Watching "Holocaust"

WATCHING "HOLOCAUST This month, many millions of Americans will "confront" the Holocaust through the extraordinary reach of television. For Jews, the watching has about it the quality of a...

...The Russians overran those territories before the task could be completed...
...How else come to a full appreciation of our redemption...
...Deportations from Terezin to Auschwitz and Treblinka took place from January 1942 until October 1944...
...Ultimately, of course, it is the dead who "own" the Holocaust— although they did not have our name for it...
...We cannot not watch it...
...Our best advice to parents who believe that their children can handle the experience is that it is the parents themselves who are most likely to make the critical difference for their children...
...Weiss's effort in Warsaw to save people from deportation is based upon the actions of Dr...
...For further reading on the ideological attitudes of Germans toward Jews, see George Mosse's Germans and Jews, (Gros-set and Dunlap, paperback...
...In order to extend our understanding, we provide notes on the people and the places of the docu-drama...
...It is because, withal, Pesach can still be celebrated, and freedom pursued, and because we can still invite the hungry to eat with us...
...For the living to create categories of intimacy is—it seems to us—inappropriate, even though it is understandable...
...Green describes these both in Terezin and in the Warsaw Ghetto...
...The whip and the furnace we can feel...
...Penguin, 1962), pp...
...Corpses were left in the street...
...Warsaw Ghetto...
...And, most of all, how do we live and find beauty while the memories are still so fresh...
...We, not others, are the survivors...
...Karl Weiss is partially based upon a Terezin artist, Otto Unger...
...Are we best advised to watch in the shelter of intimate family, or is there a purpose to watching with friends, perhaps with non-Jews...
...Accordingly, it is entirely appropriate to add meaning and metaphor to the celebration...
...They were identified by different color cloth patches on their uniforms: red triangle meant political prisoner...
...Theresienstadt has been described in many books, articles and films...
...Ernst Biberstein, a Protestant minister, head of division 6 of Einsatz-gruppe (mobile killing unit) C, which operated in southern Russia...
...In a special workroom, these artists painted reproductions of famous works and "selected" scenes of Ghetto life used for propaganda purposes...
...prominent Jews whose disappearances would be questioned by other countries...
...Paul Blobel, also head of a sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe C, directed the murders of more than 5,000 Jews near Kiev...
...He directed the evacuation of Jews from Polish cities and the creation of most major Polish ghettos...
...And so forth...
...Ernst Kaltenbrunner became head of the "Reich Security Main Office" after Heydrich's assassination...
...The film begins in August 1935, one month before the passage of the Nuremberg Laws which deprived German Jews of citizenship and civil rights...
...For example, Dr...
...The enduring questions, of course, are of another kind entirely...
...This unit was responsible for the Babi Yar massacre...
...Avon paperback, 1978) and the film based upon this book, Transport from Paradise...
...Mass killings were conducted at Auschwitz from the summer of 1942 until December 1944...
...Some people will walk away from the nine hours convinced that man is inherently evil, or that life is without meaning...
...Where was God...
...Nazi propaganda described Tere-zin as the "Paradise Ghetto," a resort...
...There is a scene in the current Broadway play "Cold Storage" in which one of the two central characters informs the other, with great compassion, that he "understands" the suffering of the other—who lost his family during the Holocaust...
...In our own time, the State of Israel—its villages and its cities, its schools and its farms, its hopes and even its mistakes—is the best evidence of our collective Triumph...
...Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer, available from the American Jewish Committee, and They Fought Back by Yuri Suhl...
...Other general histories of the Holocaust include: Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, (N.Y., Holt, Rine-hart and Winston, 1975...
...There is some of that in many of us...
...The Holocaust is still so near, and our redemption in this century so precarious, that the analogy is difficult...
...Eichmann was his protege...
...Buchenwald, near the city of Weimar in Germany, was one of the larger of hundreds of concentration camps...
...Often, prisoners were transferred elsewhere from Buchenwald, as Karl Weiss is in the story...
...Much of the discussion is specifically based upon Buchenwald...
...The central difference between the very young child and others is that the younger children may not be able to articulate their feelings very well, hence making the task of the family more difficult...
...These things they did not destroy...
...In each generation, we are instructed, each of us is to feel as if he personally had been redeemed out of bondage...
...In 1942, Blobel, an architect, was instructed to destroy the evidence of the mass murders and constructed huge pyres to burn the remains of the corpses...
