The Holocaust in art and literature
Encyclopedia
There is a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Holocaust in popular culture.
Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel
, Primo Levi
, Tadeusz Borowski
, Jerzy Kosinski
(see his semi-autobiographical novel, The Painted Bird), Imre Kertész
, Jean Améry
, Edgar Hilsenrath
, Anne Frank
, Boris Pahor
and Gizelle Hersh, but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. The Holocaust has been a common subject in American literature, with authors ranging from Sylvia Plath
to Saul Bellow
addressing it in their works.
The title character of American author's William Styron
's novel Sophie's Choice
, published in 1979, is a former inmate of Auschwitz who tells the story of her Holocaust experience to the narrator over the course of the novel. It was commercially successfully and won the National Book Award for fiction in 1980.
In 1991, Art Spiegelman
completed the second and final installment of his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus
. Through text and illustration, the autobiography retraces his father's steps through the Holocaust along with the residual effects of those events a generation later.
Also, in 1991, Martin Amis
's novel, Time's Arrow (novel)
was published. This book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, details the life of a Nazi doctor, but is told in reverse chronological order, in a narrative that almost seems to cleanse the doctor of his sins that the doctor has committed, and return to a time before the horrific acts of pure evil that preceded the Nazi regime.
White Wolf, Inc.
put out Charnal Houses of Europe: The Shoah in 1997 under its adult Black Dog Game Factory label. It is a carefully researched, respectful, and horrifically detailed supplement on the ghosts of the victims of the Holocaust for the Wraith: The Oblivion
In 1988, Jane Yolen
's The Devil's Arithmetic
was published; the book hurls its protagonist—an American teenage Jewish girl of the 1980s—back in time, back to the terrifying circumstances of being a young Jewish girl in a Polish shtetl in the 1940s.
In 2006, young adult author John Boyne
created an innocent perspective of the Holocaust in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
, which has recently been adapted into a 2009 movie of the same name.
Markus Zusak
's The Book Thief
was a Holocaust story narrated by Death himself. Pinaki Roy's "The Shrieks of Silence: Reading Transnational Miseries in Select Holocaust Novels", published in The Atlantic Critical Review Quarterly (October–December 2007, Volume 6, Number 4, ISBN 978-81-269-0936-0, pp. 120–34) offers a comparative study of the different Holocaust novels written in or translated into English.
Richard Zimler
's The Warsaw Anagrams takes place in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940-41 and is narrated by an ibbur (ghost). Named 2010 Book of the Year in Portugal, where Zimler has lived since 1990, the novel was described in the San Francisco Chronicle
in August of 2011 as follows: "Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and intelligent, this mystery set in the most infamous Jewish ghetto of World War II deserves a place among the most important works of Holocaust literature."
Key works in other languages include Ukrainian Anatoly Kuznetsov
's novel about the Babi Yar
massacre and Polish Tadeusz Borowski
's books "This way for Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" and "We were in Auschwitz".
"Stalags" were pocket books that became popular in Israel and whose stories involved lusty female SS officers sexually abusing Nazi camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the Eichmann trial, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks.
Some alternate history fiction set in scenario
s where Nazi Germany
wins World War II
, includes the Holocaust happening in countries where it did not happen in reality. And, the effects of a slight turn of historic events on other nations is imagined in The Plot Against America
, by Philip Roth
where an alleged Nazi sympathizer—Charles A. Lindbergh—defeats FDR for the Presidency in the United States in 1940.
The effect of the Holocaust on Jews living in other countries is also seen in The Museum Guard by Howard Norman
, which is set in Nova Scotia
in 1938 and in which a young half-Jewish woman becomes so obsessed and disturbed with a painting of a "Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam", that she is resolved to go to Amsterdam and "reunite" with the painter, despite all the horrific events occurring in Europe at the time and the consequences that may result.
A large body of literature has also been established concerning the Nuremburg Trials of 1945-1946, a subject which has been continually written about over the years. (See Nuremberg Trials bibliography
).
German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric", but he later retracted this statement. There are some substantial works dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the work of survivor Paul Celan
, which uses inverted syntax and vocabulary in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Celan considered the German language tainted by the Nazis, although it is interesting to note his friendship with Nazi sympathizer and philosopher Martin Heidegger
.
Poet Charles Reznikoff
, in his 1975 book Holocaust, created a work intrinsically respectful of the pitfalls implied by Adorno's statement; in itself both a "defense of poetry" and an acknowledgment of the obscenity of poetical rhetoric relative to atrocity, this book utilizes none of the author's own words, coinages, flourishes, interpretations and judgments: it is a creation solely based on U.S. government records of the Nuremberg Trials
and English-translated transcripts of the Adolph Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Through selection and arrangement of these source materials (the personal testimonies of both survivor victims and perpetrators), and severe editing down to essentials, Reznikoff fulfills a truth-telling function of poetry by laying bare human realities, and horrors, without embellishment, achieving the "poetic" through ordering the immediacy of documented testimony.
In 1998, Northwestern University Press published an anthology, edited by Marguerite M. Striar, entitled Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, which, in poetry, defends the sentiments of the statement of Adorno, in a section entitled "In Defense of Poetry," and reinforces the need to document for future generations what occurred in those times so as to never forget. The book collects, in poetry by survivors, witnesses, and many other poets—well known and not—remembrances of, and reflections on, the Holocaust, dealing with the subject in other sections chronologically, the poems organized in further sections by topics: "The Beginning: Premonitions and Prophecies"; "The Liberation", and "The Aftermath."
Aside from Adorno's opinion, a great deal of poetry has been written about the Holocaust by poets from various backgrounds—survivors (for example, Sonia Schrieber Weitz) and countless others, including well-known poet, William Heyen
(author of Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, The Swastika Poems,and The Shoah Train), himself a nephew of two men who fought for the Nazis in World War II.
German internment camps were much less strict with art. A black, Jewish artist named Josef Nassy
created over 200 drawings and paintings while he was at the Laufen and Tittmoning camps in Bavaria.
While inside the Łódź ghetto, Mendel Grossman
took over 10,000 photos of the monstrosities inside. Grossman secretly took these photos from inside his raincoat using the statistics department for the materials needed to make the photographs. He was moved to a labor camp and died in 1945, but the negatives of his photos were discovered and were put into the book, With a Camera in the Ghetto. The photos illustrate the sad reality of how the Germans dealt with the Jews.
The art, and photographs, that have survived World War II best illustrates the suffering and horror of those inside the ghettos, camps, and prisons.
Other survivors presented their memories of the Holocaust in various forms of art. Alice Lok Cahana
(1929- ), a Hungarian Holocaust survivor is well-known for her artwork dealing with her experiences in Auchwtiz and Bergen Belsen as a teenage inmate. Her piece "No Names" was installed in the Vatican Museum's Collection of Modern Religious Art
. Esther Nisenthal Krinitz
(1927–2001), a Polish survivor untrained in art told her story in a series of 36 fabric art pictures that are at once both beautiful and shocking. Memories of Survival (2005) displays her art along with a narrative by her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt. In Israel, many artists have dealt with the subject of the Holocaust, including Yigal Tumarkin
, Moshe Gershuni
, Joseph (Yoske) Levy
and others. Children of survivors have also expressed their personal family stories through various forms of visual art, such as quilt
ing.
