Trudy Gold
The Holocaust on Film, Part 1

Trudy Gold | The Holocaust on Film, Part 1 | 03.28.24

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• I felt that I couldn’t leave a film course without trying to address the whole issue of the Shoah and film. I’ve been involved in Holocaust education really since the early ‘80s, and I’ve seen many developments through my time, some hopeful, some, in terms of education, totally catastrophic. And what we see now is a plethora of films. And my worry is that the Shoah itself on film is being de-Judaized. There are so many questions that we have to ask ourselves as we go through this two-part course. I mean, I’ve known many survivors in my working life and some are very close friends of mine, and I’ve actually been to films on the Shoah with them, and I’m going to bring in some of their reflections as we go through. It was Nahum Goldmann who said, “You’d have to have the soul of a Dante to imagine the inferno.” 6 million men, women and children murdered, birth sentence of death, lines of descent lost forever. Some philosophers and writers said that the only answer was silence, but it can’t be. And as a people, we’ve always been told we must remember. Even the word is problematic, as we’ve already discussed. Do we use the word Khurbn? Do we use the word Shoah? What do we mean by the word genocide? In fact, the word genocide, which comes from Greek and Latin, was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, who was himself a survivor of the, his family, he lost his family in the Holocaust. He managed to get to America, and it had driven him mad. And he looked for a word to describe the unimaginable, that word that is so trivially bandied about today, because what it means is the total attempt to exterminate a whole people. You know, Karl Popper said that, and he also was a refugee. He was at LSE, he was responsible really for Soros’ Open Society. He was his student and took on his ideas. He said that the nine, the 20th century will only be about the meaning of words, no philosophy. And boy, was he right. And when we talk about the Shoah, even its periodization is complicated. Do we deal with ‘33 to '45, from the rise of the Nazis to power until the end? Do we deal with '39 to '45, from the invasion of Poland? Or do we deal with the actual Einsatzgruppen and the camps following on from the invasion of Russia? So what are we saying? Language is inadequate to describe which many people now see as the absolute nadir of Western civilization. That’s a huge accusation I’m making, and yet it is all over the place on films now. Films win awards, and the question is now what are they trying to do when they film different aspects of the Shoah? Can any feature film actually invoke the memory, even documentaries? I remember when “Life Is Beautiful” came out, and I’m not, I should explain, I’m not going to list or talk about every film on the Shoah. It’s impossible. What I have done is select, and many of you will want other, will want additions and subtractions, but what I’ve tried to do is be representative. I remember after “Life Is Beautiful” came out, and that was so contentious. It was an Italian film, and it’s the story of a man who is deported to the camps with his son, and he’s a comedian and he manages to hide the truth from his son. And it’s really, the Shoah is the backdrop to this man’s comedy routine. And I went with a group of survivors. And I’ll never forget the words of Rudy Kennedy, who was a slave labourer and a very, very

extraordinary man. And he said, “I can remember the look in my father’s eyes when he couldn’t hide the truth from me.” That film is pure pornography and many survivors felt so uneasy. I remember after the film “Life Is Beautiful”, a company called Film Education decided to make a documentary on can you even use, can you use documentary and feature to deal with the Shoah? And we had a panel discussion, Jack Gold, who made “Escape from Sobibor”, Laurence Rees, who of course made “The Nazis: A Warning from History”. So we had two documentary make, Rex Bloomstein, who made the first British film documentary on the Shoah, “Auschwitz and the Allies”, and another feature filmmaker. And we had a debate, and in those days we could still debate it. And I remember Trude Levi, who had survived Auschwitz and will come again into the story as I tell it, she said on the documentary that Film Education made, the problem is that when we are gone, what might be left is Hollywood. And what, where did it all begin? It did actually begin in France with films like “Night and Fog”, and as I’ve been looking at the film course, I’ve mentioned some films to you that actually touch on the Shoah, like “The Juggler”, “Exodus”, of course, “Cast a Giant Shadow” where Israel, because one of the areas that is really missing in teaching today is the link between the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel. We begin next week the, a very, very difficult, complicated aspect of history. We’re going to be really looking at the world of the Middle East and the world of the Jew and the world of Arab, the Arab. But we are going all the way back in history, and I’m going to be interviewing a man called Saad Khalidi. He’s a very unusual character because he is Muslim, three quarters Muslim, not practising now, and he’s a quarter Jewish, and his father actually surrendered the keys of Jerusalem in 1967. He’s Palestinian nobility. In fact, he is, he lives in England and he was the head of a school. He was also a schools inspector. And he is a man of peace. And I’ve been discussing it, I’ve been discussing it with him. Can it ever, ever really be represented? And it’s fascinating because it’s used now and it’s abused. And he said, he actually said to me, nobody talks about the 9 million Jews in Europe anymore. They talk about the 6 million killed. What about those who couldn’t go home? What about the survivors who when they tried to go home were either murdered or their property had been stolen? And he, this is remember, a man who has his roots in Palestine. He said, this is one of the problems, that it has, that story should be taught as part of the Shoah and the linkage between the Shoah and Israel should be made. And you do have it in films like “Exodus”, but you do not have it on any curriculum in Britain, no schools. And that is, I think, one of the problems. And of course today, and I have to say this, I have, I’m only throwing questions at you now. You have to consider what Howard Jacobson said. And I often repeat this because I really, it labours me. He said they cannot now forgive us for the Shoah. And if you look at the two latest films, one on Nicholas Winton, which is more or less completely de-Judaized, and also “Zone of Interest”, which is about the Höss family, and where is the Jewish tragedy in either of them? One is de-Judaized and the other concentrates on Nazis. And the other thing we have to talk about also is we do have a, in us, all of us, we do find, I think, the dark attractive.