...Others were Kulmhof, Belzec (created by Hans Hoefle who appears in the story), Sobibor (mentioned in the story), Lublin, and Treblinka...
...Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (N.Y., New Viewpoints, 1973...
...The story mentions visits by the Red Cross to Terezin, which actually took place...
...Where was man...
...also in Bantam paperback...
...And it is, after all, a purposeful pain...
...Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, (N.Y., Barnes, 1953, also in paperback...
...Books on the subject continue to appear, and are read by tens of thousands of people...
...The scene of Dorf s suicide may be based upon Himmler's, after his capture in 1945...
...In 1944 he was responsible for initiating sea-water drinking experiments with Gypsies at Auschwitz...
...On the children's drawings, see / Never Saw Another Butterfly...
...We are not dealing here with the gratuitous violence of regular television, but with the accurate rendering of the ultimate historical violence...
...There were cases of cannibalism...
...Its relevance lies in the questions it forces us to confront...
...It is not the job of parents, or of group workers or teachers, to specify what the reactions "should" be...
...Children of all ages will need their parents to be available as guides, interpreters, teachers...
...The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (N.Y., Collier, 1965...
...Nachum Remba, a member of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Warsaw...
...We stood for life before Hitler, accursed be his name and his memory, and we stand for life after him and in spite of him...
...Theresienstadt, called Terezin in Czech, was created by Heydrich...
...pink—homosexuals...
...God willing, the way each of us lives his life, her life, is evidence as well, evidence that decency did not die...
...A larger number—perhaps as many as ten thousand—have enrolled in one of the growing number of university or other courses that deal with the Holocaust...
...Raids, searches and beatings were the norm as laws and rules were changed almost daily...
...The Nazi Dorf resembles a general, Ohlendorf...
...Who were these people, where were these places...
...brown—gypsies...
...Nor, however moving it proves to be, can we be satisfied with having watched it...
...And some of the questions are factual: How much of the program is fact, how much is fiction...
...among the survivors, those with tatoos come first...
...Accordingly, whether or not an eight or nine year old should be encouraged to watch the first of the programs, in which there is a rape scene, or the others, where mass killing is depicted, depends as much or more on the nature of a particular family's strengths and traditions than it does on the maturity of a particular child...
...Originally, it was a place for three types of people: the sick and elderly who could not survive "resettlement...
...also in paperback...
...But some were discovered by the Nazis, and the responsible artists were punished...
...we cannot not insist that our children watch it...
...The relevance of the Holocaust does not depend on finding pale parallels to it in 1978...
...Gerald Green's description of the artists in Terezin is drawn from his earlier book, The Artists of Terezin (N.Y., Hawthorn, 1969...
...Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1954...
...ours, so long as we insist on it every day, is the Final Triumph...
...The drawings and poetry of the children (under 16) are well-known...
...we remember in order to celebrate...
...Or do we want to say that only a Jew can enter this house of mourning...
...Taken separately, these kinds of incidents are not uncommon on TV, but viewed together as events that actually happened, they can create a powerful and deeply disturbing impact on a child...
...Father Bernhard Lichtenberg was one of a handful of courageous churchmen who condemned the persecution of the Jews...
...Most impressive is Arnost Lustig's collection of short stories, Night and Hope (Washington Inscape, 1977...
...While the Holocaust did happen to us, in particular, we both want and need all others to encounter it...
...Some of our questions anticipate the program: At what age should children be encouraged to watch...
...3. In our effort to deduce "lessons" from the Holocaust, we run the risk of trivializing through false analogy...
...Shows" were put on for the commissions, which subsequently sent glowing reports of life in Terezin to the International Red Cross in Stockholm...
...It will be very tempting to suggest that the Nazis in Skokie and the anti-Semitic graffiti in a dozen American cities "prove" the relevance of the Holocaust to our own time, or that the PLO is the contemporary equivalent of the SS...
...The Cast Although the characters in the two central families—the Weisses and the Helmses—are fictional, author Gerald Green incorporates events in the lives of identifiable persons into their experiences...
...We are still crossing the Red Sea, and the ground is not dry, but slippery, and the parting of the waters is uncertain...
...In many ghettos, the average caloric intake was 170-227 per day...
...Of the 15,000 children of Terezin, only 100 survived...