A number of artists produced pictures of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
in the months following its liberation including Leslie Cole, Mary Kessell, Sargeant Eric Taylor (one of the camp's liberators), Mervyn Peake
and Doris Zinkeisen
.
, Schindler's List
, Voyage of the Damned
, The Pianist
, The Sorrow and the Pity
, Night and Fog
, Shoah
, Sophie's Choice
, Life Is Beautiful
, Korczak. A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida.
With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has also been increasing attention in recent years to preserving the memory of the Holocaust through documentaries. The most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah
, which attempts to tell the story in as literal a manner as possible, without dramatization of any kind.
Arguably, the most highly acclaimed Holocaust film by critics and historians alike is Alain Resnais
’ Night and Fog
, which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps (one of the more notable scenes shows Jewish fat being carved into soap). Many historians and critics have noted its realistic portrayal of the camps and that it lacks the histrionics present in so many other Holocaust films. Indeed, renowned film historian Peter Cowie states “It's a tribute to the clarity and cogency of Night and Fog that Resnais’ masterpiece has not been diminished by time, or displaced by longer and more ambitious films on the Holocaust, such as Shoah (film)
and Schindler's List
.”
, both the Czech
and Slovak
halves of Czechoslovakia and Hungary
. These nations were either host to concentration camps and/or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the gas chambers and as a result the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews has haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lent themselves more easily to exploring the subject. Although some directors were inspired by their Jewish roots, other directors, such as Hungary's Miklós Jancsó
, have no personal connection to Judaism or the Holocaust and yet have repeatedly returned to explore the topic in their works.
Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska's semi-documentary The Last Stage
(Ostatni etap, Poland, 1947) and Alfréd Radok
's hallucinogenic The Long Journey
(Daleká cesta, Czechoslovakia, 1948). As Central Europe fell under the grip of Stalinism and state control over the film industry increased, works about the Holocaust ceased to be made until the end of the 1950s (although films about the Second World War generally continued to be produced). Among the first films to reintroduce the topic, were Jiří Weiss's Sweet Light in a Dark Room (Romeo, Juliet a tma, Czechoslovakia, 1959) and Andrzej Wajda
's Samson
(Poland, 1961).
In the 1960s, a number of Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust either directly or indirectly had critical successes internationally. In 1966, the Slovak-language Holocaust drama The Shop on Main Street
(Obchod na korze, Czechoslovakia, 1965) by Ján Kadár and Elmer Klos won a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film the following year.
While some of these films, such as Shop on the Main Street used a convention film-making style, a significant body of films were bold stylistically and used innovative techniques to dramatise the terror of the period. This included non-linear narratives and narrative ambiguity, as for example in Andrzej Munk's Passenger (Pasażerka, Poland, 1963) and Jan Němec
's Diamonds of the Night
(Démanty noci, Czechlovakia, 1964); expressionist lighting and staging, as in Zbyněk Brynych
's The Fifth Horseman is Fear
(...a paty jezdec je Strach, Czechoslovakia, 1964); and grotesquely black humour, as in Juraj Herz's The Cremator
(Spalovač mrtvol, Czechoslovakia, 1968).
Literature was an important influence on these films, and almost all of the film examples cited in this section were based on novels or short stories. In Czechoslovakia, five stories by Arnošt Lustig
were adapted for the screen in the 1960s, including Němec's Diamonds of the Night.
Although some works, such as Munk's The Passenger, had disturbing and graphic sequences of the camps, generally these films depicted the moral dilemmas that the Holocaust placed ordinary people in and the dehumanising effects it had on society as a whole, rather than the physical tribulations of individuals actually in the camps. As a result, a body of these Holocaust films were interested in those who collaborated in the Holocaust, either by direct action, as for example in The Passenger and András Kovács
's Cold Days (Hideg Napok, Hungary, 1966), or through passive inaction, as in The Fifth Horseman is Fear.
The 1970s and 1980s, were less fruitful times for Central European film generally, and Czechoslovak cinema particularly suffered after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary. Holocaust films from this time include Imre Gyöngyössy
and Barna Kabay
's The Revolt of Job (Jób lázadása, Hungary, 1983), Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau (Poland, 1988) and Ravensbrück survivor Juraj Herz's Night Caught Up With Me (Zastihla mě noc, Czechoslovakia, 1986), whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Spielberg's similar sequence in Schindler's List.
Directors such as István Szabó
(Hungary) and Agnieszka Holland
(Poland) were able to make films that touched on the Holocaust by working internationally, Szabó with his Oscar-winning Mephisto
(Germany/Hungary/Austria, 1981) and Holland with her more directly Holocaust-themed Angry Harvest
(Bittere Ernte, Germany, 1984). Also worth noting is the East German-Czechoslovak coproduction Jacob, the Liar
(Jakob, der Lügner, 1975) in German and directed by German director Frank Beyer
but starring the acclaimed Czech actor Vlastimil Brodský
. The film was remade in an English-language version
in 1999 but did not reach the scholarly acceptance of the East German version by Beyer.
A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to a number of more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's Korczak (Poland, 1990), Szabó's Sunshine
(Germany/Austria/Canada/Hungary, 1999) and Jan Hřebejk
's Divided We Fall
(Musíme si pomáhat, Czech Republic, 2001). Both Sunshine and Divided We Fall are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.
Generally speaking, these recent films have been far less stylised and subjectivised than their 1960s counterparts. For example, Polish director Roman Polanski
's The Pianist
(France/Germany/UK/Poland, 2002) was noted for its emotional economy and restraint, somewhat surprising to some critics given the over-wrought style of some of Polanski's previous films and Polanski's personal history as a Holocaust survivor.
. It contains chamber music
by Gideon Klein
, Viktor Ullmann
, and Hans Krása
, the children's opera Brundibár
by Krása, and songs by Ullmann and Pavel Haas
. All the composers died in Auschwitz concentration camp
in 1944, except for Klein, who died the following year in Fürstengrube
. Many of the works were written at the end of their lives, in 1943 and 1944. The CDs were released in 1991.
The songs that were created during the Holocaust in ghettos, camps, and partisan groups tell the stories of individuals, groups and communities in the Holocaust period and were a source of unity and comfort, and later, of documentation and remembrance.
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar
inspired a poem written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko
which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich
in his Symphony No. 13
.
In 1984, Canadian rock band Rush
recorded the song "Red Sector A
" on the album Grace Under Pressure
. The song is particularly notable for its allusions to The Holocaust, inspired by Geddy Lee
's memories of his mother's stories about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen
, where she was held prisoner.
