Memories of Resistance and The Holocaust On Film 1St Ed Edition Mercedes Camino Full Chapter
Memories of Resistance and The Holocaust On Film 1St Ed Edition Mercedes Camino Full Chapter
Memories of
Resistance and the
Holocaust on Film
Mercedes Camino
Department of History
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Introduction 1
vii
viii CONTENTS
Filmography 243
Index 249
List of Figures
ix
x LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 5.1 Roman Polanski, The Pianist (2002). Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas
Kretschmann) is framed by a window which lights him up and
offers him a hallowed space to walk away 162
Fig. 5.2 Roman Polanski, The Pianist (2002). The Eucharistic bread and
jam that Hosenfeld offers to Szpilman is lit with a shaft of light 163
Fig. 6.1 Stephen Spielberg, Schindler’s List (1997). Schindler (Liam
Neeson) watches the destruction of Płaszów’s ghetto from his
horse181
Fig. 7.1 Alexander ‘Sasha’ Pechersky (Rutger Hauer). Jack Gold, Escape
from Sobibor (1987) 205
Fig. 7.2 Alexander Pechersky. Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem.
4216/2206
Fig. 7.3 Mordechai Anielewitz. Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem.
5322213
Fig. 7.4 Edward Zwick, Defiance (2008). The flight of the Bielski
partisans reminiscent of Moses’ exodus from Egypt across the
Black Sea to reach Sinai 221
Fig. 7.5 Edward Zwick, Defiance (2008). Biblical imagery of Jews in
flight is associated with renewal and a new baptism 221
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The Hollywood Academy and the Cannes Film Festival do not normally
converge in their understanding of cinema and very seldom coincide in
their awards. Films that gain Oscars from the Academy tend to be enter-
taining, reward the protagonist’s individual endeavour and adhere to the
traditional three-act narrative, often with a happy ending. By contrast, one
unstated prerequisite of films put forward for competition in Cannes is
originality, in either theme or style, or both.1 It thus came as a surprise to
see Cannes and the Academy concur in their praise of László Nemes’ opera
prima, Son of Saul (Saul fia, 2015), which was awarded the Cannes’ Grand
Prix in 2015 and an Oscar for one of the Academy’s most competitive
categories, Film in a Foreign Language, in 2016. Even more remarkable
was to hear Claude Lanzmann’s unambiguous praise of the film, which
was as notable as it was rare. Lanzmann believes that Nemes’ articulation
of fiction and reality conveys effectively that the Holocaust will always
remain beyond the realm of representation.2 This premise infused the pro-
duction of his nine-and-a-half-hour documentary, Shoah, first released in
1985 and celebrated thereafter as a landmark in filmmaking and in
Holocaust studies. Although belonging to different genres, Son of Saul
and Shoah focus on the Sonderkommando, a category referred to by
the dead, starved, enslaved and routinely beaten up until they became
despondent and lifeless Muselmänner, having given up on life, at which
point they were murdered and replaced. A few Sonderkommandos, however,
did survive, and their memoirs were determinant in the re-definition of
Holocaust survivor from the 1970s onwards, as will be seen in Chap. 5
of this book, ‘Holocaust Testimony: Survivors, Ghosts and Revenants
(1947–2002)’.
Primo Levi presents the Sonderkommandos as the paradigmatic example
of the moral conundrum, which he describes as the Holocaust’s ‘grey
zone’, and as embodiments of ‘National Socialism’s most demonic crime’.
Soon after his release from Auschwitz, Levi dedicated a chapter of his first
book, Se questo è un uomo (If this is a Man), to the shock and degradation
that awaited all internees when they received their first blows from other
prisoners.5 The role assigned to Sonderkommandos, Levi argues, provides
the best illustration of the Nazi ‘paroxysm of perfidiousness and hatred’
that designed a camp system in which ‘it must be the Jews who put Jews
into the ovens, it must be shown that the Jews, the sub-race, the sub-men,
bow to any and all humiliation, even to destroying themselves’. In this
way, the German lowered the status of their victims, making them forcibly
into perpetrators and robbing them of any trace of human dignity. This
vision, in turn, created a circular logic in which the subhuman Jews became
suitable for extermination. Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved,
expands on this analysis of the successful attempt ‘to shift onto others—
specifically the victims—the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of
even the solace of innocence’.6
The likes of Elie Wiesel, Levi, or Sonderkommandos Philip Müller,
Abraham Bomba or Rudolf Vrba, wrote or gave interviews about their
experiences, foregrounding paradoxes inherent in Holocaust survival.
Contemporaries, however, often classed Sonderkommandos as Jewish collab-
orators, as they did with the Jewish Councils or Jewish Police in ghettos, all
of whom had a visible role in repression and in putting into effect the Final
Solution to the Jewish Problem. The contradictions inherent in their survival
started to become known with a renewed interest in books such as Wiesel’s
Night or Levi’s If This is a Man, which did not meet immediate success on
their release in the 1940s and 1950s. Finished before the end of 1946, Levi’s
manuscript was initially rejected and then had 2000 copies printed by Franco
Antonicelli the same year. This first edition only sold 1500 copies, in spite
of receiving a positive review by Italo Calvino in the publication of
the Italian Communist Party, L’Unità.7 It was reprinted in 1958 by the
4 M. CAMINO
Turin editor Giulio Einaudi, and has remained a bestseller ever since. An
even more protracted process was followed by Wiesel’s Night, which saw the
light in 1958 as a reduced summary of an earlier 800-page manuscript, Un
di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), written in Yiddish and
published in Argentina in 1956. It was reprinted in Paris in 1960 and later
on in the same year in New York, where it only sold around 1000 copies in
three years. Wiesel, who remained a human rights campaigner throughout
this life, would go on to publish more than fifty books, receiving the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1986. Night remains his most widely read work and has been
widely translated.