...Perhaps the best description and analysis of life in a Nazi concentration camp is that offered by Eugen Kogon in The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., Farrar Straus, 1950...
...reactions will vary greatly, and age is only one of the factors that will account for the variety of response...
...Basic information about Auschwitz may be found in the standard histories and in the autobiography of Commandant Hoess (see above...
...For a compelling documentary novel on this subject, see Ana-toly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar (N.Y., Dial, 1966...
...Yet it would be wrong to permit the pall of the Holocaust to lessen the joy of remembered redemption...
...Happily, the Haggadah is not intended as a binding script for the seder...
...So, too, there is often a specific reference added, especially on the second night of Pesach, to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on that same night in 1943...
...See Hoess's autobiography, Commandant of Auschwitz, New York, World Publishing, 1959...
...Vicarious suffering is not our goal, nor catharsis our aim...
...A total of 139,654 Jews were sent to Terezin—17,320 survived until liberation, 33,419 died of disease or starvation, 86,934 were transported to extermination camps...
...For additional information, see the chapter "Eichmann and the Eichmann Trial," by Gabriel Bach in Holocaust, (Jerusalem, Keter Books...
...The events the program depicts speak for themselves...
...and Mrs...
...He was assassinated in May, 1942...
...Some reactions may be more Jewishly authentic than others, but the first issue the family will have to confront is whether it is capable of providing a safe and supportive environment for people of any age to deal with their own personal reactions...
...For further information, see R. Manvell and H. Graenkel, Heinrich Himmler, and also the memoirs of Himmler's masseur, Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs 1940-45...
...available in Berkley Windhover paperback, 1975...
...We seek, instead, to remind ourselves of the absolute precious-ness of life...
...Diffidently, then, some information and some ideas that may be helpful: 1. One problem that many families will face on the nights of April 1619 is whether young children should be permitted, or even encouraged, to watch "Holocaust...
...Ohlendorf s personality and career seem to have been utilized by Green in his construction of the Dorf character...
...The danger here is that we create an artificial hierarchy of ownership, a self-imposed ghetto of the spirit...
...His was the Final Solution...
...Some of the other more infamous include Dachau, Sach-senhausen, Ravensbruck...
...Arthur Nebe was director of Kripo (Criminal Police), in charge of internal security and corruption within the Nazi government, the armed forces, and the SS...
...we "own" the Holocaust...
...We include here a brief identification of the central characters, and, where relevant, some suggestions for further reading...
...The Educational Guide produced as a national Jewish interagency effort reports that there is general agreement among educators who have read the script that the program should not be recommended viewing for youngsters under ten years of age, with some proposing eleven or twelve as a more appropriate minimum...
...For a discussion of Jewish resistance during this period, see They Chose Life...
...While Green names the artists Frey and Felsher (Karl Weiss is the third), their names were actually Leo Haas, Otto Ungar, and Bedrich Fritta...
...For portraits of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, see the two best known diaries of Warsaw Ghetto life: Emanuel Ringleblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (N.Y., Schocken, 1958...
...We want that in part so that we can be better understood...
...Though he often had jurisdictional differences with the SS, he was deeply committed to the extermination of the Jews...
...available in paperback...
...But how can we add reference to or discussion of the Holocaust without converting our gladness to gloom...
...but, in general, we should be aware that this docu-drama has some fairly explicit scenes dealing directly with the concentration camps, the mass graveside murders at Babi Yar, and the 'showers' at Auschwitz...
...Additional visual art and textual data on Terezin art is to be found in Alfred Kantor, The Book of Alfred Kantor(N.Y., McGraw-Hill, 1971...
...It is accurately characterized by extreme poverty, starvation, disease, over-crowding and anxiety...
...Hans Frank was administrator of occupied Poland...
...In fact, more than half of the 20,000 young Jewish men who were sent to concentration camps after Kristallnacht went to Buchenwald, where there were many types of prisoners in addition to Jews...
...For a fictional account of Jewish life in Germany, see I. J. Singer's The Family Carnovsky, (available in paperback...
...The Skokie Nazis are sick, and the PLO is evil, but neither is what "Holocaust" is about, or, more important, what the Holocaust was about...
...There is no Moses, there are no miracles...
...available in paperback...
...He then became deputy minister in the Economic Ministry...
...among Jews, those who survive care more than those born in America...
...Amen...
...There are only memories to guide us, and dreams...