In 1988, Steve Reich
composed Different Trains
, a three-movement piece for string quartet
and tape. In the second movement, Europe — During the War, three Holocaust survivors (identified by Reich as Paul, Rachel, and Rachella) speak about their experiences in Europe during the war, including their train trips to concentration camps. The third movement, After the War, features Holocaust survivors talking about the years immediately following World War II.
In Pink Floyd
's album The Wall
, one of the record's tracks is titled "Waiting for the Worms". This song is set in the middle of the time the main character, Pink, has become a neo-nazi, and the head of a fascist group. The song seems to be set in a march down a main street in Brixton, England, with Pink singing/saying the lyrics through a megaphone. One of the lyrics from the song is, "Waiting! For the final solution
to strengthen the strain!"
In 2007, composer Lior Navok composed "And The Trains Kept Coming..." (Slavery Documents no.3) for narrators, soloists, choir and orchestra, based on real documents, correspondence between the allies, train schedules and last letters. It was premiered in Boston, by the Cantata Singers
, David Hoose, music director. http://www.liornavok.com
, a Jewish-American choreographer, created her piece "Dreams". It was an attempt to deal with her night terrors. Eventually it became a memoire to the horrors of the Holocaust. In this dance, the dancers stand still, each one clasping a balled fist with the other hand, trying to pull them apart but with no success.
This same feeling of being trapped and enslaved is illustrated also in one of Pilobolus dances, "Selection". In Selection, one of the dancers approaches a dancing couple, separating them by his cane and snatching the woman away from her partner’s arms.
In Rami Be’er’s "Aide Memoire" (Hebrew title: Zichron Dvarim), he tried to illustrate the feeling of being “trapped.” The dancers move ecstatically, trapped in their personal turmoil, spinning while swinging their arms and legs, and banging on the wall; some are crucified, unable to move freely on the stage. This piece is performed by KCDC (the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company)
From Holocaust Survivors And Remembrance Project—iSurvived.org:
DEFA Film Library Massachusetts
Literature
| A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel-or else it is not about Auschwitz. |
| Day by Elie Wiesel Elie Wiesel Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and... |
Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel
Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and...
, Primo Levi
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...
, Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski was a Polish writer and journalist. His wartime poetry and stories dealing with his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz are recognized as classics of Polish literature and had much influence in Central European society.- Early life :...
, Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosiński , born Józef Lewinkopf, was an award-winning Polish American novelist, and two-time President of the American Chapter of P.E.N.He was known for various novels, among them The Painted Bird and Being There...
(see his semi-autobiographical novel, The Painted Bird), Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history"....
, Jean Améry
Jean Améry
Jean Améry , born Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austrian-born essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during World War II...
, Edgar Hilsenrath
Edgar Hilsenrath
Edgar Hilsenrath is a German-Jewish writer living in Berlin. His main works are Night, The Nazi and the Barber, and The Story of the Last Thought.-Biography:...
, Anne Frank
Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.Born in the city of Frankfurt...
, Boris Pahor
Boris Pahor
Boris Pahor is a Slovene writer from Italy. He is considered to be one of the most influential living authors in the Slovene language and has been nominated for the Nobel prize for literature by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts...
and Gizelle Hersh, but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. The Holocaust has been a common subject in American literature, with authors ranging from Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...
to Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
addressing it in their works.
The title character of American author's William Styron
William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...
's novel Sophie's Choice
Sophie's Choice (novel)
Sophie's Choice is a novel by William Styron published in 1979. It concerns a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps...
, published in 1979, is a former inmate of Auschwitz who tells the story of her Holocaust experience to the narrator over the course of the novel. It was commercially successfully and won the National Book Award for fiction in 1980.
In 1991, Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
completed the second and final installment of his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus
Maus
Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of...
. Through text and illustration, the autobiography retraces his father's steps through the Holocaust along with the residual effects of those events a generation later.
Also, in 1991, Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
's novel, Time's Arrow (novel)
Time's Arrow (novel)
Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize .- Plot summary :The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in a disorienting reverse chronology...
was published. This book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, details the life of a Nazi doctor, but is told in reverse chronological order, in a narrative that almost seems to cleanse the doctor of his sins that the doctor has committed, and return to a time before the horrific acts of pure evil that preceded the Nazi regime.
White Wolf, Inc.
White Wolf, Inc.
White Wolf Publishing is an American gaming and book publisher. The company was founded in 1991 as a merger between Lion Rampant and White Wolf Magazine, and was initially led by Mark Rein·Hagen of the former and Steve and Stewart Wieck of the latter. Since White Wolf Publishing, Inc. merged with...
put out Charnal Houses of Europe: The Shoah in 1997 under its adult Black Dog Game Factory label. It is a carefully researched, respectful, and horrifically detailed supplement on the ghosts of the victims of the Holocaust for the Wraith: The Oblivion
Wraith: The Oblivion
Wraith: The Oblivion is a role-playing game set in the afterlife of White Wolf Game Studio's World of Darkness. In the game, players take on characters who are recently dead and are now ghosts...
In 1988, Jane Yolen
Jane Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolen is an American author and editor of almost 300 books. These include folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and children's books...
's The Devil's Arithmetic
The Devil's Arithmetic
The Devil's Arithmetic is a historical novel written by American author Jane Yolen and published in 1988. The book is about Hannah, a Jewish girl who lives in New Rochelle, New York...
was published; the book hurls its protagonist—an American teenage Jewish girl of the 1980s—back in time, back to the terrifying circumstances of being a young Jewish girl in a Polish shtetl in the 1940s.
In 2006, young adult author John Boyne
John Boyne
John Boyne is an Irish novelist.- Biography :He was educated at Terenure College, before heading to trinity college, dublin, and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he won the Curtis Brown prize. But it was during his time at Trinity that he began to get published...
created an innocent perspective of the Holocaust in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 novel from the point of view of an innocent young boy, written by Irish novelist John Boyne. Unlike the months of planning Boyne devoted to his other books, he said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half...
, which has recently been adapted into a 2009 movie of the same name.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film)
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2008 historical-drama film based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer John Boyne. Directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, it stars Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga and Rupert Friend.A Holocaust drama, the film...
Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak is an Australian author. He is best known for his books The Book Thief and The Messenger , which have been international bestsellers.- Career :...
's The Book Thief
The Book Thief
The Book Thief is a novel by Australian author Markus Zusak. Narrated by Death, the book is set in Nazi Germany It describes a young girl's relationship with her foster parents, Hans and Rosa, and the other residents of their neighborhood, and a Jewish fist-fighter who hides in her home during the...
was a Holocaust story narrated by Death himself. Pinaki Roy's "The Shrieks of Silence: Reading Transnational Miseries in Select Holocaust Novels", published in The Atlantic Critical Review Quarterly (October–December 2007, Volume 6, Number 4, ISBN 978-81-269-0936-0, pp. 120–34) offers a comparative study of the different Holocaust novels written in or translated into English.