Unrecognized and unrecognizable, Holocaust survivors were beset by
contradictions and found it difficult to adjust to life in the liberation’s after-
math. Some, as Levi’s friend, Lorenzo Perrone, on whose generosity Levi
depended for his survival in Auschwitz, descended into alcoholism, which
led to his early death in 1952. Levi himself is thought to have committed
suicide in 1987, while other survivors resumed their lives in countries
other than their own.8 European Jews tried to put the past behind them
but many returned to it to give testimony about their life experiences
decades later. Lanzmann’s documentary, Shoah, famously broke some
silences by interviewing Szymon Srebrnik, Bomba, Vrba and Müller,
cementing Raul Hilberg’s classification of Shoah protagonists into three
segregated categories: victims, perpetrators and bystanders.9 Lanzmann
classed Sonderkommandos unambiguously as victims whose moral choices
were close to zero and Nazi commanders as perpetrators. Controversially,
Lanzmann castigated Polish bystanders, who bore the brunt of his accusa-
tions of antisemitism both during the war and at the time of making his docu-
mentary. These debates about Polish antisemitism will be referred to elsewhere
in this book, including the reception of Edward Zwick’s film, Defiance (2008),
in Poland, charted in Chap. 7, The Jewish Resister (1987–2015).
Nemes’ focus on a Sonderkommando in the context of a frustrated
attempt to escape Auschwitz is not completely innovative. An earlier
twenty-first-century film, Nelson’s The Grey Zone, which borrows its title
from Levi, also deals with Hungarian Jewish members of the
Sonderkommando. Nelson’s film is based on the memoirs written by one of
those assessed by Levi as belonging in ‘the grey zone’, the Hungarian doc-
tor, Miklós Nyiszli (Allan Corduner), who assisted Joseph Mengele with his
experiments.10 As in the book, in Nelson’s film, a girl (Kamelia Grigorova)
miraculously survives the gas chamber, perhaps thanks to a pocket of air
held between the remaining victims. Nyiszli manages to resuscitate her and
INTRODUCTION 5
World War. Among the myriad films that treat the plight of civilians in
occupied Europe, this book establishes a thematic division that corre-
sponds to chronologies of the conflict’s memorialization, highlighting the
intersecting vectors of time and space described by Mijhail Bakhtin as chro-
notopes. Although these trends neither arise ex nihilo nor disappear with-
out a trace, this investigation reveals cinematic representations of resistance
and the Holocaust that are demarcated by the ‘intrinsic connectedness of
temporal and spatial relationships’, or chronotopes.14 The result is a geo-
political alignment that embeds historical and social co-ordinates, while
displaying artistic movements and taking into consideration technological
developments. These parameters radiate from the geographical and politi-
cal centres of the conflict, France, the USSR and Poland, extending pri-
marily to the main allies in the conflict, the USA and the UK, as well as
other occupied countries, especially, but not only, those that were eventu-
ally situated beyond the Iron Curtain. Germany, as the aggressor, did not
experience occupation and is therefore largely be excluded from my inves-
tigation, although consideration is given to the alternative stages of
memorialization that took place in East Germany. By contrast with West
Germany (FRD), the Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) con-
structed a peculiar memory of the war visible in films that address the
Holocaust in unusual ways, as will be seen in Chap. 5, which focuses on
Jewish testimony. West Germany, as the direct heir to the Nazi regime,
underwent an initially denazification process that entailed minimizing the
breadth and depth of Nazism and its appeal, as well as highlighting its own
victims and the putative honour of its army, the Wehrmacht.
This book treats films as historical sources in order not to elucidate
details about events but to showcase ideas and attitudes about them. These
films complement and are complemented by other sources, especially let-
ters, photographs, memoirs and court testimonies, in unique and impor-
tant ways. Films dealing with WWII and the Holocaust are highly
dependent on the role played by photography during the conflict.
Photojournalists became increasingly important from the 1930s, and pho-
tographs of the era have become iconic in a phenomenon described by
Marianne Hirsch as ‘post-memory’ and by Alyson Landsberg as ‘pros-
thetic memory’.15 As with photographs, films establish an intimate
relationship with viewers, which is only in part individual, as it is bound
by parameters demarcated by the filmmakers. Films and photographs
use light, lines, focus, vanishing points and other techniques, many
of which were initially borrowed from painting, to direct viewers to
INTRODUCTION 7
and espousing ideas that would inspire them to work, fight and die for a
cause. With the war nearing its end, films began to construct narratives
that could facilitate social reconstruction.
The films looked at in this book focus on civilian resistance and the
destruction of European Jewry, two events that are distinctive but inextri-
cably intertwined. Although all chapters include more than one nation,
the book’s thematic division creates clusters around particular chrono-
topes, including the camp, the forest, the sewer, the ghetto, the train, the
mountain and the bar or cafe. My analyses deal with productions from
complex cinematic traditions, the most prominent of which are those of
France and the USSR, though the study includes films from Yugoslavia,
Great Britain, the USA and Poland, as well as some contributions from the
GDR, Italy, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The thematic division within
time-space co-ordinates means that the treatment of some national or
transnational cinematic traditions may be perfunctory, as well as the omis-
sion of some productions. Films dealing with strictly military aspects of
the war are largely excluded from my investigation, though the line demar-
cating the genre is imprecise, and some are mentioned in relation with
secret agents, POWs and escapees.