There are so many films about Nazis. We’ll be dealing with some films that I think are really worthwhile, others that I think should never have been made, and some that are downright awful. Some of them are going to lead to more exploration of these important themes, others are going to obfuscate. So it really, it the, look, obviously there were a few films just after the war and then after the Eichmann trial there was another surge. But it really begins as, the floodgates open in 1978 with a miniseries called “The Holocaust”. Can we see the first slide, if you don’t mind? It’s a miniseries, and let’s look at the trailer and then I will talk about it. [Clip plays] - [Narrator] “Schindler’s List” is considered one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. Now only one other film of this magnitude has received such critical acclaim, “Holocaust”. - We’ll solve a multitude of problems simply by attacking Jews. - [Narrator] It’s an extraordinary story of courage and heroism against the odds as seen through the lives of two unforgettable families. - We’re all friends here, all good Berliners. - [Narrator] Torn apart by the devastation of war. - Things won’t get easier for you. - How much worse can they get? We’re no longer citizens, we have no legal rights. Property can be confiscated. In the name of humanity, what else can you do to us? - [Narrator] One struggles against oppression. - What has he done? Why are you taking him. - Routine questioning. - No, no, no, what is his crime, what has he done? - [Narrator] The other allies with Hitler. - I respect the party and the work the Führer is doing. - [Narrator] Winner of eight prestigious Emmy Awards. - Try again, what crime did you commit?

• I have done nothing.

  • [Narrator] And the critics agree, “Holocaust” is one of the most powerful films ever made.
  • This is my country as much as theirs. I do not fear those barbarians.
  • [Narrator] “Riveting, fascinating, an uncommonly valuable achievement”, says “Time” magazine.
  • I am still not convinced they intend to kill us all.
  • Please . If you don’t, I will kill him.
  • And “The New York Post” says, “Every American family should see 'Holocaust’.” - The trains aren’t going to Russia.
  • Where are they going?
  • Treblinka.
  • Another Polish work camp?
  • It’s a death camp.
  • [Narrator] Featuring a brilliant, all-star cast.
  • Please, go back, it’ll be all right.
  • [Narrator] Including two time Oscar winner Meryl Streep.
  • The rabbis say that every life is a sanctification.
  • [Narrator] James Woods of “The Getaway”, an Oscar nominee for “Salvador”, Michael Moriarty of “Pale Rider” and “Law and Order”, Joseph Bottoms of “Inner Sanctum” and “Blind Date”, David Warner of “Star Trek V” and VI, and Sam Wanamaker of “City of Joy” and “Baby Boom”.
  • Everybody take hands.
  • [Narrator] “Holocaust”, exclusively from World Vision Home Video. [Clip ends]

• Okay, so a little more about it. Of course, it starred Meryl Streep and James Woods. And if you think about it, television is a totally unlikely medium. It was a miniseries that was over nine hours and it was interrupted every 10 minutes to sell believe it or not, of all things, soap. Nobody can say that it’s a good film. It’s been criticised on its artistic merit, on its philosophical merit and on historic grounds. But the point is it had the most extraordinary impact and it probably had more impact than any film until “Schindler’s List”. And that’s why in reworking it onto video, that’s why they mentioned “Schindler’s List”. It was seen by 120 million viewers. And then when it went to Europe, 15 million Germans saw it. It won eight Emmys and it was the most advertised miniseries of any television programme in history. And it led to a huge debate on the Holocaust on TV, newspapers, radio, churches, synagogues, there was big debates on the Holocaust. And it paves the way for a string of popular works, including film. You’re going to see a whole spate of films. I’m going to show you a few of them like “Playing for Time”, “Escape from Sobibor”, “Murderers Amongst Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story”. It attracted countless readers. It really sparked people’s interest, more so than the Eichmann trial ever had. So it’s fascinating that this miniseries, it even caused in America, in Germany, by the way, the denouncement of ex-Nazis. It led to the creation of the Carter Commission, which called for a national Holocaust memorial and museum, as well as an annual day of remembrance. And so this is serious stuff. Eventually, it led to the Washington Museum and also, it made the Holocaust a household word. Everybody knew what it was. Nine and a half hours of primetime American television seen by 120 million people. And it’s a story of a fictional family in Berlin, successful Berlin Jews, and encapsulates various aspects of the Jewish experience. Dr. Weiss had been a Polish Jew and his proudly German wife, who is in love with German culture, and she refuses to accept what had happened. Dr. Weiss feels it’s his duty to stay behind in Germany. He could have got out to help with the community. He is finally deported to Poland and his wife finally is join, is reunited with him, where? In the Warsaw Ghetto, and they are deported to Auschwitz. It plays footloose with history, but it’s telling the story. The eldest son, James Woods, is married to a gentile, Meryl Streep. It’s at the beginning of her career. Her family has very, very little sympathy for the Jews. And he is finally set, he’s an artist, he’s a very, he’s part of the, of, he’d been part of the Weimar cultural scene. And he is seen as an artist. His work is seen as decadent. He is tortured and he’s finally sent to Auschwitz. The daughter of the family is raped, which leads to her having a total mental breakdown and she is sent to a sanitarium, where she is later a victim of the euthanasia programme. The youngest son runs away and joins the partisans and he meets up with a Czech Jewish girl who is a Zionist. And they take, they’re caught. They go to Sobibor, where they take part in the Sobibor uprising. And later of course, that becomes another film, “Escape from Sobibor”. It’s a melodrama. It was concocted for mass appeal. They used no Holocaust historians or advisors. Elie Wiesel was one of his harshest critics, but some Jewish organisations actually defended it. Now it won, as I said, eight primetime Emmys and it had throughout the world, it had 18 wins. Now I think the producer, Martin Chomsky, he himself was the son of Eastern European