Richard Zimler
Richard Zimler
Richard Zimler is a best-selling author of fiction. His books, which have earned him a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the 1998 Herodotus Award, have been published in many countries and translated into more than 20 languages...
's The Warsaw Anagrams takes place in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940-41 and is narrated by an ibbur (ghost). Named 2010 Book of the Year in Portugal, where Zimler has lived since 1990, the novel was described in the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
in August of 2011 as follows: "Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and intelligent, this mystery set in the most infamous Jewish ghetto of World War II deserves a place among the most important works of Holocaust literature."
Key works in other languages include Ukrainian Anatoly Kuznetsov
Anatoly Kuznetsov
Anatoly Vasilievich Kuznetsov was a Russian language Soviet writer who described his experiences in German-occupied Kiev during WWII in his internationally acclaimed novel Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel...
's novel about the Babi Yar
Babi Yar
Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a...
massacre and Polish Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski was a Polish writer and journalist. His wartime poetry and stories dealing with his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz are recognized as classics of Polish literature and had much influence in Central European society.- Early life :...
's books "This way for Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" and "We were in Auschwitz".
"Stalags" were pocket books that became popular in Israel and whose stories involved lusty female SS officers sexually abusing Nazi camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the Eichmann trial, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks.
Some alternate history fiction set in scenario
Scenario
A scenario is a synoptical collage of an event or series of actions and events. In the Commedia dell'arte it was an outline of entrances, exits, and action describing the plot of a play that was literally pinned to the back of the scenery...
s where Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
wins World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, includes the Holocaust happening in countries where it did not happen in reality. And, the effects of a slight turn of historic events on other nations is imagined in The Plot Against America
The Plot Against America
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh.-Plot introduction:...
, by Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
where an alleged Nazi sympathizer—Charles A. Lindbergh—defeats FDR for the Presidency in the United States in 1940.
The effect of the Holocaust on Jews living in other countries is also seen in The Museum Guard by Howard Norman
Howard Norman
Howard A. Norman , is an American award-winning writer and educator. Most of his short stories and novels are set in Canada's Maritime Provinces. He has written several translations of Algonquin, Cree, Eskimo, and Inuit folklore. His books have been translated into 12 languages.-Early...
, which is set in Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...
in 1938 and in which a young half-Jewish woman becomes so obsessed and disturbed with a painting of a "Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam", that she is resolved to go to Amsterdam and "reunite" with the painter, despite all the horrific events occurring in Europe at the time and the consequences that may result.
A large body of literature has also been established concerning the Nuremburg Trials of 1945-1946, a subject which has been continually written about over the years. (See Nuremberg Trials bibliography
Nuremberg Trials bibliography
The following is a bibliography devoted to the Nuremberg Trials*Allen, Charles R. Nazi War Criminals in America: Facts. Action: The Basic Handbook. Charles R. Allen, Jr. New York: Highgate House, 1985....
).
Poetry
| To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. |
| Prisms by Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society.... |
German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric", but he later retracted this statement. There are some substantial works dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the work of survivor Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
, which uses inverted syntax and vocabulary in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Celan considered the German language tainted by the Nazis, although it is interesting to note his friendship with Nazi sympathizer and philosopher Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
.
Poet Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky provided his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of...
, in his 1975 book Holocaust, created a work intrinsically respectful of the pitfalls implied by Adorno's statement; in itself both a "defense of poetry" and an acknowledgment of the obscenity of poetical rhetoric relative to atrocity, this book utilizes none of the author's own words, coinages, flourishes, interpretations and judgments: it is a creation solely based on U.S. government records of the Nuremberg Trials
Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
and English-translated transcripts of the Adolph Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Through selection and arrangement of these source materials (the personal testimonies of both survivor victims and perpetrators), and severe editing down to essentials, Reznikoff fulfills a truth-telling function of poetry by laying bare human realities, and horrors, without embellishment, achieving the "poetic" through ordering the immediacy of documented testimony.
In 1998, Northwestern University Press published an anthology, edited by Marguerite M. Striar, entitled Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, which, in poetry, defends the sentiments of the statement of Adorno, in a section entitled "In Defense of Poetry," and reinforces the need to document for future generations what occurred in those times so as to never forget. The book collects, in poetry by survivors, witnesses, and many other poets—well known and not—remembrances of, and reflections on, the Holocaust, dealing with the subject in other sections chronologically, the poems organized in further sections by topics: "The Beginning: Premonitions and Prophecies"; "The Liberation", and "The Aftermath."
Aside from Adorno's opinion, a great deal of poetry has been written about the Holocaust by poets from various backgrounds—survivors (for example, Sonia Schrieber Weitz) and countless others, including well-known poet, William Heyen
William Heyen
William Helmuth Heyen is an American poet, editor, and literary critic. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Suffolk County...
(author of Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, The Swastika Poems,and The Shoah Train), himself a nephew of two men who fought for the Nazis in World War II.
Visual arts
Art inside the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos was punishable; if found, the person who created it could be killed. However, many people painted, sketched, and also made literary pieces of art. Many of the artist's pieces were found by the Nazis before they could complete them. The ghettos were a very dreary place. Jews needed a way to bring life into the ghettos, and bring out their human need to create and be creative. The Nazis branded art that portrayed their regime poorly as “horror propaganda”.German internment camps were much less strict with art. A black, Jewish artist named Josef Nassy
Josef Nassy
Josef Nassy was a black expatriate artist of Jewish descent. Nassy was living in Belgium when World War II began, and was one of about 2,000 civilians holding American passports who were confined in German internment camps during the war....
created over 200 drawings and paintings while he was at the Laufen and Tittmoning camps in Bavaria.
While inside the Łódź ghetto, Mendel Grossman
Mendel Grossman
Mendel Grossman was born in 1913. He was a Jew, and a Hasid in Lodz during the Holocaust. The Nazis put him in the Łódź Ghetto in 1939; there he found work as a photographer, making identification cards and documenting the work that his fellow inmates did in the ghetto...
took over 10,000 photos of the monstrosities inside. Grossman secretly took these photos from inside his raincoat using the statistics department for the materials needed to make the photographs. He was moved to a labor camp and died in 1945, but the negatives of his photos were discovered and were put into the book, With a Camera in the Ghetto. The photos illustrate the sad reality of how the Germans dealt with the Jews.
The art, and photographs, that have survived World War II best illustrates the suffering and horror of those inside the ghettos, camps, and prisons.
Other survivors presented their memories of the Holocaust in various forms of art. Alice Lok Cahana
Alice Lok Cahana
Alice Lok Cahana is an Hungarian Holocaust survivor. She was a teenage inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps. She is most well known for her writings and abstract paintings about the Holocaust....
(1929- ), a Hungarian Holocaust survivor is well-known for her artwork dealing with her experiences in Auchwtiz and Bergen Belsen as a teenage inmate. Her piece "No Names" was installed in the Vatican Museum's Collection of Modern Religious Art
Collection of Modern Religious Art, Vatican Museums
The Collection of Modern Religious Art of the Vatican Museums is a collection of paintings, graphic art and sculptures...