The selection of films in this book is informed by a preference for rep-
resentative or salient productions that have influenced the genre or are
better known. A criterion used is the consideration of a film as ‘founda-
tional’, in the sense that they introduce or summarize aspects that become
recurrent in one way or another in other films. Lastly, this book takes into
consideration accessibility either online, in DVDs or archives, selecting
accessible productions when more than one might serve similar purposes.
While some films studied here will be familiar to readers, the analyses do
not take for granted prior knowledge. Consequently, historical and cine-
matic contexts are spelled out, and events in the films will be outlined
when necessary for their analysis.
The main concepts underlying this study, resistance, collaboration and
Holocaust, are subject to substantial debate, and boundaries about their
significance need to be established. For the purposes of this book, resis-
tance is treated from the perspective of the occupiers, who cast a wide net
and used collective responsibility to prevent all forms of opposition. In
other words, the lines that separate passive from active resistance or defi-
ance from non-compliance or disobedience are drawn in relation to par-
ticular contexts. For example, praying in a ghetto or giving a piece of
bread to passing POWs can be classed as acts of disobedience in countries
INTRODUCTION 9
on the Western Front, while they risked an individual’s life, as well as that
of their family or even an entire village in the East. Acts of sabotage, print-
ing illegal press or murder of collaborators can be rightly considered resis-
tance in places like Denmark or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
while minor acts of solidarity would be just as dangerous in Poland or the
USSR. While this in no way lowers the value of acts such as the rescue of
Danish Jews, which will be outlined in Chap. 7, it raises the bar of deeds
that could be classed as symbolic when they took place in Eastern Europe
or the Balkans.
The stereotypical resister in a World War II film conjures up the image
of a French young man wearing a beret and wiring rail tracks while a train
approaches. Sabotage, that is, was established in the war’s early aftermath
as the more cinematic form of resistance, although it was by no means the
most effective. This book takes an eclectic view of resistance that includes
the rescue of Jews as one of the most important actions since it under-
mined the core ideological tenet of Nazi racial hegemony. Indeed, a focus
on Nazi thought makes some actions more subversive and long lasting,
even if not as explosive, in every sense of the term, as blowing up a train.
Minor protests or acts of disobedience in the Reich itself, such as the
White Rose, Rosenstrasse, or the belated July plot of 1944, are beyond the
scope of an investigation of events taking place in the occupied areas of
Europe. This exclusion also applies to any real or imagined protests in
Austria, regardless of whether these were religious or nationalist. However,
Italy, which abandoned the Axis in 1943, is treated in Chap. 2, The
Civilian Resister (1942–69), as it provides the most significant example of
the transformation of anti-fascists into active resisters and of civilians sup-
porting their struggle. Those exceptions notwithstanding, the chapters in
this book engage with multifarious forms of resistance, as well as the
parameters that define them.
Jewish survivors, witnesses and resisters are also classed in this book
in accordance to the criteria followed by the Nazis and their collabora-
tors. In other words, I treat this conflict’s unwilling protagonists in
keeping with the designation of those who created it, the Nazi ideo-
logues such as Alfred Rosenberg, through the reification of racial
supremacy that had Aryans at the pinnacle of a civilization whose nadir
were Jews, Slavs and Africans, probably in that order. This Nazi dogma
formed the basis from which military and paramilitary forces developed
before and during the war, providing a justification for the occupation
of Europe and a self-serving rationale for the staggering destruction
10 M. CAMINO
that followed. From this perspective, any form of resistance that would
present a challenge to that hierarchical order would be treated as criminal,
with the division between passive or active resistance becoming
academic.
Anti-Nazi resistance took place in the context of a pan-European con-
flict, which was triggered by Nazi Germany and eventually split countries
along socio-political lines, evolving into fully fledged civil wars in places
such as Yugoslavia or Greece and, to a lesser extent, Italy or France.
European governments fell into line with Nazi demands in quick succes-
sion, introducing antisemitic measures of their own, even when excusing
or disguising them as anti-communist or, in the idiom of the era, anti-
Bolshevik. In sum, resistance in occupied Europe was defined by the Nazis
as a seamless transition between barbarism, partisanship and Jewishness,
terms that often became interchangeable and that will be treated as coter-
minous in this book. This study thus situates the Holocaust within a Nazi
worldview that made communism, socialism and Jewishness often synony-
mous and where Slavic peoples, ranked just above Jews in the subhuman
scale, were earmarked for decimation and slavery. While the genocide of
European Jewry became the central Nazi pillar, and the only war that
Germany won, their credo subjugated and murdered millions elsewhere
especially, but not only, in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In addition,
millions of civilians were dispossessed of their homes and displaced from
them if they happened to inhabit land earmarked as German Lebensraum,
as in the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, Poland or Ukraine.
In this environment, many Jews, both religious and secular, took part
in myriad resistance activities that even reached concentration and death
camps, as mentioned above in relation to Son of Saul. In Eastern and
Western Europe, Zionist, non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews not only took
part in the struggle to save their families or their communities, but were
also present in all resistance movements, especially those to the left of the
political spectrum. The Jewish contribution to anti-fascist movements
was not simply a response to the Nazi ultra-nationalist focus on Jews as
enemies of the German motherland. It also resulted from their active
involvement in the social and political fabric of various countries,
especially in the USSR, Poland and France. Various forms of Jewish
resistance are shown in films in which Jews appear initially as innocent
victims and, subsequently, as survivors, active partisans or even corrupt
leaders of Jewish Councils (the Judenrat), as in Roman Polanski’s The
Pianist (2002). Regardless of these differences, a large proportion of films
INTRODUCTION 11
tragic or hubristic and does not necessarily lead to their downfall. Their
destinies, however, are linked to their willingness to take the moral high
ground against the establishment during the years of Appeasement.