immigrants and he was a producer and a director. He was a very popular director. He’d directed episodes of “Star Trek”, “Gun Smoke”, “Hawaii Five-0”. He was one of the directors on “Roots” and he’d also made one of the TV movies, “Victory at Entebbe”. Remember after the Entebbe raid, do you remember the glory days when Israel was the darling of the West? And after the Entebbe incident, there were three films. And the joke going around Israel was that after the hostage taking in Iran, the Americans wanted the Israelis to film it but the Israelis wanted too much. They wanted 10% of the film rights. Do you remember the days when we could still smile? And he also later on directed another very interesting miniseries based on the memory of William Shirer, the book “Inside The Third Reich”. William Shirer, of course, was an American journalist. His book is really worth reading. And also another miniseries on Peter the Great. He was very successful. He won four Emmy Awards, so the point I’m making, the film up until “Schindler’s List” that had the greatest impact was this miniseries that ran for nine and a half hours. Now, the man who did the screenplay was another Jew called Gerald Green. He had, he wrote many novels including “The Last Angry Man”. He did many, many teleplays. He won the Outstanding Writer and Drama Series. He won the Peace Prize for Literature. In ‘85, he wrote “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story”, and “The Last Angry Man” was a brilliant film, by the way. It starred Paul Muni. And it, interesting, it was a film that put Jews at the centre of it. It extolled Jewish values. It was far more within the Jewish world. So what I, my, so my contention is it all, and this is not controversial. This is something that the majority of historians and film historians will go with. This is the film that set it all alight. And now, let’s have a look at some of the films, some bad, a few good and the majority are indifferent. Now, “Playing for Time”, it was written by Arthur Miller. It was based on a book, “Playing for Time” by Fania Fénelon, directed by Daniel Mann. And it’s based on Fania Fénelon was in the Woman’s Orchestra in Auschwitz. You’ve heard me interview my great friend, Anita Lasker Wallfisch, who I believe is the last survivor. She said it wasn’t an orchestra, it was a band. And all the other survivors of the band hated the film. They didn’t like the way it dealt with Alma Rosé. The leader of the orchestra was an extraordinary woman called Alma Rosé, who actually died of typhus in the camps. Now because in Fania Fénelon’s book, which is very much portrayed in the time, in the film, to start with she’s played by Vanessa Redgrave. And there was an incredible amount of controversy over that because of course her anti-Israel stance, and Fania Fénelon herself objected to it. And the film because of that was initially banned in Israel. And what the survivors were most horrified at was the way that Alma Rosé was portrayed. I know that Anita Lasker Wallfisch felt so much about this woman that her great-granddaughter is named for her. And also, I went with Anita to an exhibition in Innsbruck of the Woman’s Orchestra because Alma Rosé’s father was actually in London and safe. And of course, his daughter dies in Auschwitz and it was Anita who went to talk to him about her last days. And it, according to Anita and other survivors, this is a slanderous portrait. And not only that, it, what Anita’s already told, has told me many times, and she is one of the few people I completely intellectually and