. Esther Nisenthal Krinitz
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz was a Polish artist.-The Final Solution:In September 1939, as a 12-year-old, Esther watched German soldiers arrive in her village of Mniszek, strategically located along the east bank of the Vistula River...
(1927–2001), a Polish survivor untrained in art told her story in a series of 36 fabric art pictures that are at once both beautiful and shocking. Memories of Survival (2005) displays her art along with a narrative by her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt. In Israel, many artists have dealt with the subject of the Holocaust, including Yigal Tumarkin
Yigal Tumarkin
Yigal Tumarkin is an Israeli painter and sculptor. He is also known as Igael Tumarkin.-Biography:...
, Moshe Gershuni
Moshe Gershuni
-Early life:Moshe Gershuni was born in 1936 in Tel Aviv in the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents Yona and Zvi Kutner immigrated there from Poland in the 1920s. He spent his childhood in Tel Aviv and graduated from the local religious high school in 1954. He has two siblings; a brother named...
, Joseph (Yoske) Levy
Joseph (Yoske) Levy
Joseph Levy is an Israeli artist, who focuses mainly in oil paintings and sculptures in wood and aluminum. Levy is known for his semi cubist depiction of human figures in catastrophic situations...
and others. Children of survivors have also expressed their personal family stories through various forms of visual art, such as quilt
Quilt
A quilt is a type of bed cover, traditionally composed of three layers of fiber: a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding and a woven back, combined using the technique of quilting. “Quilting” refers to the technique of joining at least two fabric layers by stitches or ties...
ing.
A number of artists produced pictures of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle...
in the months following its liberation including Leslie Cole, Mary Kessell, Sargeant Eric Taylor (one of the camp's liberators), Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R...
and Doris Zinkeisen
Doris Zinkeisen
Doris Clare Zinkeisen was a Scottish theatrical stage and costume designer, painter, commercial artist and writer. She was best known for her work in theatrical design.-Early life:...
.
Film
The Holocaust has also been the subject of many films, including The PawnbrokerThe Pawnbroker (film)
The Pawnbroker is a 1964 drama film, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters and Jaime Sánchez and directed by Sidney Lumet. It was adapted by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant....
, Schindler's List
Schindler's List
Schindler's List is a 1993 American film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark...
, Voyage of the Damned
Voyage of the Damned
Voyage of the Damned is the title of a 1974 book written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, which was the basis of a 1976 drama film with the same title.The story was inspired by true events concerning the fate of the MS St...
, The Pianist
The Pianist (2002 film)
The Pianist is a 2002 biographical war film directed by Roman Polanski, starring Adrien Brody. It is an adaptation of the autobiography of the same name by Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman...
, The Sorrow and the Pity
The Sorrow and the Pity
The Sorrow and the Pity is a two-part 1969 documentary film by Marcel Ophüls about the French Resistance and collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. The film uses interviews with a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from...
, Night and Fog
Night and Fog (film)
Night and Fog is a 1955 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was...
, Shoah
Shoah (film)
This page is about the film by the name of Shoah. For other uses, see Shoah Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film directed by Claude Lanzmann about the Holocaust...
, Sophie's Choice
Sophie's Choice (film)
Sophie's Choice is a 1982 American romantic drama film that tells the story of a Polish immigrant, Sophie, and her tempestuous lover who share a boarding house with a young writer in Brooklyn. The film stars Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Peter MacNicol. Alan J...
, Life Is Beautiful
Life Is Beautiful
Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice , who must employ his fertile imagination to help his family during their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and...
, Korczak. A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida.
With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has also been increasing attention in recent years to preserving the memory of the Holocaust through documentaries. The most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah
Shoah (film)
This page is about the film by the name of Shoah. For other uses, see Shoah Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film directed by Claude Lanzmann about the Holocaust...
, which attempts to tell the story in as literal a manner as possible, without dramatization of any kind.
Arguably, the most highly acclaimed Holocaust film by critics and historians alike is Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...
’ Night and Fog
Night and Fog (film)
Night and Fog is a 1955 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was...
, which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps (one of the more notable scenes shows Jewish fat being carved into soap). Many historians and critics have noted its realistic portrayal of the camps and that it lacks the histrionics present in so many other Holocaust films. Indeed, renowned film historian Peter Cowie states “It's a tribute to the clarity and cogency of Night and Fog that Resnais’ masterpiece has not been diminished by time, or displaced by longer and more ambitious films on the Holocaust, such as Shoah (film)
Shoah (film)
This page is about the film by the name of Shoah. For other uses, see Shoah Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film directed by Claude Lanzmann about the Holocaust...
and Schindler's List
Schindler's List
Schindler's List is a 1993 American film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark...
.”
Central European Film
The Holocaust has been particularly important theme in cinema in the Central and East European countries, particularly the cinemas of PolandCinema of Poland
The history of cinema in Poland is almost as long as history of cinematography, and it has universal achievements, even though Polish movies tend to be less commercially available than movies from several other European nations....
, both the Czech
Cinema of the Czech Republic
The Czech Republic was a seedbed for many acclaimed film directors.Three Czech/Czechoslovak movies that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film were The Shop on Main Street by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos in 1965, Closely Watched Trains by Jiří Menzel in 1967 and...
and Slovak
Cinema of Slovakia
The cinema of Slovakia encompasses a range of themes and styles typical of European cinema. Yet there are a certain number of recurring themes that are visible in the majority of the important works. These include rural settings, folk traditions, and carnival...
halves of Czechoslovakia and Hungary
Cinema of Hungary
Hungary has had a notable cinema industry from the beginning of the 20th century, with Hungarians who affected the world of motion picture both inside and outside the borders...
. These nations were either host to concentration camps and/or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the gas chambers and as a result the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews has haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lent themselves more easily to exploring the subject. Although some directors were inspired by their Jewish roots, other directors, such as Hungary's Miklós Jancsó
Miklós Jancsó
Miklós Jancsó is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.Jancsó achieved international prominence from the mid-1960s onwards, with works including The Round Up , The Red and the White and Red Psalm .Jancsó's films are characterized by visual stylization,...
, have no personal connection to Judaism or the Holocaust and yet have repeatedly returned to explore the topic in their works.
Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska's semi-documentary The Last Stage
The Last Stage
The Last Stage was a 1947 Polish feature film directed and co-written by Wanda Jakubowska, depicting her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II...
(Ostatni etap, Poland, 1947) and Alfréd Radok
Alfréd Radok
Alfréd Radok was a distinguished Czech stage director.He worked as the stage director of the National Theatre in Prague in the years 1948 to 1949 and 1966 to 1968. Radok's work belongs to the top of the Czech stage direction of the 20th century...