Presciently, these men had foreseen the evils of fascism well before
Appeasement had proved to be an inadequate tool against Hitler’s expan-
sionism. In doing so, these films offer a redemptive narrative that counters
the political unwillingness to oppose Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. The
pedigree of these cinematic heroes, in other words, is attested to by the
manner in which they had forged their credentials.
Anti-fascists or ‘discreet heroes’ started to appear in films in 1942, ini-
tially devised by European filmmakers in an effort to counter the isolationist
stance embraced by the USA. In their crudest form, these productions,
which were made during the war, projected the multi-sided conflict of
occupied Europe in Manichaean terms. This happens in, for example, Sam
Wood’s block-buster For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942), Michael Curtiz’
Mission to Moscow (1943), Gregory Ratoff and László Benedek’s Song of
Russia (1944) and the little-known Man from Morocco (1945), directed by
exile Mutz Greenbaum (known as Max Greene). More sophisticated and
long lasting are the two films at the centre of the first section of Chap. 2,
Curtiz’ Casablanca (1942) and Rossellini’s landmark, Rome, Open City
(henceforth, Rome).
The 1940s anti-fascist heroes had a natural heir in resisters that appeared
in films in the 1950s and 1960s, which are looked at in the second section
of Chap. 2, Monuments and Martyrs. This segment studies the consecra-
tion of ‘resister films’ soon after the war, which project the transformation
of innocent civilians into active saboteurs during the conflict. These men,
and the women who accompany them, are presented with a situation in
which not to resist might be tantamount to collaborating, and it is the situ-
ation, and not their prior beliefs, that makes them active resisters. Thus, if
cinematic anti-fascists of the 1940s had been formed and tested in the
1930s, in the next two decades, they are shown to be dynamic and deter-
mined in response to situations beyond their control, joining underground
movements as a response to the occupation or because of the policies of
the occupiers. Interestingly, the change in direction of the war in 1942–43,
which affected the recruitment of resisters everywhere in Europe, does not
figure as a cinematic cause, partly to avoid suggesting that resistance was
opportunistic. These films, moreover, were conceived as a means to memo-
rialize the conflict, showcasing people’s ingenuity and solidarity in the face
of German occupation. For reasons to be investigated in this chapter, this
INTRODUCTION 15
beliefs. For others, on the contrary, this was the crucial event of moder-
nity, which culminated the assumptions of the so-called age of reason.
This point of view was first championed in Theodor W. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944) and expounded
thereafter by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), as
well as Giorgio Agamben’s Remants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the
Archive (2002) and State of Exception (2005).33
Eichmann’s trial also became a catalyst for literary and visual testimo-
nies of Holocaust survivors, contributing to increasing engagements in
witnessing and memorializing their plight. Chapter 5, Holocaust
Testimony: Survivors, Ghosts and Revenants (1947–2002), focuses on the
way in which cinema became ‘testimonial’, with films using actual mem-
oirs of survivors and stimulating them.34 Although referents to the murder
of European Jews had appeared in films produced after the war in Eastern
Europe, representations of Jewish witnessing came of age in the late
1970s. This shift followed the renewed interest in the topic spurred by the
screening in the USA of Marvin J. Chomsky’s television series Holocaust
(1978), which traced the stories of a German and a Jewish family from the
rise of Nazism through World War II. Chapter 5 situates the stories of
Holocaust witnesses as fragments of a ‘sentient history’ that is only acces-
sible through creative and visual sources. In other words, films about
Holocaust witnessing not only occupy an important position in Holocaust
memorialization, but are also a means to introduce the topic and to reach
wider audiences. They also project an alternative way of approaching this
past, enabling the transference of witnessing from the source to the desti-
nation. The creation of this vicarious observer is, however, not without
contradictions and is opposed by those who, like Lanzmann, believe that
the Holocaust can only be represented in its absence, as will be seen in
Chap. 5.
Productions dealing with survivors provide glimpses of hope in what
were dire and hopeless historical situations. Even if this hope is fabricated,
its re-enactment establishes a link between the past and the present.
Throughout these films, and the narratives that inspired them, the past is
brought effectively into the present, preventing distance and oblivion,
and precluding the sense of historical closure that 1945 demarcated. This
hope can either facilitate or obstruct mourning, providing a salutary form
of working through trauma but also deleting the fact that the ‘real wit-
nesses of the Holocaust’, those who, in Levi’s terms, ‘saw the Gorgon’,
did not survive or were muted.
20 M. CAMINO
films from the 1980s and 1990s. This is a time when the narrative of
national and widespread resistentialism that had inspired post-war recon-
struction had been broadly, if not universally, challenged. It is also when
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to the public,
and Holocaust survivors increasingly talked and wrote about their lives.
Since then, and following the success of Spielberg’s film, other rescuers
have been given full cinematic treatment, including Polish righteous Irena
Sendler (Anna Paquin) in John Kent Harrison’s The Courageous Heart of
Irena Sendler (2009) and Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) in
Agnieska Holland’s In Darkness (W ciemności, 2011).
The increasing number of ‘rescue’ films was contemporaneous with the
wish to bring to light the lives and deeds of Jews who took an active stance
to counter the situation in which they had found themselves. The end of
the Cold War brought to light the lives and deeds of Jews who had taken
part in communist or socialist resistance, with an added focus on Zionists.