morally trust, she said that they kind of kept each other together and there was a real camaraderie. And I know one of her closest friends has just died, age 100, in Israel, another survivor of the band. And the diminution of their love for each other is portrayed in this film. And this is what the, they objected to because what I get from Anita and having read other memoirs, that’s what kept them together. So, “Playing for Time” was considered by the survivors as appalling. And tragically, this was seen as a truth. If it’s on film, it’s got to be true. Oh, what a world we live in. So another film that was very, very, can we come onto the next? Another film that was very controversial, again, Meryl Streep, is “Sophie’s Choice”. Now remember, “Playing for Time” was written by the great Arthur Miller, based on a book. This is directed and written by Alan J. Pakula, adapted from a brilliant novel by William Styron. But the plot is totally fiction. It’s about a young woman, a young, it starts with a young writer who moves to Brooklyn. He befriends his neighbours, Sophie, played by Meryl Streep, who’s a Polish immigrant, and her very unstable lover, Nathan, who’s, it’s his, the debut of Kevin Klein. And he, the writer, learns that Sophie’s husband and father were killed in a German work camp, and she was interned in Auschwitz. He later learns though from a college professor that her father was a Nazi sympathiser. And he admit, he confronts her and she admits the truth. And when her husband and father are taken by the Nazis, she had a lover who was in the resistance. And evidently in the story, completely fictitious, he persuades Sophie to translate some documents and she declines, feeling that it might endanger her two children. Two weeks later, Joseph is murdered by the Gestapo and she and her two children are sent to Auschwitz where she becomes secretary to Höss, who’s getting so much coverage, that evil, evil man is getting so much coverage, due to her language and office skills. And what happens is she can choose which of her children could live and which could die. And that is Sophie’s choice. The reality is all the children were killed. And what happens in the film, the unstable Nathan accuses Sophie of infidelity. She and the writer flee, she agrees to marry him. She agrees to live with him but not marry him because she says she’s an unfit mother because she had to choose at Auschwitz between her two children. And in, according to the film, she decides to save her son. And whilst he’s asleep, she returns to the unstable Nathan and they commit suicide together. It was a huge box office success. It received five nominations at the Academy Awards. And Meryl Streep, who is a very, I think we would all agree, is one of the greatest actresses of her generation, she won Best Actress. Generally favourable reviews, but this is Pauline Kael in “The New Yorker”. “I think it is an infuriatingly bad movie. The whole plot is based on a connection that isn’t there, the connection between Sophie and Nathan’s relationship and the what, and what the Nazis did. Sophie’s choice, the incident is garish rather than illuminating and too particular to demonstrate anything. And also, there’s a focus on a Polish Catholic survivor, despite William Styron’s novel actually focuses on the Jewish specificity of the Shoah.” This is something that’s been creeping up, you know, and part of the de-Judaization of the

Holocaust. Look, I want to be very careful here because any huge loss of life is appalling, but it’s almost as though the world cannot cope with the guilt of the Shoah. So by de-Judaizing it, by minimising the Jewish element, by emphasising what happened to everyone else, which was appalling too, then somehow it, not only does it distort reality, it takes it away from what Howard Jacobson suggested, that they will never forgive us for the Shoah. So therefore, if other victims are just as at risk as the Jews, then it wasn’t Jewish specifically. And most Holocaust Memorial Days now are totally, can I use the word ecumenical? Where every catastrophe is lumped together, which is so dangerous because you have to, look, the slave trade is not the Holocaust. The slave trade was absolutely appalling and evil, but it wasn’t the Holocaust. What happened to homosexuals in the Holocaust was not the same as what happened to Jews. It was still appalling. But you’d lump them together, you lump it with Rwanda, you lump it with every other catastrophe. And what do you get? You get a great, big sea of darkness and nothingness. But then there was a film that was made that did try to tell the truth. And that is Claude Lanzmann’s. Can we see the next playbill please? Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary film, the “Shoah”, and all the criticism that’s labelled, levelled at most films is they do not give enough focus to the murder of the Jews. This is the essence of Claude Lanzmann’s film. It’s, he filmed nearly 300 hours of eyewitness testimony with survivors, survivors of the Shoah, perpetrators. He actually interviewed perpetrators, which many people said should never have been done. And he also interviewed bystanders. Ironically, now this is again fascinating, the criticism is why didn’t you include rescuers and those who were saved? Because to Lanzmann, the reality was yes, there are amazingly wonderful people who saved, 35,000 of them are honoured at Yad Vashem. But it was not the story of the Shoah. It’s an addendum. And what he actually said was, “I never tried to document the whole history of the Holocaust. It’s rather,” I’m quoting, “It’s an attempt to tell the truth about the Nazis’ attempt to murder every Jew. Birth became sentence of death.” Now, the edited down version is nine and a half hours. In cinemas when it was shown, it was either broken into three or into two. He doesn’t see it even as a historical document. It’s a work of art that tries to transmit the horror of what he called Dante’s Inferno. So there’s no archive footage. In fact, it’s set entirely in 1985, the present of the time, because it’s about eyewitnesses relieving their memories in front of the camera. And he took them often to the places where it took place. Now, the group that is fascinating, he, when he interviewed the bystanders, mostly Poles who lived very close to the camps, what comes out so poignantly is their actual indifference. And he did manage to identify a few SS who’d worked in the camps. And he did trick some of them with a hidden camera. He never allowed them one jot of justification. Now the film is only concerned with the how. How did it happen? Not why it happened, because nobody will ever satisfactorily answer why it happened. I mean, I can give you the great Yehuda Bauer. He suggested there were nine reasons that made it a possibility. He begins with the ancient hatred. He talks about the lack of democratic tradition in Germany. He talks about Weimar, he talks about the humiliating defeat in the First World War, the rise of