's hallucinogenic The Long Journey
The Long Journey
The Long Journey is a series of six novels by Danish author and poet Johannes V. Jensen, written between 1908 and 1922. The books deal with the authors theories on evolution, backdropped against a description of humanity from pre-Ice Age up to the voyage of Christopher Columbus...
(Daleká cesta, Czechoslovakia, 1948). As Central Europe fell under the grip of Stalinism and state control over the film industry increased, works about the Holocaust ceased to be made until the end of the 1950s (although films about the Second World War generally continued to be produced). Among the first films to reintroduce the topic, were Jiří Weiss's Sweet Light in a Dark Room (Romeo, Juliet a tma, Czechoslovakia, 1959) and Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Wajda is a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he is possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial "Polish Film School"...
's Samson
Samson (1961 film)
Samson is a 1961 film made by Academy Award-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda that uses art house aesthetics to tell a story about the Holocaust. Wajda's World War II film alludes to the Old Testament story of Samson, who had supernatural physical strength...
(Poland, 1961).
In the 1960s, a number of Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust either directly or indirectly had critical successes internationally. In 1966, the Slovak-language Holocaust drama The Shop on Main Street
The Shop on Main Street
The Shop on Main Street is a 1965 Czechoslovak film about the Aryanization programme during World War II in the Slovak State....
(Obchod na korze, Czechoslovakia, 1965) by Ján Kadár and Elmer Klos won a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film the following year.
While some of these films, such as Shop on the Main Street used a convention film-making style, a significant body of films were bold stylistically and used innovative techniques to dramatise the terror of the period. This included non-linear narratives and narrative ambiguity, as for example in Andrzej Munk's Passenger (Pasażerka, Poland, 1963) and Jan Němec
Jan Nemec
Jan Němec is a Czech filmmaker whose most important work dates from the 1960s. Film historian Peter Hames has described him as the "enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave."- Biography :...
's Diamonds of the Night
Diamonds of the Night
Diamonds of the Night is a Czech 1964 film about two boys on the run from a train taking them to a concentration camp. It was director Jan Němec's first full-length feature film.-Plot:...
(Démanty noci, Czechlovakia, 1964); expressionist lighting and staging, as in Zbyněk Brynych
Zbynek Brynych
Zbyněk Brynych was a Czech film director and screenwriter. He directed 30 films between 1951 and 1985.-Selected filmography:* Suburban Romance * The Fifth Horseman is Fear -External links:...
's The Fifth Horseman is Fear
The Fifth Horseman is Fear
The Fifth Horseman is Fear is a 1964 Czechoslovak New Wave film about the Holocaust that was directed by Zbynek Brynych...
(...a paty jezdec je Strach, Czechoslovakia, 1964); and grotesquely black humour, as in Juraj Herz's The Cremator
The Cremator
The Cremator is a 1969 Czechoslovak horror comedy/drama film directed by Juraj Herz, based on a novel by Ladislav Fuks. The screenplay was written by Herz and Fuks. The film was selected as the Czechoslovakian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards, but was not...
(Spalovač mrtvol, Czechoslovakia, 1968).
Literature was an important influence on these films, and almost all of the film examples cited in this section were based on novels or short stories. In Czechoslovakia, five stories by Arnošt Lustig
Arnošt Lustig
Arnošt Lustig was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust.Lustig was born in Prague...
were adapted for the screen in the 1960s, including Němec's Diamonds of the Night.
Although some works, such as Munk's The Passenger, had disturbing and graphic sequences of the camps, generally these films depicted the moral dilemmas that the Holocaust placed ordinary people in and the dehumanising effects it had on society as a whole, rather than the physical tribulations of individuals actually in the camps. As a result, a body of these Holocaust films were interested in those who collaborated in the Holocaust, either by direct action, as for example in The Passenger and András Kovács
András Kovács
András Kovács is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. He directed 30 films between 1961 and 1996. His 1978 film A ménesgazda was entered into the 29th Berlin International Film Festival. He was also a member of the jury at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.-External links:...
's Cold Days (Hideg Napok, Hungary, 1966), or through passive inaction, as in The Fifth Horseman is Fear.
The 1970s and 1980s, were less fruitful times for Central European film generally, and Czechoslovak cinema particularly suffered after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary. Holocaust films from this time include Imre Gyöngyössy
Imre Gyöngyössy
Imre Gyöngyössy was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. His film Job's Revolt , which he co-directed with Barna Kabay, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.-External links:...
and Barna Kabay
Barna Kabay
Barna Kabay is a Hungarian film director, screenwriter and film producer. His film Job's Revolt , which he co-directed with Imre Gyöngyössy, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.-External links:...
's The Revolt of Job (Jób lázadása, Hungary, 1983), Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau (Poland, 1988) and Ravensbrück survivor Juraj Herz's Night Caught Up With Me (Zastihla mě noc, Czechoslovakia, 1986), whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Spielberg's similar sequence in Schindler's List.
Directors such as István Szabó
István Szabó
István Szabó is a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, and opera director.Szabó is the most internationally famous Hungarian filmmaker since the late 1960s. Working in the tradition of European, auteurist art cinema, he has made films that represent many of the psychological and political...
(Hungary) and Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland is a Polish film and TV director and screenwriter. Best recognized for her highly political contributions to Polish cinema, Holland is one of Poland's most prominent filmmakers.-Personal life:...
(Poland) were able to make films that touched on the Holocaust by working internationally, Szabó with his Oscar-winning Mephisto
Mephisto (1981 film)
Mephisto is the title of a 1981 film adaptation of Klaus Mann's novel of the same name, directed by István Szabó, and starring Klaus Maria Brandauer as Hendrik Höfgen...
(Germany/Hungary/Austria, 1981) and Holland with her more directly Holocaust-themed Angry Harvest
Angry Harvest
Angry Harvest is a 1985 West German film directed by Agnieszka Holland. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is based on a novel written by Hermann Field and Stanislaw Mierzenski while they were imprisoned by the Polish government in the early 1950s...
(Bittere Ernte, Germany, 1984). Also worth noting is the East German-Czechoslovak coproduction Jacob, the Liar
Jacob, the Liar (1975 film)
Jacob, the Liar is a 1975 East German-Czechoslovakian film directed by Frank Beyer and based on the eponymous novel by Jurek Becker. It starred Vlastimil Brodský in the title role.-Cast:* Vlastimil Brodský - Jakob Heym* Erwin Geschonneck - Kowalski...
(Jakob, der Lügner, 1975) in German and directed by German director Frank Beyer
Frank Beyer
Frank Beyer was German film director. In East Germany he was one of the most important film directors, working for the state film monopoly DEFA and directed films that dealt mostly with the Nazi era and contemporary East Germany. His film Traces of Stones was banned for 20 years in 1966 by the...
but starring the acclaimed Czech actor Vlastimil Brodský
Vlastimil Brodský
Vlastimil Brodský was a respected Czech actor. He appeared in over 90 films, and is considered a key figure in the postwar development of Czech cinema....