Chapter 7, The Jewish Resister (1987–2015), deals with these men and
women in films which started to appear in the 1980s. Jack Gold’s televi-
sion docudrama, Escape from Sobibor (1987), about the uprising in the
camp, stands at the crossroads of changes arising from the weakening and
dissolution of the USSR, and the presence of Red Army inmates in the
film attests to this liminal moment. Jewish resistance has received greater
coverage in the twenty-first century, although it still comes as a surprise to
learn that most ghettos and camps witnessed rebellions and even mutinies.
These historical events started to become popular history at the time that
Gold’s film was released, which coincided with Nechama Tec’s publication
on the Bielski partisans in Soviet Belarus, which Edward Zwick adapted in
Defiance (2008).38 Chapter 7 investigates these productions, as well as Jon
Avnet’s television film about the last months of the Warsaw Ghetto,
Uprising (2001), in the context of their increased prominence in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. Productions about Jewish resistance are
largely based on historical events, even when they take some liberties with
them. More fictional, however, are what Daniel H. Magilow labels ‘Jewish
Revenge Fantasies’, the most prominent of which is Quentin Tarantino’s
Inglourious Basterds (2009).39
Also about Jewish revenge, but using resistance and the Holocaust as
ingredients, is Verhoeven’s Black Book (2008), to be studied in this book’s
Conclusion. Verhoeven’s Black Book offers a summative potpourri that
concurs with the deployment of or challenge to resistentialist chrono-
topes in some twenty-first-century productions from Norway and
24 M. CAMINO
Notes
1. On the Festival of Cannes’ website, the organizers list the requirements for
the presentation of films. The first refers to its main objective in terms of
‘quality’, ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ as follows: ‘Its aim is to reveal and
focus attention on works of quality in order to contribute to the evolution
INTRODUCTION 25
of motion picture arts and encourage the development of the film industry
throughout the world’ (http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/participer/
rules?id=2).
2. See Jordan Cronk, ‘“Shoah” Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann Talks Spielberg,
“Son of Saul”’, Hollywood Reporter, 5 February 2016 (http://www.hol-
lywoodrepor ter.com/news/shoah-filmmaker-claude-lanzmann-
talks-869931).
3. Ed Vulliamy, ‘Claude Lanzmann: the Man who Stood Witness for the
World’, Observer, 4 March 2102 (https://www.theguardian.com/
film/2012/mar/04/claude-lanzmann-memoir-shoah-interview).
4. These figures take into account the 1941 borders, which included seg-
ments from Romania and Czechoslovakia that Hungary had ‘lost’ in the
Trianon Treaty after WWI. Within the pre-war borders, the death toll was
nearly ninety per cent. Both figures include around 63,000 who died as a
result of massacres or malnutrition prior to the armistice.
5. Levi, Chapter 9: The Drowned and the Saved, in If This is a Man and The
Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 2013), pp. 93–106.
6. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (New
York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 37, 35, 53.
7. Italo Calvino, ‘Un libro sui campi della morte. Se questo è un uomo’.
L’Unità, 6 May 1948; reprinted in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica,
ed. by Ernesto Ferrero (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 306–7.
8. Levi’s death, caused by a fall from a third-floor apartment, was ruled sui-
cide, though the possibility of accidental death cannot be disregarded.
9. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–
1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). I explain in more detail Hilberg’s
approach in Chap. 6: Righteous Gentiles (1987–2011).
10. Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (London: Penguin,
2012).
11. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 63–64.
12. Jozef Warszawski, whose real name was Josef Dorebus, had arrived in
Auschwitz from the French camp of Drancy. The men who managed to
escape crossed the Vistula River, before hiding in an empty building in
which they were tracked down by SS, who killed them and brought their
bodies back to be displayed in the camp. See Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz
(Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1999), pp. 159–60 for this uprising and Chap. 5, The
Inferno (esp. pp. 120–60) for the organization of the resistance, the chal-
lenges that they faced and the role of Soviet POWs.
13. Four women, led by Róża Robota, smuggled small portions of gunpowder
daily to the camp resistance. The women were subsequently tortured and
hanged on 6 January 1945.
26 M. CAMINO
14. See ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a
Historical Poetics’, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University Texas
Press, 1981), pp. 84–258 (p. 84).
15. Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012) and The Generation
of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012); Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The
Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
16. On the importance of cinema prior to World War II, see Jeffrey Richards,
The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London:
IB Tauris, 1987).
17. Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1968).
18. The speech was delivered during the 20th Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956 behind closed doors.
Although the essence of the speech was widely discussed thereafter, it was
only published in full in 1989.
19. Michael R.D. Foot estimates around one 3200 women of a total of 13,000
agents. See SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 (Evesham:
Greenwood, 1984), p. 62.
20. The Greek and Albanian partisans were equally important. However, in the
case of Greece, the Second World War was soon followed by a bitter civil
war. The conflict lasted until 1949, when the communist-led Democratic
Army of Greece was defeated by the governmental forces supported by the
UK. On this topic, see John L. Hondros, ‘Greece and the German
Occupation’, The Greek Civil War 1943–50, ed. by David Close (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 32–57; and Mark Mazower, Inside
Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (Baltimore: Yale
University Press, 1993).
21. My study has benefited from Jurica Pavičić’s knowledge of Partisan Films,
and I wish to thank Pavičić for sending me a copy of ‘Titoist Cathedrals:
Rise and Fall of the Partisan Film’ before its publication in Titoism, Self-
Determination, Nationalism, Cultural Memory, Volume Two of Tito’s
Yugoslavia, Stories Untold, ed. by Gorana Ognjenović and Jasna Jozelić
(London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 37–65.