this charismatic, insane man, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But does it really, really justify the murder over a four and half, a four and a half year period, of one and a half million children? That’s the point. The how, we can talk about how it happened. Will we ever really understand why? It allows for no excuses. It implies that there is no reason for it and there is no real way to understand it. And the brilliance of it is the devil is in the unremitting detail. He spent 11 years researching, 350 hours of film. And “Shoah” is the word he chose. And for him, he said it, it’s an epic drama of a people abandoned by the world to a fate unprecedented in history, which is seen as so unpalatable today. This is particularly driven home in a 45-minute interview with Jan Karski. Now, I’ve talked to you about Jan Karski in the past. He was the courier from Warsaw, remember? He was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and also he went to the gates of, to the edge of Belzac. And now, he was the one who informed the Allies of what was the reality of the Nazi occupation of Poland. And Lanzmann also in the film, he has long periods of silence and interesting, because I think it’s the French film directors who have probably dealt with the more of the reality, if we can ever talk about that. Alain Resnais with “Night and Fog”, he’d been commissioned to make a testament back in 1955, and he worked with a poet and a novelist and a survivor called Jean Cayrol to collaborate on the harrowing half hour document. It’s a swift, brutal film which uses, which records the genocide. And it was shown in France in 1956. And then in 1971, you had Marcel Ophuls, which dealt with “Sorrow and the Pity”, which dealt with collaboration and was incredibly important in French history because it took away the notion that all the French were in the resistance and they were incredibly courageous. It instead gave you a France full of cowardice, passivity and huge antisemitism. And later on he won the best documentary for “Hôtel Terminus: "The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie”. And of course Pierre Sauvage, “Weapons of the Spirit”, the story of Le Chambon, where you do have a wonderful Huguenot village which saved Jews, which we’ve already talked about when I was dealing with rescuers. Now I’m going to talk a little bit about Claude Lanzmann, because he was extraordinary. His family had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He had a brother, Jacques, who became a novelist and a songwriter. His dates were 1925 to 2018. During World War II, the family disguised their identity and went into hiding. He was a member of the resistance when he was 17. He was very left wing. He opposed the Algerian war and signed the 1960 petition, the Manifest of the 121. He was one, he becomes part of the circle of leading French intellectuals. After the war, he becomes the Chief Editor of “Modern Times”, a magazine that had been founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He was also a lecturer. He’s part of their circle. And later, he becomes Simone de Beauvoir’s lover. He was very much, he was later part of a leftist delegation that visited North Korea. He fell in love with a Korean nurse and had a love affair with her. He made a documentary entitled “Napalm”, about the scars of the Vietnam War. In 19, he, 1973, he’d made “Pourquoi Israël”, which is directorial debut, it was three days after the Yom Kippur War, examining, examines the necessity of the state from its birth. He wanted it to be the answer for a number of viewpoints. Interesting, when the film was shown in Hamburg

in 2009, “Pourquoi Israël”, leftist groups prevented its showing, saying it was one-sided, Zionist perspective. It’s fascinating how the tilt which we are living with today has become so important and so prominent. So he made many other documentaries. He continued with his films on the Shoah. He made a film about Sobibor, “The Revolt”. He made a longer film about Karski. He made a film “The Last of the Unjust”, which is about Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, very controversial figure who was part of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt. He, it drove him mad. The Shoah actually drove him mad, but he was a great filmmaker and a great seeker of truth. And I think his film, it’s unrelenting. I don’t know how many of you have actually seen it. It’s hard, it’s tough. But I think it probably comes nearest to an attempt to describe the how. And now another very, very different kind of film. Can we go on please? This is “Escape from Sobibor”. It starred Alan Arkin, Joanna Pacula and Rutger Hauer, and it’s of course, it’s about the extraordinary Sobibor uprising on the 14th of October, 1943, when the Jews of the camp, there were Russian prisoners of war and there were Jews in Sobibor. It was solely a death camp. You know, the Nazis constructed six camps in Poland, four of which were totally for death, and two others which were labour camps and death camps, such as Auschwitz. And what happens is in the camp, they managed to rise up and escape. Now of the seven, 600 inmates, 300 escaped and only, the truth is between 50 and 70 of them successfully escaped. The rest were all recaptured and murdered. But after the uprising, Himmler was so horrified that the great master race, the Jews and Russian prisoners had actually managed to rise up, that he had it completely obliterated and planted with trees. I remember visiting Sobibor in the ‘90s. It’s extraordinary. There’s a holiday camp just next door to it. Of the escapers, the Red Army officer survived in Russia and Feldhendler, this is the true part of the story, played by Alan Arkin. He was the Jewish leader of the resistance. He was later murdered by Polish fascists. And the sadistic sergeant in the film flees to Brazil. He’s later found stabbed to death in 1980. That’s another story about . Now I know a lot about this film because it was actually made by my brother-in-law, Jack Gold, who was a brilliant filmmaker by the way. He made films like “The Naked Civil Servant”, “The National Health”, “Man Friday”, “Aces High”. He went to Hollywood to make “The Medusa Touch”. And those of you who live in Britain, he was very close to John Thaw and he directed the final episode of “Morse”. But he himself did not think “Escape from Sobibor” was a good film. We talked about it. He made it in Yugoslavia and he said he had to put all the actors on diets. Jack was an incredibly sensitive man and we did have a very long conversation about, and we did panel discussions on should these films be actually made? And it’s very, very, very complicated. So that’s “Escape from Sobibor”. Can we go on please? [Clip plays] - [Narrator] Then, action-adventure hero Rutger Hauer stars in an.