. The film was remade in an English-language version
Jakob the Liar
Jakob the Liar is a 1999 American tragicomedy film directed by Peter Kassovitz and starring Robin Williams, Alan Arkin, Liev Schreiber, Hannah Taylor-Gordon, and Bob Balaban. The movie is set in 1944 in a ghetto in German-occupied Poland in the times of the Holocaust and is based on the book by...
in 1999 but did not reach the scholarly acceptance of the East German version by Beyer.
A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to a number of more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's Korczak (Poland, 1990), Szabó's Sunshine
Sunshine (1999 film)
Sunshine is a 1999 historical film written by Israel Horovitz and István Szabó, directed and produced by István Szabó. It follows three generations of a Jewish family during the changes in Hungary from the beginning of the 20th century to the...
(Germany/Austria/Canada/Hungary, 1999) and Jan Hřebejk
Jan Hrebejk
Jan Hřebejk is a Czech film director.-Early life and education:Born in Prague, Hřebejk studied together with his classmate Petr Jarchovský at high school. Now Jarchovsky is a frequent collaborator as a screenwriter...
's Divided We Fall
Divided We Fall (film)
Divided We Fall is a 2000 Czech film directed by Jan Hřebejk. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.-Plot:...
(Musíme si pomáhat, Czech Republic, 2001). Both Sunshine and Divided We Fall are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.
Generally speaking, these recent films have been far less stylised and subjectivised than their 1960s counterparts. For example, Polish director Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers."...
's The Pianist
The Pianist (2002 film)
The Pianist is a 2002 biographical war film directed by Roman Polanski, starring Adrien Brody. It is an adaptation of the autobiography of the same name by Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman...
(France/Germany/UK/Poland, 2002) was noted for its emotional economy and restraint, somewhat surprising to some critics given the over-wrought style of some of Polanski's previous films and Polanski's personal history as a Holocaust survivor.
Select list of films based on the holocaust
- 1990 -- Europa EuropaEuropa EuropaEuropa Europa is a 1990 German language film directed by Agnieszka Holland. Its original German title is Hitlerjunge Salomon, i.e. "Hitler Youth Salomon". It is based on the 1989 autobiography of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy who escaped The Holocaust by masquerading not just as a non-Jew, but...
, a boy in Nazi Germany, trying to conceal that he is Jewish, joins the Hitler YouthHitler YouthThe Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
. - 1993 -- Schindler's ListSchindler's ListSchindler's List is a 1993 American film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark...
, dramatized account of Oskar SchindlerOskar SchindlerOskar Schindler was an ethnic German industrialist born in Moravia. He is credited with saving over 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories, which were located in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic respectively.He is the subject of the...
's activities. - 1997—Life is Beautiful
- 1999 -- All My Loved onesAll My Loved OnesAll My Loved Ones is a 1999 Czech-language film directed by Matej Mináč. It was an international co-production between Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia...
, fictional account of one child saved by Nicholas WintonNicholas WintonSir Nicholas George Winton, MBE is a British humanitarian who organised the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport. Winton found homes for them and arranged for their safe...
's activities. - 2000 -- Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness, documentary about Chiune SugiharaChiune Sugiharawas a Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. During World War II, he helped several thousand Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were refugees from...
. - 2001 -- Nowhere in AfricaNowhere in AfricaNowhere in Africa is a 2001 German film directed by Caroline Link and based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Stefanie Zweig. It tells the story of a Jewish family that emigrates to Kenya during World War II to escape the Nazis and run a farm...
, adaptation of Stefanie ZweigStefanie ZweigStefanie Zweig Stefanie Zweig Stefanie Zweig (born 19 September 1932, Leobschütz (now Głubczyce, Upper Silesia) is a German Jewish writer.- Background :Zweig is best known for her autobiographical novel, Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 1998), based on her early life in Kenya, which was...
's autobiographical novel. - 2002 -- The Power of Good, documentary about Nicholas Winton.
- 2002 -- The PianistThe Pianist (2002 film)The Pianist is a 2002 biographical war film directed by Roman Polanski, starring Adrien Brody. It is an adaptation of the autobiography of the same name by Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman...
, adaptation of Władysław Szpilman's autobiography. - 2006 -- Black Book, fictionalized account of occupied Netherlands.
- 2007 -- The CounterfeitersThe Counterfeiters (film)The Counterfeiters is a 2007 Austrian-German film written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the Nazis during the Second World War to destabilize Great Britain by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England bank notes.The film centres on a...
, tells the story of Jews in SachsenhausenSachsenhausen concentration campSachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used primarily for political prisoners from 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in May, 1945. After World War II, when Oranienburg was in the Soviet Occupation Zone, the structure was used as an NKVD...
who were forced to counterfeit dollars and pounds in order to flood the British and American economies. - 2008 -- The Boy in the Striped PyjamasThe Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film)The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2008 historical-drama film based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer John Boyne. Directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, it stars Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga and Rupert Friend.A Holocaust drama, the film...
, adaptation of John BoyneJohn BoyneJohn Boyne is an Irish novelist.- Biography :He was educated at Terenure College, before heading to trinity college, dublin, and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he won the Curtis Brown prize. But it was during his time at Trinity that he began to get published...
's novel. - 2008 -- DefianceDefiance (2008 film)Defiance is a 2008 World War II era film written, produced, and directed by Edward Zwick, set during the occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany. The film is an account of the Bielski partisans, a group led by three Jewish brothers who saved and recruited Jews in Poland during the Second World War...
, story of Tuvie BielskiTuvie BielskiTuvia Bielski was the leader of the partisan group the Bielski partisans who were situated in the Naliboki forest in pre-war Poland during World War II.-Life:...
and the Bielski partisansBielski partisansThe Bielski partisans were an organisation of Jewish partisans who rescued Jews from extermination and fought against the Nazi German occupiers and their collaborators in the vicinity of Nowogródek and Lida in German-occupied Poland...
.
Music
Inmates at the Terezín concentration camp during World War II composed the music on Terezín: The Music 1941-44Terezín: The Music 1941-44
Terezín: The Music 1941–44 is a 2-CD set with music written by inmates at the Terezín concentration camp during World War II.Volume 1 contains chamber music by Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, and Hans Krása; Volume 2 features the children's opera Brundibár by Krása, and songs by Ullmann and Pavel Haas...
. It contains chamber music
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...
by Gideon Klein
Gideon Klein
Gideon Klein was a Czech pianist and composer of classical music, organizer of cultural life in Theresienstadt concentration camp.-Life:...
, Viktor Ullmann
Viktor Ullmann
Viktor Ullmann was a Silesia-born Austrian, later Czech composer, conductor and pianist of Jewish origin.- Biography :...
, and Hans Krása
Hans Krása
Hans Krása was a Czech composer who was killed in the Holocaust at Auschwitz. He helped to organize cultural life in Theresienstadt concentration camp.-Life:...