22. Rousso uses the neologism ‘résistancialisme’ to denote the mythology of
resistance in The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944,
trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1994).
23. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
INTRODUCTION 27
Auschwitz with her two children, Sophie is given the choice to which the
title alludes between her two children, one of whom is to die and the other
to survive.
37. Police Battalions were also involved in massacres directly, as investigated by
Christopher Browning’s now classic, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police
Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1993). Direct involvement of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht
has been amply documented. See, for example, Richard J. Evans, The Third
Reich at War (London: Allen Lane, 2008), pp. 58–60 and passim. Omer
Bartov has charted the transformation of the Wehrmacht into a victim of
the war by German historians in the 1980s, arguing against ‘the bizarre
inversion of the Wehrmacht’s roles proposed by all three exponents of the
new revisionism, whereby overtly or by implication the Army is trans-
formed from culprit to saviour, from an object of hatred and fear to one of
empathy and pity, from victimizer to victim’. See Bartov, ‘Soldiers, Nazis
and War in the Third Reich’, ed. by Christian Leitz, The Third Reich: The
Essential Readings (London: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 129–150 (p. 148).
Bartov pays special attention to the vindication of German soldiers in cin-
ema in ‘Celluloid Soldiers: Cinematic Images of the Wehrmacht’, in Russia:
War, Peace and Diplomacy: Essays in Honour of John Erikson, ed. by Ljubica
Erikson and Mark Erickson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004),
pp. 130–143.
38. Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993).
39. Magilov, ‘Jewish Revenge Fantasies in Contemporary Film’, in Jewish
Cultural Aspirations, ed. by Bruce Zuckerman, Ruth Weisberg and Lisa
Ansell (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), pp. 89–109.
CHAPTER 2
The Second World War witnessed the rise and fall of a new type of cine-
matic hero whose historical referent was the ‘anti-fascist’ militant of the
previous decade. By the war’s end, these ‘Good Russians’ had largely been
complemented or replaced by civilians who become committed resisters
during the conflict. This transition can be seen in films such as Roberto
Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945), which casts both
sets of characters at the same time. As will be explored in this chapter,
Rossellini’s film exemplifies the difficulties of synthesizing Italy’s unique
role in the war, as aggressor, perpetrator, victim and resister. Elsewhere,
the transition is closely linked to the substantial role played by the USSR
in the war and its aftermath. Whereas the alliance with the USSR gave way
to a temporary vindication of 1930s socialists and communists, this per-
spective largely disappeared with the onset of the Cold War. For reasons to
be explored in Chap. 3, The Partisan (1943–74), this paradigm continued
unexpectedly in the only communist country that broke up from the
Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia, while other nations of the so-called Warsaw Pact
projected idiosyncratic views of their role in the conflict in spite of the
strict Soviet censorship.
The invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa on 22 June
1941 and the bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7 December of the same year
made Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt unlikely
allies for the following four years. This historical conundrum led to the
release of films promoting the political underpinnings of 1930s Popular
fascist Italy and Nazi Germany with the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the
Spanish Civil War from 1936 and the German annexation of Austria and
the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland in 1938. This expansionism was met
with Non-Intervention or Appeasement by the main powers of the time,
France, Great Britain and the USA. These policies ended with the invasion
of Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering the declaration of war by
France and Great Britain two days later. The rapid German advance in the
following spring announced the shift to total war, with France and, espe-
cially, Great Britain turning to the USA as a potential source for military
help or, better, direct intervention in the conflict. Efforts to counter the
isolationist position that the USA had embraced since World War I took
many forms, and cinema led a relentless crusade for increasing support and
involvement. As Todd Bennett’s analysis of ‘The Celluloid War’ demon-
strates, the fight against isolationism ‘was configured by the state as well as
by the studio’.6 This campaign informed the production of films repre-
senting the daily struggle and ‘moral fibre’ of ordinary British civilians to
American audiences, thereby minimizing or erasing class differences in the
process. A good example of this type of film is William Wyler’s Mrs Miniver
(1942), which Churchill suggested to be ‘worth four divisions for what it
did to influence American opinion’.7 Other cinematic productions con-
tributed to that trend through their retroactive presentation of the fight of
the communist-led International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War
(1936–39) as fundamentally heroic and selfless.
Overtly or covertly propagandistic, 1940s films that cast International
Brigades make them simply ‘anti-fascist,’ and this vision was prevalent
while the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill alliance lasted. These films belatedly
endorse the Popular Front coalitions of communists, socialists and other
left-wing parties in 1930s Europe, which were successful in France and
Spain, winning elections in February and May of 1936 respectively.8 These
alliances would play an important role in the internationalization of the
Spanish Civil War through the recruitment of International Brigades,
which comprised volunteers from more than fifty different countries. The
central organization of the approximately 35,000 brigades was carried out
by card-carrying communists, who also made up the majority of volun-
teers. The brigades were not, however, the only international supporters
of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39), which was also endorsed by
fund-raising in grass-roots organizations, as well as a good number of art-
ists and intellectuals. In addition, anti-Stalinist communists or other leftist
individuals fought with Trotskyist or anarchist militia. The commitment of
34 M. CAMINO
these volunteers and supporters was infused by their political outlook and
the wish to counter the substantive backing given to the nationalist rebels
by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Although the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Italian invasion
of Abyssinia are events leading to the Second World War, the Spanish Civil
War provided the rallying point against Appeasement for left-wing
Europeans.9 The impact and long-lasting impression of the war can be
seen in artworks, books and films that were released in the 1930s and early
1940s. Some of these works were produced during the conflict, and the
most prominent of them was Pablo Picasso’s Guernika (1937), a harrow-
ing protest of the blitzkrieg of the Basque town by the German Condor
Legion of the Luftwaffe. Intellectuals, writers, photographers and war
correspondents also contributed to the popularity of the conflict. Among
them, writers Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Lillian
Hellman, André Malraux, Martha Gellhorn and Ilya Ehrenburg, photog-
raphers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David ‘Chim’ Seymour and film-
makers, such as Joris Ivens, amply documented the fight from the point of
view of the republicans.