[Clip ends] - Actually, I think we’ll stop that. No, no, what I want to do now, can I ask you something very difficult? 'Cause I knew, if you don’t mind, I know, I knew this was to happen because I’ve got so much material. I will be going back on some of these stories, but what I want to turn to now is an extraordinary television film. It’s the, it’s called “God on Trial”. And I want to show you. And can we get to that if you don’t mind, Hannah? Hannah, I want to go to that. We’ll come back to these films on Sunday and I’m going to have to find another slot, I think. Can we go back? I want to go on now to, I’m going to show you all these films and talk about them, but I want to go on to “God on Trial” because I want to leave you on one of the most remarkable pieces of acting I’ve ever seen about the Shoah. Can we go on? We will do all of these, I promise. “God on Trial”, now let me explain. “God on Trial” is a television film and it was actually written by a, it was written by a Scot. It is the story of, and it’s based on a true story told by Elie Wiesel, of a group of prisoners in Auschwitz who put God on trial. And this is the speech of, and Elie Wiesel said he was a witness to it. And this is the speech of the rabbi, brilliantly played by the great, the late, great actor Anthony Sher. It’s a long extract but I want you to hear it, and then we will go, if you can remember my place, Hannah, we’ll go back to that on Sunday. [Clip plays] - The accusation is that God has broken His covenant with the Jewish people. - Who led us out of Egypt? - Well, He had some sense. - God led us out of Egypt. - Another question, why were we in Egypt to start with? - Well, there was a famine, so we took shelter. - Who sent the famine? - Well, the famine, we don’t know much about that. - [Rabbi] God sent the famine. So God sent us to Egypt and God took us out of Egypt. - Exactly so. And later, He sent us out of Babylon in order that we might. - And when He brought us out of Egypt, how did He do it? By words, visions, a miracle?

• Moses asked Pharaoh.

  • And when Pharaoh said, no? - The plagues.
  • First Moses turned the Egyptians’ water to blood. Then God sent a plague of frogs, next a plague of mosquitoes, then a plague of flies. Then He slew their livestock, next, a plague of boils. Next came the hail which battered down the crops and even the trees and structures everywhere except in Goshen, where the Israelites lived.
  • And still, Pharaoh did not agree.
  • And so a plague of locusts and then the days of darkness. And finally, what?
  • God slew the firstborn of Egypt and led us out of Egypt.
  • He struck down the firstborn from the firstborn and heir of Pharaoh to the firstborn of the slave at the mill. He slew them all. Did He slay Pharaoh?
  • No, I don’t think so, because later.
  • It was Pharaoh who said no, but God let him live and slew his children instead, all the children. And then the people of Israel made their escape, taking with them the gold and silver and jewellery and garments of the Egyptians. And then God drowned the soldiers who pursued them. He did not close the waters up so that the soldiers could not follow. He waited till they were following and then He closed the waters. And then what?
  • Then the desert, ultimately the promised land.
  • Now the promised land, was it empty, a new place, uncultivated? - No, there were.
  • As is written, when the Lord thy God shall bring you into the land, you shall cast out many nations before you. Nations much greater and mightier than you are. You shall smite them and utterly destroy them and make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
  • He’s shown us His favour. We are His people.
  • And He gave us a king in Saul. Now, when the people of Amalek fought Saul’s people, what did the Lord God command? I ask the scholar.

• Crush Amalek, put him under the cursed destruction. - Was Saul to show mercy, to spare anyone?

  • Do not spare.
  • Do not spare him but kill. Kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camels and donkey. So Saul set out to do this and on the way he met the Kenites. Now, these were not Amalek’s people. He had no quarrel with them. He urged them to flee. And the Lord our God, was He pleased by the mercy of Saul, by the justice of Saul?
  • No, no, He wasn’t.
  • And when Saul decided not to slaughter all the livestock, but to take it to feed his people, was God pleased by his prudence, his charity?
  • No.
  • No, He was not. He said you have rejected the word of Adonai, therefore He has rejected you as king. So seeking to please the Lord our God, Samuel brought forth King Agag and hacked him to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal. After Saul there came David, who took Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite to himself by arranging to have Uriah killed, against the wishes of God. Did God strike David for this?
  • In a manner of speaking.
  • Did He strike Bathsheba?
  • In the sense that when they.
  • Adonai said since you have sinned me, the child will die. You asked earlier, who punishes a child? God does. Now, did the child die suddenly, mercifully, without pain?
  • In chapter 12, we learned that in actual.
  • Seven days. Seven days that child spent dying in pain while David wrapped himself in sack and ashes and fasted and sought to show his sorrow to God. Did God listen?
  • The child died.
  • Did that child find that God was just? Did the Amalekites think that Adonai was just? Did the mothers of Egypt, the mothers, did they think that Adonai was just?

