Concentrating on the Holocaust

To mark 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Venkateswaran Ganesan looks at iconic films that captured the horror of genocide

From Life is Beautiful

Some of the most sensitive films around the Holocaust have largely been made by Jewish filmmakers or those of Jewish descent. Widely regarded as culturally the most significant film in this genre is Schindler’s List , directed by Steven Spielberg, who was born to orthodox Jewish parents. The film is globally acclaimed, studied and dissected, but stands out paradoxically in filmmaker Kubrick’s words “for being a success story. Where every Holocaust film is about the 6 million who got killed, Schindler’s List is about the 600 who didn’t.” Roman Polanski, Roberto Benigni, Alan Pakula and Gillo Pontecorvo are filmmakers with varied ethnicities, but united by their Jewish descent and in having made films around the Holocaust with great sensitivity.

The Holocaust is replete with memories invoking the horror of genocide, getting a global stage during World War II. Since the war, many works of fact and fiction have used the event as the basis for their works. The film world is not far off the mark.

An interesting running theme across the spectrum of sensibility is that filmmakers have mostly used real people and real events.

Ilsa ,

She Wolf of the SS , a crude C-grade, Nazi sexploitation film, for instance, is based on the real-life murderous Nazi SS personnel Ilse Koch.

Schindler’s List is also based on the life of Oskar Schindler, a German who saved hundreds of Jews during the war, using his wealth, and died penniless. Polanski based

The Pianist around the life of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, while Roberto Benigni based his

Life is Beautiful partly on his father’s sufferings in a concentration camp.

When we discuss concentration camps, Auschwitz in Nazi Germany, flashes in our minds, because it is the lasting figure of the World War. However, there have been extermination camps, like the one at Treblinka, Nazi German-occupied Poland, which is the playing field for

The Pianist .Each country involved in the war, and affected by the Axis powers, has a tale to tell. Some films are told extraordinarily and they are a pleasure to speak about. The Great Escape tells the tale of a Prisoner of War, who tries escaping, eventually gets caught and is sent back to his camp. The film begins his portrayal with a scene of him bouncing a baseball on the wall of his cell. The film ends optimistically with an identical sequence after being sent back. There is a beautiful cyclical symmetry to the hero’s character arc inside this story (as a sidenote, this is not new to us. Kamal Haasan tried something similar in Thevar Magan , where the first scene has the hero entering from a railway station with pomp and the final frame has him leaving from the same railway station).

Life is Beautiful presents a striking dichotomy throughout with top-class cinematic craft from Benigni. The hero meets his ‘princess’ as she falls on him from an open attic, following which he falls on her, escaping his nemesis. He sets the first half of the film as a comedy with potential tragic undertones as the Italian Jew woos his lady, surrounded by a depressingly Fascist ruling class; and the second half positively becomes a tragi-comedy in a concentration camp as he tries hard to save his son’s innocence by playing the clown amid the darkness of war. From when the hero courts his lady love to the final sequence, inspired by Trotsky’s final words (“Life is Beautiful”) from his safe house (the hero’s son is hidden in a sweatbox as the hero faces execution), as he faced imminent execution from Stalin, everything about the medium of cinema is beautifully controlled.

To quote the Hungarian Nobel Laureate and the survivor of a concentration camp, Imre Kertesz, “It is impossible for life in a Nazi concentration camp to be accurately portrayed by anyone who did not experience it first-hand.” He may have a valid point and all the films we see are invariably distilled portrayals. But within this caveat, to paraphrase an iconic fictional villain from the Nazis, the greatest gift of the film world in this context has been that it has constantly reminded us of “the tremendous feats that human beings are capable of, when we abandon dignity.”

This article has been corrected for errors.