From the ‘anti-fascist’ perspective of the 1940s, the Spanish Civil War
was a dress rehearsal for the greater conflict and the International Brigades
were honourable fighters for the right cause at the wrong time. The 1940s
films that showcase these men thus championed a cause that had been
largely repudiated during the Appeasement era and that would be subse-
quently disowned. A successful rendition of this point of view is Sam
Wood’s adaptation of Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942),
which became the top box-office hit in the USA on its release. With the
onset of the Cold War, real or imagined communists, including veterans
from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the USA, became outcasts of the
infamous witch hunts led by Joseph McCarthy and the House of
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).10 The ‘Red Scare’ that was
contemporary with the HUAC led to the blacklisting of Hollywood pro-
ducers, directors and scriptwriters, making some of those involved in the
aforementioned films immediately suspect.
Wood’s adaptation of Hemingway’s famous For Whom the Bell Tolls
casts Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan, supposedly an International
Brigade willing to sacrifice himself for the Republic’s ‘little people’ (both
literally and metaphorically). Although the film was very popular, it did
little to illuminate the Spanish war or the fight of the Brigades. In fact,
Wood’s adventure film distances the events from the ideological struggle
THE CIVILIAN RESISTER (1942–69) 35
Since the end of the First World War in 1918, American politicians had
favoured an isolationist role in world affairs. Dubbed ‘a day that shall live in
infamy’ by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 7 December convinced many
ordinary Americans that Germany and Japan threatened not just American
interests but world peace, and that their territorial expansion had to be
stopped.12
The alliance between Great Britain, the USA and the USSR, which
many would have thought impossible a few years earlier, lasted while they
shared the same enemy, and hostilities resumed with the onset on the
Cold War. Until then, however, cinematic productions showcased sympa-
thetic portrayals of ‘Good Russians’ and good communists. This interim
would start to be phased out towards the end of the conflict, and Good
Germans would replace Good Russians when West Germany and some of
its allies became close partners in the fight against communism. Cinematic
anti-fascists ‘survived’ in productions from the Eastern Bloc, noticeably in
Partisan Films made in Yugoslavia, as will be seen in Chap. 3 of this book.
A good number of anti-fascist characters from 1940s films are shown to
have supported republican loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, which devel-
oped as a result of the failure of the coup led by General Francisco Franco
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“May eighth. This morning I reached the Cooper’s Creek depot
and found no sign of Mr. Burke’s having visited the creek, or the
natives having disturbed the stores.”
Only a few miles away the creek ran out into channels of dry
sand where Burke, Wills and King were starving, ragged beggars fed
by the charitable black fellows on fish and a seed called nardoo, of
which they made their bread. There were nice fat rats also, delicious
baked in their skins, and the natives brought them fire-wood for the
camp.
Again they attempted to reach the Mounted Police outpost, but
the camels died, the water failed, and they starved. Burke sent Wills
back to Cooper’s Creek. “No trace,” wrote Wills in his journal, “of any
one except the blacks having been here since we left.” Brahe and
Wright had left no stores at the camp ground.
Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have told Wills of
help within his reach, the fish hooks would have won them food in
plenty. It is curious, too, that Burke died after a meal of crow and
nardoo, there being neither sugar nor fat in these foods, without
which they can not sustain a man’s life. Then King left Burke’s body,
shot three crows and brought them to Wills, who was lying dead in
camp. Three months afterward a relief party found King living among
the natives “wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a
civilized being but by the remnants of the clothes upon him.”
“They should not have gone,” said one pioneer of these lost
explorers. “They weren’t bushmen.” Afterward a Mr. Collis and his
wife lived four years in plenty upon the game and fish at the
Innaminka water-hole where poor Burke died of hunger.
Such were the first crossings from east to west, and from south
to north of the Australian continent.
XVIII
A. D. 1867
THE HERO-STATESMAN
THERE is no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the
hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored
fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman,
having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out of
chaos?
This Spanish-red Indian half-breed began work at the age of
seven as errand boy in a shop. At fourteen he was earning his living
as a private tutor while he worked through college for the priesthood.
At seventeen he was a soldier in the local militia and saw his country
overthrown by the United States, which seized three-fourths of all
her territories. At the age of twenty-one, Professor Diaz, in the chair
of Roman law at Oaxaca, was working double tides as a lawyer’s
clerk.
In the Mexican “republic” it is a very serious offense to vote for
the Party-out-of-office, and the only way to support the opposition is
to get out with a rifle and fight. So when Professor Diaz voted at the
next general election he had to fly for his life. After several months of
hard fighting he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a
village.
The villagers were naked Indians, and found their new mayor an
unexpected terror. He drilled them into soldiers, marched them to his
native city Oaxaca, captured the place by assault, drove out a local
usurper who was making things too hot for the citizens, and then
amid the wild rejoicings that followed, was promoted to a captaincy
in the national guards.
Captain Diaz explained to his national guards that they were fine
men, but needed a little tactical exercise. So he took them out for a
gentle course of maneuvers, to try their teeth on a rebellion which
happened to be camped conveniently in the neighborhood. When he
had finished exercising his men, there was no rebellion left, so he
marched them home. He had to come home because he was
dangerously wounded.