...Our own identification with those places and those events and with the slaughtered is the consequence of an act of will, not of genetic memory...
...For a better understanding of the ways in which Germans were won over to the Nazi cause, see Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, (Quadrangle paperback), and William Sheridan Allen, Nazi Seizure of Power, (paperback...
...Hitler had been chancellor for a year and a half...
...In order to feel that—not merely to remember it, but to feel it—each of us must also feel the lash of Pharoah's whip...
...How, then, shall we approach Pesach this year...
...If we are to feel joy, it is not because we were saved while others were slaughtered...
...Remember, for example, the lasting impact of Leon Uris' Exodus...
...The key variable may be not the age of the child but the ways of the child's family...
...The response is instant, and vehement: "I forbid you to understand...
...At the same time that we want the understanding and even the sympathy of others, we also want the Holocaust to be ours...
...That is why it has become customary in so many homes to spend a few moments in expression of concern for Soviet Jewry...
...Yevgeny Yevushenko's famous poem, "Babi Yar" is found in his Selected Poems (Baltimore...
...paperback, 1974...
...The major bibliographical resource work on the Holocaust is Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman, (eds...
...He escaped to Argentina after the war, was apprehended by Israeli agents, stood trial and was hanged for crimes against the Jewish people in 1961...
...Obviously, they cannot be protected—none of us can—from the pain...
...Despite all this, cultural and educational activities continued...
...Over the course of the last several years, several thousand Americans—mostly Jews—have made their way to Mauthausen, or to Auschwitz, or to another of the centers of the Kingdom of Night...
...5. In recent months, charlatans have proposed that the facts of the Holocaust were not so grim as we have known them to be, and fools have believed this grotesque revisionism...
...Guide to Jewish History Under Nazi Impact (N.Y., Ktav, 1975...
...Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish Affairs Section, was most directly responsible for the mass extermination activities of the Third Reich...
...He was consultant to Hoess in the construction of Auschwitz...
...He was arrested after praying for the Jews at his Berlin church...
...The association in time is so very close that it will not be possible—nor is it necessary—to separate the two events...
...But it is not the only evidence...
...The crematoria, with 46 ovens, had a capacity to burn 12,000 corpses a day...
...He was an uneducated man who did his job efficiently and dispassionately, creating the most extensive center for murder ever known...
...Nora Levin, The Holocaust, (N.Y., Schocken, 1973...
...Based on our conversations with parents and educators, we would propose a slightly different approach...
...Weiss, Karl Weiss, and other characters in the story perish at Auschwitz...
...By the end of 1942, however, others were sent as well, and there were 90,000 Jews existing in an area that normally housed 7,000...
...In the language of the Family Home Viewing Guide, "There can, of course, be no absolute guidelines since each child's maturity level differs from every other child's...
...These are excerpted from the historical analysis and bibliography prepared for the interagency Educational Guide by Dr...
...We live that way not to spite the Kingdom of Death, but because we are a stiff-necked people, and that is our way...
...Each tear is a question: why, and how, and what next...
...it is a permissive script, and one is encouraged to interpolate, to add one's own insights to the traditional text...
...Green often refers to Heydrich's "Jewish grandfather," a theory which has been proved incorrect...
...Others will take "never again" as the central lesson of the show and the events it describes...
...And if we want understanding and sympathy, we cannot forbid tears...
...See also Justice in Jerusalem by Gideon Hausner (Holocaust Library, distributed by Schocken Books, New York...
...4. Perhaps the most distinguished achievement of the Jewish people in our time has been our capacity to insist on life despite the awareness we cannot lose of death and its power...
...Many families provide an extra place setting, and an empty chair, in order to remind the assembled of our kinsfolk who cannot yet celebrate in freedom...
...Also see O. Kraus and E. Kulka Death Factory...
...How dare others pretend to know what we know, feel what we feel...
...Byron Sherwin of Spertus College, and are reprinted with thanks to the author and the 15 national sponsoring agencies...
...Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, perceived the "War against the Jews" as a "moral necessity," as self-defensive war...
...Unless we understand the difference, we convert the Holocaust into just another unhappy episode—and make it impossible to deal sensibly with the "easy" questions as well...
...The threat of deportation was always present...
...We cannot make a wall out of our shroud...
...The script mentions that 12,000 people were killed per day...
...Most of the Nazis, however, are clearly identifiable historical figures...