• But Adonai is our God, surely.

  • Oh, what, did God not make the Egyptians? Did He not make their rivers and make their crops grow? If not Him, then who? What, some other god? And what did He make them for? To punish them, to starve, to frighten, to slaughter them? The people of Amalek, the people of Egypt, what was it like for them when Adonai turned against them? It was like this. Today there was a selection, yes? When David defeated the Moabites, what did he do?
  • He made them lie on the ground in lines. And he chose one to live and two to die.
  • We are become the Moabites. We are learning how it was for the Amalekites. They faced extinction at the hand of Adonai. They died for His purpose. They fell as we are falling. They were afraid as we are afraid. And what did they learn? They learned that Adonai, the Lord our God, our God is not good. He is not good. He was not ever good. He was only on our side. [Clip ends]
  • I think we better stop it there. Can we stop it there? Okay, because what happens at the end of course is they all pray to Him. And as I said, this is based on an incident that Elie Wiesel wrote about and that he witnessed, the trial of God. I mean, it’s a very powerful piece. What I’ve decided, I’m going to take questions now and I’m going to try and put a third session in because I think it’s so important that some of the themes, and I can see we’ve got quite a few questions, so let me have a look. Q&A and Comments Thank you, Hannah, for doing that for me. Monty is saying the word Holocaust is now just a generic term. We need to take back how we refer to the murder of 6 million Jews. Shoah is the word and we as Jews should now have to refer to it. Gita agree, “Life Is Beautiful” is a travesty. “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”, even more so. I’ll be dealing with these next time. Yes, I agree. Q: Is “Adam Resurrected”, a film based on the book by Kaniuk, on your list? A: No it isn’t, Honey. Thank you, Honey, for what you said. Must disagree about “Zone of Interest”. Forget the crowd speech. The film was the most brilliant evocation of the Holocaust. We will discuss it, Vita. Anna, nearly all of the films focus on the Shoah in the concentration, extermination camps. I don’t know of any films that focus on the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators. That in my opinion is a major omission in the history of the Shoah, yes. Lois and Stan in the 1970s, I worked for a Swiss company and my Swiss colleagues learned about the Holocaust for the first time watching the miniseries. Yes, this is

certainly important. It’s absolutely true. Look, with “Schindler’s List”, whatever you think of the film, it led to an incredible, the two films that stick out have got to be “The Holocaust” by Lanzmann and, sorry, the miniseries, rather. And then the film that I think is the most important is Lanzmann’s “Shoah” and, but the other important film is “Schindler’s List”. This is Shelly. I remember watching the miniseries “Holocaust” and being appalled at one of the lines near the end where the assimilated German Jewish woman goes to her death, tells her children to continue to study Shakespeare. Where is the Judaism or pride in being Jewish? I saw a YouTube history that said Magda Goebbels’ biological father, who previously thought to be only her stepfather, was a wealthy German Jewish businessman. I don’t believe that’s actually true, Shelly. I will check that for you. But she was a very, very strange woman. You know, she, her lover was Haim Arlosoroff when she was young. It’s a very strange story. Q: Who would watch a movie about the horrors of the Shoah unless you are an antisemite? Are they a large enough market to make the movie a financial success? A: Probably, yes. Oh, David, that is so, so, so, so cynical. You know, I think there’s no doubt. Look, we, people have a fascination with evil and darkness. Just think of all the horror films. One of the films that is on the list that I’m going to show you is “Inglourious Basterds”, you know, Tarantino’s film. I find him very hard to watch on any level. He’s talented. So is it also that dark side of all of us? This is Rita, my late parents were Holocaust survivors. My beloved father was a resistance fighter who watched World War film and films about the Shoah. Antisemites? No, of course not, Rita. Now I think David is referring, he, I think he’s referring to the non-Jewish world, frankly. You don’t say what was so objectionable about “Playing for Time”. The fact that Fania Fénelon’s story upset so many survivors because it rubbished Alma Rosé, and also talked about the fact that they were at each other’s throats when, from what I’ve gathered from survivors like Anita, and as I said, I trust her more than any other person I know, frankly, that they, the orchestra, they kept each other together. Denise, I remember when Israel was the darling of the world. We’d just spent our first night in Jerusalem. In the early hours, the noise of the street woke us up. We just thought the Israelis were very noisy. It was only the following morning when we got to to take us from our first tour of the city that we heard everyone talking 19 to the dozen about the Entebbe raid that had happened. I will never forget the feeling of pride we felt. Yeah, didn’t take much. Saul Bellow wrote in 1967 if Israel had lost, then the world would’ve sent blankets to the surviving Jewish orphans. 1967, Israel became no longer embattled little Israel. It’s a long, complicated story, this story, and I think we will be telling it. We’re going to take quite a few months over the Middle East, and Wendy and I discussed it at length. I discussed it with my colleagues. It’s the one area that we haven’t really done. We’ll be bringing in all sorts of experts. I’m not going to say we’re going to be able to unlock it, but at least I think we’ll be able to deal with a lot of information.