, the children's opera Brundibár
Brundibár
Brundibár is a children's opera by Jewish Czech composer Hans Krása with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, originally performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia...
by Krása, and songs by Ullmann and Pavel Haas
Pavel Haas
Pavel Haas was a Czech composer who was murdered during the Holocaust. He was an exponent of Leoš Janáček's school of composition, and also utilized elements of folk music and jazz. Although his output was not large, he is notable particularly for his song cycles and string quartets.-Pre-war:Haas...
. All the composers died in Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
in 1944, except for Klein, who died the following year in Fürstengrube
Fürstengrube subcamp
The Fürstengrube subcamp was organized in the summer of 1943 at the Fürstengrube hard coal mine in the town of Wesola near Myslowice , approximately from Auschwitz concentration camp. The mine, which IG Farbenindustrie AG acquired in February 1941, was to supply hard coal for the IG Farben...
. Many of the works were written at the end of their lives, in 1943 and 1944. The CDs were released in 1991.
The songs that were created during the Holocaust in ghettos, camps, and partisan groups tell the stories of individuals, groups and communities in the Holocaust period and were a source of unity and comfort, and later, of documentation and remembrance.
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar
Babi Yar
Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a...
inspired a poem written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.-Early life:...
which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....
in his Symphony No. 13
Symphony No. 13 (Shostakovich)
The Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor by Dmitri Shostakovich was first performed in Moscow on 18 December, 1962 by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and the basses of the Republican State and Gnessin Institute Choirs, under Kirill Kondrashin . The soloist was Vitali Gromadsky...
.
In 1984, Canadian rock band Rush
Rush (band)
Rush is a Canadian rock band formed in August 1968, in the Willowdale neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario. The band is composed of bassist, keyboardist, and lead vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer and lyricist Neil Peart...
recorded the song "Red Sector A
Red Sector A
"Red Sector A" is a song by Rush that provides a first-person account of a nameless protagonist living in an unspecified prison camp setting. "Red Sector A" first appeared on the band's 1984 album Grace Under Pressure....
" on the album Grace Under Pressure
Grace Under Pressure (Rush album)
Grace Under Pressure is the tenth studio album by the Canadian rock band Rush, released in 1984 . A symbol for the album is the letter "p" above a line with the letter "g" below ....
. The song is particularly notable for its allusions to The Holocaust, inspired by Geddy Lee
Geddy Lee
Gary Lee Weinrib, OC, better known as Geddy Lee , is a Canadian musician, best known as the lead vocalist, bassist, and keyboardist for the Canadian rock group Rush...
's memories of his mother's stories about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle...
, where she was held prisoner.
In 1988, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
composed Different Trains
Different Trains
Different Trains is a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988. It won a Grammy Award in 1990 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.The work's three movements have the following titles:...
, a three-movement piece for string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
and tape. In the second movement, Europe — During the War, three Holocaust survivors (identified by Reich as Paul, Rachel, and Rachella) speak about their experiences in Europe during the war, including their train trips to concentration camps. The third movement, After the War, features Holocaust survivors talking about the years immediately following World War II.
In Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
's album The Wall
The Wall
The Wall is the eleventh studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd. Released as a double album on 30 November 1979, it was subsequently performed live with elaborate theatrical effects, and adapted into a feature film, Pink Floyd—The Wall.As with the band's previous three...
, one of the record's tracks is titled "Waiting for the Worms". This song is set in the middle of the time the main character, Pink, has become a neo-nazi, and the head of a fascist group. The song seems to be set in a march down a main street in Brixton, England, with Pink singing/saying the lyrics through a megaphone. One of the lyrics from the song is, "Waiting! For the final solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
to strengthen the strain!"
In 2007, composer Lior Navok composed "And The Trains Kept Coming..." (Slavery Documents no.3) for narrators, soloists, choir and orchestra, based on real documents, correspondence between the allies, train schedules and last letters. It was premiered in Boston, by the Cantata Singers
Cantata Singers and Ensemble
The Cantata Singers and Ensemble is a professional volunteer choir and professional orchestral ensemble located in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1964 to perform and preserve the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach , the group has since expanded its scope to include repertoire from the 17th...
, David Hoose, music director. http://www.liornavok.com
Dance
The subject of the Holocaust has been dealt with in modern dance. Some dances illustrate the feeling of being trapped and having nowhere to go. In 1961 Anna SokolowAnna Sokolow
Anna Sokolow was a Jewish American dancer and choreographer.-Training:...
, a Jewish-American choreographer, created her piece "Dreams". It was an attempt to deal with her night terrors. Eventually it became a memoire to the horrors of the Holocaust. In this dance, the dancers stand still, each one clasping a balled fist with the other hand, trying to pull them apart but with no success.
This same feeling of being trapped and enslaved is illustrated also in one of Pilobolus dances, "Selection". In Selection, one of the dancers approaches a dancing couple, separating them by his cane and snatching the woman away from her partner’s arms.
In Rami Be’er’s "Aide Memoire" (Hebrew title: Zichron Dvarim), he tried to illustrate the feeling of being “trapped.” The dancers move ecstatically, trapped in their personal turmoil, spinning while swinging their arms and legs, and banging on the wall; some are crucified, unable to move freely on the stage. This piece is performed by KCDC (the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company)
See also
- List of composers influenced by the Holocaust
- Nazi exploitationNazi exploitationNazi exploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves villainous Nazis committing criminal acts of a sexual nature often as camp or prison overseers in World War II settings...
- Trauma and the arts
- World War II in art and literatureWorld War II in art and literatureThere is a wide range of ways in which people have represented World War II in popular culture. Many works were created during the years of conflict and many more have arisen from that period of world history....
- Yellow StarYellow starYellow star is a term that could refer to:*A yellow star in Stellar classification*A yellow badge, a cloth patch that Jews were ordered to wear on their clothes*Any plant of Hypoxis genus in the Hypoxidaceae family...
- Holocaust denialHolocaust denialHolocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
External links
From Holocaust Survivors And Remembrance Project—iSurvived.org:
- Inmate Art from Concentration Camps and Gettos: Expressing the Inexpressible
- Contemporary Art About and in Response to the Holocaust
- Holocaust Literature
- Music of the Holocaust--A Remembering for the Future
- Heartstrings: Music of the Holocaust an online exhibition by Yad VashemYad VashemYad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
- Music of the Holocaust, Teacher's Guide
- Music of the Holocaust, CSUS
- Art and the Holocaust from University of Pennsylvania
- Unspeakable - The artist as witness to the Holocaust. Imperial War MuseumImperial War MuseumImperial War Museum is a British national museum organisation with branches at five locations in England, three of which are in London. The museum was founded during the First World War in 1917 and intended as a record of the war effort and sacrifice of Britain and her Empire...
exhibition - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Music of the Holocaust and Poetry and the Holocaust
- Essay on the history of Holocaust cinema
DEFA Film Library Massachusetts
- http://www.umass.edu/defa/ Jacob The Liar