...The portrayal of Heydrich is essentially historically accurate, although in some cases Heydrich himself formulated policies which the author ascribes to Dorf...
...Still others will, perhaps, insist that one must work, against the odds, to create a society in which such terrible things cannot happen...
...It was a small fortress town of about 7,000 soldiers and peasants about 35 miles from Prague...
...the exultation is not yet possible...
...2. Assuming that many millions of non-Jews watch the program, "Holocaust" could be an important historical event, helping to shape Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism for years to come...
...decorated or disabled Jewish veterans of the First World War...
...Jews are closer to the thing than non-Jews, hence weep more authentically...
...For Jews, the watching has about it the quality of a religious obligation...
...By watching "Holocaust," we do not seek to wallow in tragedy...
...The portrayal of Karl Weiss as one of the "artists of Terezin" is factual...
...Babi Yar is the site of the mass murder of about 35,000 Jews which took place on September 29-30, 1941, ostensibly in retaliation for sabotage activities in Kiev...
...Reinhard Heydrich was Himmler's assistant before the war and was appointed head of the Gestapo in 1939...
...The very last line of the chorus of the Partisan Song, the most famous of the songs of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, concludes with the words, mir zeinen do!—we are here...
...The answer is not entirely clear...
...There is, after all, a loss that only family can feel...
...Some are technical: What other sources are there, now that interest has been aroused...
...When he was tried at Nuremberg in 1947, he made no excuses for his actions, unlike other defendants...
...The simple fact is that all of us need help and support in dealing with the events depicted on "Holocaust...
...Sanitary conditions were absent, 20 to 25 people lived in one room, epidemics (particularly of typhus and dysentery) were rampant...
...Two days after immersion into a unique exposure to the most terrible events, we begin our annual eight day celebration of freedom...
...Holocaust" uses imagined families as its central protagonists, but most of the characters it portrays were real people, or are based on the lives of real people...
...purple—Jehovah's Witness...
...But neighbors and would-be friends can surely share, and share authentically, in a loss that is universal as well as particular...
...82-85...
...In fact, during May-June 1944, that number often rose to 15,000...
...For we do not approach this encounter seeking merely to be moved...
...These events are included in the program...
...Skokie and Ma'alot raise different questions, difficult but more limited...
...Many managed to execute secret renderings expressing the truth, some of which were smuggled out...
...If the family as a unit is accustomed to doing things together, and if open discussion is a family tradition, younger children may be able to watch the program, for all the distress they will feel, without traumatic consequences...
...Clearly, after nearly a generation of avoidance, there is a growing impulse to confront...
...At a more personal, less historic level, however, Jews may have some difficulty in relating to non-Jewish response...
...we also want it in order that all people come to understand that the Holocaust happened not only to Jews, but to humankind...
...6. The scheduling of "Holocaust" creates an extraordinary juxtaposition...
...Life in the Ghetto is a part of the Green story...
...Yet in remembering and feeling our slavery, we do not mourn...
...paperback, 1973...
...The nationally televised encounter will last at most nine hours...
...So, too, the places where the action happens are real...
...For poignant autobiographical memoirs which depict life in Auschwitz, see Elie Wiesel's Night (Avon paperback) and Primo Levi's Auschwitz (published many times by different publishers...
...The Places Auschwitz was the largest of six extermination camps...
...In addition to the extermination camps, there were hundreds of concentration camps and slave labor camps...
...He appears often throughout the story in the context of the operations he supervised, first in Vienna (1938), where he was in charge of the Immigration office charged with the deportation of Jews from Germany-Austria...
...Otto Ohlendorf was a lawyer and economist who worked under Heydrich in the "Reich Security Main Office" between 1939 and 1943...
...Again, the events portrayed in the story are based on fact...
...But they can be helped to deal with the pain...
...Rudolf Hoess was appointed by Himmler as Commandant of Auschwitz, specifically charged with destroying the Jewish people...
...The act of will is not restricted to Jews, nor is it seemly to close others out and then to accuse them of not caring...
...But if the advance notices are at all correct, the NBC "docu-drama" will have an impact far beyond the four evenings we will be watching it...
...For more on the Jehovah's Witnesses, see Kogon and Philip Friedman, Wiener Library Bulletin 5 (1951...
...hence, this figure in the script...
...In the story, Karl Weiss is sent to Buchenwald soon after Kristallnacht...

Vol. 3 • April 1978 • No. 5


 
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