Anna says I highly recommend viewing the film “Shttl”, which takes place in a small village in Western Ukraine one day before the Einsatzgruppen enter. One of the things I have is an amazing film called “Five Polish Cities” that was taken in 1939 by a Polish Jew who was living in America. And he went back to, he went home to take a picture, to take film of his community in five cities. And that really gives you a smell of what life was. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It seems the world is criticising Israel for defending itself. When did right become wrong and wrong become right? Yeah, don’t apply logic to prejudice, Arlene. It never works. Serena, “Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz” book by Richard Newman disagrees with previous movies. Her cause of death is mysterious, not typhus, maybe meningitis, maybe poison. It’s very complicated. I’m going to check this out for you, Serena. I read that it was in prison. I read it was the imprisoned Seven Day Adventists who were the first who sent out words about what was happening in the concentration camps. There were quite a few people, actually. Jan Karski is particularly important because he was employed by the Polish government in London and he was the one who relayed it. He had meetings with the British government, with the Polish government in exile and with Roosevelt. Apparently Simone Weil, who was the first time responsible, who was for the time responsible for providing funds for Holocaust, refused to give money to Lanzmann for “Shoah”. She objected to the fact that he only interviewed peasant Poles who came off very badly. The film lacked other voices. As you know, she was a survivor of Auschwitz. This was told to a university of class on Polish Jews. The professor himself was a gentile Pole who spoke and read Yiddish and Hebrew. Don’t know how true this is. I know she didn’t give, I don’t know enough. I’ll have to check that. Sherry says American slavery should never be diminished. It was not the Shoah, an evil in its own right. I think I said that, Sherry. I did say, of course it was absolutely a blot on humanity. I’m not minimising it at all, but what I’m saying it, if you lump all these catastrophes together, you don’t get anywhere. We have to understand what slavery was about. We have to understand all these horrors, but don’t lump them in together into one great big, super horror because then it obfuscates any kind of hope for reason. Q: Why would Vanessa Redgrave play this role? She’s so anti, well, and is she? A: She wouldn’t say she was antisemitic. She would say she’s anti-Israel. We’ll be talking about her a lot of when we get to it. It was a good role. And you see, there’s a divorcement in their minds between the victims of the Shoah and the Jews of today, or the Jews of then. It’s extraordinary, the mind tricks. Yes, Alexander Pechersky was the Jewish Red Army POW. Yes, he did. Yes, he did write his own. He wrote his autobiography, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he survived in Russia. Fania Fénelon came to Toronto for the Jewish Book Fair to discuss her book. She was furious about the movie. Yes, that’s true. She hated the idea of Vanessa Redgrave playing her. She was 4'11" tall and Vanessa is a giant. And the leader, the portrayal of the leader of the band was badly portrayed

and she couldn’t understand it. She was an interesting woman. Very French, reapplying lipstick several times. Oh, that’s a lovely insight, Aubrey. The “Shoah” tells it all, but the interview with Catholic Poles when translated into English made their remarks less disgusting than they really were. Oh, that’s . Oh, thank you. Just a point, at the commemoration of HMD in the UK, not only, not able, only lost World War I genocide, crimes against humanity recognised, not the Armenian genocide. Yes, this is another problem because the British government are allied to the Turks, they don’t recognise the Armenian genocide. It’s absolutely, it’s absolutely disgusting. I remember the first Holocaust Memorial Day in England when the Armenians were protesting, and of course Stefan Zweig wrote about the Armenian genocide. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There are so many wrongs in the world, aren’t there, Sheila? Patrick hasn’t left lockdown. Patrick is not taking part in the next series because it’s on the Middle East and he said that he hasn’t really got any, it’s not his field of expertise. We are having, we’ll be bringing in people to talk about the music of the Arab world and Sephardi music, et cetera. Q: Who made “God on Trial”? A: It was a, it’s a, it was made for British television. You, I’m, I got the extract from I think you can get the film on YouTube. Holocaust by Bullets by Father Desbois. Yes, it’s very interesting. I had the privilege of interviewing him. A very interesting man, Lerna. Jerry says, Jerry, see the piece from the film “God on Trial” has left me stunned and yet we know the worst from writings. The questions which arise are those questions that most of us are frightened to ask. Yes, yes. It’s so dark, isn’t it? Well, Pesach is coming up. It’s a time for us all to be together. It’s a time for us to ask questions. Anyway, thank you. Vanessa Redgrave, this is from Carrie. Vanessa Redgrave asked my dear friend Esther Brunstein, a survivor, to accompany to all sorts of events in able to talk about the Holocaust for years. I agree with you, Trudy. She’s not an antisemite. The question is, Carrie, when is the line crossed? And I think we’re going to have to have lots of debates on that. Okay, take care all of you and be safe. Lots of love, bye.