It must be explained that there were two big political parties, the
clericals, and the liberals—both pledged to steal everything in sight.
Diaz was scarcely healed of his wound, when a clerical excursion
came down to steal the city. He thrashed them sick, he chased them
until they dropped, and thrashed them again until they scattered in
helpless panic.
The liberal president rewarded Colonel Diaz with a post of such
eminent danger, that he had to fight for his life through two whole
years before he could get a vacation. Then Oaxaca, to procure him a
holiday, sent up the young soldier as member of parliament to the
capital.
Of course the clerical army objected strongly to the debates of a
liberal congress sitting in parliament at the capital. They came and
spoiled the session by laying siege to the City of Mexico. Then the
member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these clericals.
He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased
that clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals
had camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them.
He got that supper.
So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited
Napoleon III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the
unfortunate liberals fought a joint army of French and clericals,
checked them under the snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed
them before the walls of Puebla that it was nine months before they
felt well enough to renew the attack. The day of that victory is
celebrated by the Mexicans as their great national festival.
In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their
clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of the
city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large
rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried, the
French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the
courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing
away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic,
charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.
The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and
the French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any
parole. They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a
little iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those
bars, escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by
capturing a French convoy camp, raised the southern states of
Mexico, and for two years held his own against the armies of France.
President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert,
a fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and
Marshal Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer
Diaz in the south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a
chain of forts. Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing
the government of the southern states, and among other details,
founding a school for girls in his native city.
Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the
Germans, attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly
fifty thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the
unfortunate nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the
most glorious defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral
bells for cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where
he and his starving followers fought their last great fight, until he
stood alone among the dead, firing charge after charge into the
siege lines.
Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic
attempts at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an
impossible wall. He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like
a wolf, and yet on the second day after that escape, he commanded
a gang of bandits and captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded
an expedition sent against him, raised an army, and reconquered
Southern Mexico.
Porfirio Diaz
It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French
to retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts,
gathering the people as he came, besieged Querétaro, captured and
shot the Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered
the City of Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant
president, resigned his commission as commander-in-chief, and
retired in deep contentment to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.
For nine years the hero made sugar. Over an area in the north
as large as France, the Apache Indians butchered every man,
woman and child with fiendish tortures. The whole distracted nation
cried in its agony for a leader, but every respectable man who tried
to help was promptly denounced by the government, stripped of his
possessions and driven into exile. At last General Diaz could bear it
no longer, made a few remarks and was prosecuted. He fled, and
there began a period of the wildest adventures conceivable, while
the government attempted to hunt him down. He raised an
insurrection in the north, but after a series of extraordinary victories,
found the southward march impossible. When next he entered the
republic of Mexico, he came disguised as a laborer by sea to the port
of Tampico.
At Vera Cruz he landed, and after a series of almost miraculous
escapes from capture, succeeded in walking to Oaxaca. There he
raised his last rebellion, and with four thousand followers
ambuscaded a government army, taking three thousand prisoners,
the guns and all the transport. President Lerdo heard the news, and
bolted with all the cash. General Diaz took the City of Mexico and
declared himself president of the republic.
Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been the
handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous, the most charming,
and terrific as lightning when in action. The country suffered from a
very plague of politicians until one day he dropped in as a visitor,
quite unexpected, at Vera Cruz, selected the eleven leading
politicians without the slightest bias as to their views, put them up
against the city wall and shot them. Politics was abated.
The leading industry of the country was highway robbery, until
the president, exquisitely sympathetic, invited all the principal
robbers to consult with him as to details of government. He formed
them into a body of mounted police, which swept like a whirlwind
through the republic and put a sudden end to brigandage. Capital
punishment not being permitted by the humane government, the
robbers were all shot for “attempting to escape.”
Next in importance was the mining of silver, and the recent
decline in its value threatened to ruin Mexico. By the magic of his
finance, Diaz used that crushing reverse to lace the country with
railroads, equip the cities with electric lights and traction power far in
advance of any appliances we have in England, open great
seaports, and litter all the states of Mexico with prosperous factories.
Meanwhile he paid off the national debt, and made his coinage
sound.
He never managed himself to speak any other language than his
own majestic, slow Castilian, but he knew that English is to be the
tongue of mankind. Every child in Mexico had to go to school to learn
English.
And this greatest of modern sovereigns went about among his
people the simplest, most accessible of men. “They may kill me if
they want to,” he said once, “but they don’t want to. They rather like
me.” So one might see him taking his morning ride, wearing the
beautiful leather dress of the Mexican horsemen, or later in the day,
in a tweed suit going down to the office by tram car, or on his
holidays hunting the nine-foot cats which we call cougar, or of a
Sunday going to church with his wife and children. On duty he was
an absolute monarch, off duty a kindly citizen, and it seemed to all of
us who knew the country that he would die as he had lived, still in
harness. One did not expect too much—the so-called elections were
a pleasant farce, but the country was a deal better governed than the
western half of the United States. Any fellow entitled to a linen collar
in Europe wore a revolver in Mexico, as part of the dress of a
gentleman, but in the wildest districts I never carried a cartridge.
Diaz had made his country a land of peace and order, strong,
respected, prosperous, with every outward sign of coming greatness.
Excepting only Napoleon and the late Japanese emperor, he was
both in war and peace the greatest leader our world has ever known.
But the people proved unworthy of their chief; to-day he is a broken
exile, and Mexico has lapsed back into anarchy.
XIX
A. D. 1870
THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT