Compiled by Gary Evans,
Dept of Communication, University of Ottawa,
© Gary Evans, March, 2007.
Email: evansg@uottawa.ca
This is a chronological filmography (in progress) of films and videos on the Holocaust produced in Canada and/or by Canadians. [Brackets indicate where they may be found]
*Asterisk= material with a female slant.
G
uilty Men. National Film Board of Canada, Tom Daly, dir. 1945, 11m.This newsreel shows footage of the Nuremberg trials of the chief war criminals and an Allied execution, referring only to “crimes.” It makes reference to the Jewish catastrophe, without mentioning the word “Jew” once, though it does show images of pre-war anti-Semitic acts against German Jews and Allied footage from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. [NFB Archives]
Sun in My Eyes. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] Feb. 21, 1960.
60m.
This is a televised play by Jack Kuper about his life as a child in a
Shtetl in Poland during the German occupation. Starring Al Waxman, it is a
tale of the Nazis’ murder of a family on the run and the desperate sobering
finality of having a child as sole survivor. The title derives from a Polish
peasant fiction that Jews could not see the sun. This Toronto production is
probably the first time the CBC treated the subject of the Holocaust directly.
[master copy, CBC Archives, Ottawa; copy with the Jewish Board of Education,
Toronto, audiovisual department]
Canada at War. (Part 4, June 1944-August 1946) National Film Board,
Donald Brittain, dir. 1962, 28m.
Using archival footage this segment traces Canadian army activity in Europe
in 1944-45, including atrocities discovered at Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, &
Buchenwald as well as the beginning of the Nuremberg trials. In the section
dealing with the end of the war, there is footage of Bergen-Belsen with a
comment, “Untold millions had been gassed, starved, burned, and beaten to death.
They had committed a crime. They were not of pure German stock.” This segment
closes with reference to Hitler’s last will and testament. “In it he blamed the
Jews for everything.” [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
Across Canada: The Observer. (CBC tv series), Don MacPherson, producer.
Nov.19, 1964. 30m. Public affairs programme.
There is a brief item on a man who
rescued 50 Romanian Jews during the war. [National Archives, Ottawa]
Across Canada: The Observer. (CBC tv series), Don MacPherson, producer.
Feb. 9, 1965, 30m. Public affairs programme.
There is a segment on the opening of The Deputy, a German play that
deals with accusations against Pope Pius XII in connection with the destruction
of the Jews. [National Archives, Ottawa]
Memorandum.
Survivor Bernard Laufer visits Bergen-Belsen and remembers his incarceration. The narration asks important questions about perpetrators and bystanders and subtly articulates the meaning of ‘the banality of evil.’ This landmark Canadian documentary includes footage of Nazi criminals on trial in 1965 amidst a German society that is seemingly unconcerned. The closing minutes evoke a vision of loss and resignation that is poetic and enduring[Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
Man Alive (television series) From the Ashes: Elie Wiesel in
conversation with Roy Bonisteel. CBC, 1973, 28m.
Wiesel talks to Bonisteel about his book Night and about his loss of
faith in God when he was in Auschwitz. Wiesel calls himself a storyteller, not a
teacher or messenger. Yet he believes that whoever hears a witness to the
Holocaust becomes a witness and messenger too. The power of his words is
riveting, and the viewer forgets that visually there are only two men in
conversation. [Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal]
It Has To Be Told. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1973. 29m.
Three
survivors recollect the concentrationary experience. There are no accompanying
visuals. (Note: This may be the raw material from which a television program was
constructed.) [Canadian Jewish Congress copy has no titles, no narration, only
the survivors’ testimonies.]
*The Man Who Hid Anne Frank Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, December
17, 1980, Harry Rasky, producer/dir. 57m.
Fourteen year old Holly Rasky,
intrigued by Anne Frank’s diary, traveled to Amsterdam to interview many of
those who helped shelter Anne, her family and four other refugees for two years.
The on-screen presence of the young teen (Rasky’s daughter) and the use of
archival footage help draw others like her to Anne Frank’s remarkable story and
the interviews illuminate the quiet heroism of the many Dutch who risked their
lives on behalf of this now world renown figure. [CBC Archives. For broadcast
only; not available for rental or purchase.]
The Spies Who Never Were: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, October 11,
1981, Harry Rasky, producer/dir. 114m.
This two-programme documentary film,
narrated by Harry Rasky, tells the story of the 3,000 (mostly Jewish) refugees
in Britain who, upon the outbreak of war, found themselves exiled to prison
camps in Canada as suspected subversives. A number of these ‘spies who never
were’ went on to become well known figures in the world of Canadian music,
broadcasting and letters. Eric Koch, one of the interviewees, happened to be the
CBC executive in charge of documentary programming, but took credit only as a
consultant on the film. [CBC Archives. For broadcast only; not available for
rental or purchase.]
Au nom de tous les miens
A feature based on the true story of Martin Gray, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who, here played by Michael York, experienced the German invasion of Poland, endured ghettoization, capture, and concentration camp internment, only to escape, join the partisan resistance and then the Soviet army. Postwar, he rebuilt his life in the United States, then moved to France, where tragedy struck again as he lost his wife and child in a forest fire. The English version was released in 1990. [?]
Journey Into Our Heritage (series) Canadian Jewish Congress, Stanley
Asher, dir. 1983. (This consists of two 20 minute videos that were aired on
community cable in Montreal)
Holocaust survivor Paul Trepman, former executive
director of the Jewish Public Library, Montreal, shows slides of his trip to
Poland and Czechoslovakia. Poor production values and some erroneous information
lessen this item’s effectiveness. [Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal]
Charlie Grant’s War. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Martin Lavut,
dir. 1984. 125m.
This fictional story with high production values is a melodrama about a
Canadian diamond merchant in Nazi Germany who risks his life to smuggle Jews
out. The play underscores the sorry Canadian government policy of “None Is Too
Many.” [Sound and Moving Image Archives (National Archives), Ottawa]
*Dark Lullabies. DLI and National Film Board, Irene Angelico and Jack
Neidik, dirs. 1985. 81m.
This documentary film journey of the on-screen
director, herself a child of survivors, who meets children of Nazi perpetrators.
She asks what happened and why, and travels from Montreal to Israel to Germany
in search of answers. This film is oddly structured, yet moving emotionally
whenever survivors speak. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
*So Many Miracles. Alternative Pictures, Inc and Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, Katherine Smalley and Vic Sarin, dirs. 1986. 48m.
This is a docmentary film account of the Rubinek Family reunion with the
Polish family that hid them 49 years earlier. Its high production values
combined with an effective use of direct cinema technique record the return and
reunion. The directors employ actors to emphasize several of the Rubinek’s
dramatic moments, especially a near-capture by German soldiers. The film
achieves closure by emphasizing how some gentiles were willing to risk their
lives to save Jews. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
*To Mend the World. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Harry Rasky, dir.
1987. 86m.
This world class documentary combines survivor testimonies with the
art of witnesses to create some of the most profound and haunting images of the
genocide. A dozen survivors recount the agonizing circumstances and unfathomable
depth of despair they faced and overcame. The art is probably the closest a
viewer will ever come to the actual concentration camp experience. Rasky’s
skillful blending of witnesses, art and music guarantees this film as one of the
premier Canadian films on the Holocaust. Rasky said his film tried to find some
meaning, or even hope, in the Holocaust experience. Viewing it reminds one of
Elie Wiesel’s fundamental position on the Holocaust: to hear a witness is to
become a witness oneself. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
Two Men Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Gordon Pinsent, dir. 1988. 105m
This fictitious television melodrama tells the story of a Hungarian child
survivor living in Toronto who, 44 years after the fact, accidentally discovers
“the trusted friend” who betrayed his family to the Nazis, thereby causing their
deaths. Lacking hard evidence, Canadian authorities can do nothing to bring the
man to justice, so in murderous desperation, the survivor confronts his nemesis.
But his nearly forgotten Jewish ethics will not allow him to kill, and the story
ends as he returns to his abandoned faith.
*Voices of Survival. Canadian Jewish Congress, Heritage Canada,
TVOntario. Alan Handel dir. 1988. 56m. (narrator Stephen Lewis)
Six Canadian
witnesses tell parts of their stories of surviving brutality, roundups,
Auschwitz selection and their macabre Auschwitz “people’s game: gas or shower?”
There is good use of historical footage and intercutting of a discussion about
the Allied failure to stop the mass murder as well as Canada’s pathetic refugee
record. [Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal]
The Quarrel (based on a short story “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner” by
Chaim Grade) from a play by Joseph Telushkin. American Playhouse Theatrical
Films, Atlantic Releasing and Apple & Honey Productions. Eli Cohen dir. 1990.
90m.
Two survivors (one played by Saul Rubinek, whose parents were featured in
So Many Miracles) meet by chance on Montreal’s Mount Royal in 1948 where
they resume their philosophical dialogue of faith versus reason, a dialogue cut
short by the Holocaust and the mutual loss of their families. The man of faith
insists that he could have been a perpetrator too, but his comfort is his faith.
Their philosophical discussion eclipses historical reality and the film meanders
while exploring the premise that all men can be killers—digressing from the fact
that Jews were victims and the Nazis were the killers. [Jewish Public Library,
Montreal]
A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Birthday Trip in Hell. Kuper Productions,
Toronto, Jack Kuper dir, 1991. 30m.
Wehrmacht Sergeant Heinz Joest spent his 43rd birthday inside the Warsaw
Ghetto on September 19th, 1941, taking photographs. These unique photos are the
core of this black and white documentary video, complemented by excerpts from
the hidden diaries of Warsaw ghetto historians, as well as by Yiddish music of
the period. Hope is stronger than desperation as evidence of ongoing underground
schools and religious observances bear witness to human fortitude in a nightmare
world. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
March of the Living. Jewish Education Council of Montreal, Sid Goldberg,
dir. 1992. 147m.
This is video footage of the March of the Living journey to Poland and Israel
in 1992. Similar accounts of this event have been produced annually by the
Jewish Education Council of Montreal. (The video is intended as a record of the
event rather than a documentary production intended for broadcast.)
The Valour and the Horror. (Part 1 Death by Moonlight) Galafilm,
National Film Board, Brian McKenna, dir. 1992. 104m.
This highly controversial docudrama makes the weakest reference to the
Holocaust and asserts that the Allied bombing raids on Germany were war crimes,
neglecting to mention that Nazi propaganda insisted that the bombing was the
result of Jewish world power.
This production, reflecting flawed historical research, is notable for
missing a valuable opportunity to tie the Holocaust to Allied bombing policy.
[Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
Both Sides of the Wire. Black River Productions and Vision TV Neal
Livingston, dir. 1993. 47m.
This documentary tells the story of young German and Austrian Jewish men who,
having sought refuge in Britain before the war, were deported to Canada in 1940
and were interned as enemy aliens alongside Nazis. They return to the camp where
they were internees and remember daily life. This low budget production suffers
from visual sluggishness. [Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal]
The Lucky Ones: Allied Airmen and Buchenwald. National Film
Board/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/ A & E Networks, Michael Adler, dir.
1994. 47m.
This documentary tells the story of 168 Allied airmen, ages 19-21, who were
waiting for transfer to POW camps and who witnessed atrocities at Buchenwald in
the summer of 1944. There are minimal references to other prisoners, and the
specificity of the Holocaust is ignored. Thus the viewer might think that
Buchenwald was a camp for captured combatants exclusively. [Jewish Public
Library, Montreal]
The Voyage of the St. Louis. Galafilm, Inc., National Film Board, Les
Films d’Ici, Canal +, NDR International, Maziar Bahari, dir. 1994. 51m.
This tale, told by some surviving refugees, is a documentary film account of
the saga of the 937 mostly Jewish refugees who sailed on the German luxury liner
St.Louis from Hamburg to Cuba in 1939. They had their visas revoked and found
themselves refused refuge in the US and Canada. They returned to Europe, the
war began, and some ¾ perished as victims of the Nazis. Their ordeal in search
of refuge was the subject of the fiction film Voyage of the Damned.
[Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
*Silent Witness/Les Gardiens du Silence. Wichin-York Film, Harriet
Wichin, dir. 1994. 74m. (In English or French, with German.)
This colour film deals with the concentration camp-as -museum and the
contemporary issue of monumentalization. Always off-camera, Wichin deals with
absence and meaning as she visits sites at Dachau and Auschwitz. The rich hues
of the cinematography make her quest poetic, but the film lacks the political
edge that is needed to understand specific controversies that lay behind turning
the concentration camps into contemporary memorials. The documentary tries to
reach for universals about suffering and reconciliation, yet the specificity of
the Jews’ destruction seems to be strangely eclipsed. [Cinema Libre, Montreal]
Holocaust
Denial Vs. Freedom of Speech Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, dirs.
1994 12m Necessary Illusions Productions Inc. and the National Film Board of
Canada
This video focuses on one of the most controversial areas in Noam Chomsky's
career: his defense of the civil rights of Robert Faurisson, a French
intellectual who was suspended from his university post because he could not be
protected from violence as a result of publishing revisionist literature
minimizing Nazi atrocities during World War II. Faurisson denied the existence
of gas chambers and of an orchestrated, genocidal campaign against Jews. He was
later taken to court in part for "falsification of history." It is the classic
debate about free speech vs. the right to express unpopular views or even
outright lies. The video explores the context of Chomsky's Libertarian defense
including the skewed handling of the debate by the press. Exerpted from a longer
work titled, Manufacturing Consent.
*Hidden Children Sienna Films and October Films (U.K.) 1995. Tom Roberts,
producer, Julia Sereny, dir. 50m.
This documentary video explores the tales of
six Jews who were hidden children during the Holocaust. For some, day to day
existence depended on their ability to pass as Christians. Another ran wild in
the forests. Subsequently they had to deal with the difficult issues of
abandonment and family re-integration. As adults, they generally chose careers
such as social work, medicine, and teaching, allowing them to repay the generous
world that had helped them. [Available through Sienna Films, Toronto
Shtetl, Kuper Productions, Jack Kuper dir, 1995. 23m.
The aged Canadian folk artist Mayer Kirshenblatt serves as a central focus in
this recollection of small town Jewish communities of Eastern Europe which were
destroyed in the Holocaust. This documentary evokes the vividness and vitality
of a once thriving civilization, obliterated by war and now only a memory in the
minds of the last survivors. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
A Rough Crossing. Starry Night Productions/NFB, Teresa MacInnes, dir.
1995. 48m.
This documentary film retraces the journeys of eight British child evacuees
to Canada in 1940. One of the children was Martin Gilbert, now the renowned
British historian. Insisting he came as a British subject, not as a Jew, and his
tale is punctuated by a brief segment in which Canadian historians recount
Canada’s closed door policy to most Jewish refugee children. Most of those
children subsequently perished. [Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal]
Web of War. Galafilm, National Film Board, Brian McKenna, dir. 1995. 51m.
This documentary is about three Canadians who return to Europe and recount
the story of Canadians and Poles who fought alongside each other. It contains
brief reference to the Holocaust. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
Who Was Jerzy Kosinski? Kuper Productions, Jack Kuper dir, 1996. 53m.
Video.
Kuper wrote a memoir called Child of the Holocaust, a tale of a boy on
the run during the Holocaust. When he read Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
he suspected plagiarism of his book. Kuper traveled to Poland to find out if the
renowned Holocaust novel was indeed Kosinski’s true story. What Kuper learned
subsequently provides a shocking denouement to this documentary investigation.
Visualizing Memory…A last Detail. Kleinmann Family Foundation, Naomi
Kramer, dir. 1996. 52m.
Survivor Peter Kleinmann returns to Flossenburg
concentration camp, one of three where he was incarcerated during war. The video
tries to be didactic by breaking the narrative into four thematic sections: The
Fallacy of Race, Liberation, Moral Responsibility, and Visualizing Memory.
Conceptually these have an uneven impact, in part, because the videography is
unremarkable. Yet the witness accounts are riveting. The work raises the
important contemporary question of commemoration as the viewer ponders what will
happen once the witnesses have passed away. [
Nothing to Be Written Here Hahn and Daughters Productions, Wendy
Oberlander, dir. 1996. 47m.
Oberlander’s video contains average production
values. It tells the story of her father as a 17 year old Austrian Jewish
refugee in Britain who was sent to Canada and interned in a New Brunswick POW
camp as an enemy alien. As an assimilated Jew he and some 2,000 others like him
there and in other camps worked as lumberjacks and were kept apart from the Nazi
POWs. The narration describes Canada’s closed door refugee policy and the long
wait the internees endured before becoming official refugees. [Canadian Jewish
Congress, Montreal]
*Punch Me in the Stomach Punch Me in the Stomach & Zee Films (Canada/New
Zealand coproduction) Francine Zuckerman, dir. 1997. 72m.
Deb Filler, comedienne
and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, does a one woman (Off Broadway show)
playing 36 characters of her family. At the core of this documentary/comedy is
her father, whose story of survival was a constant factor in her youth. “Debbie,
don’t slump, stand up straight. Remember in the camps if you slump, they shoot
you.” Using backscreen projection of changing documentary camp footage, she
plays out roles of tourist, victim, and herself in this unusual approach to
conveying Holocaust truths. [Bravo tv network]
Man Alive: A Journey to Prague Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, dir???
1997. 30m
Popular Canadian radio host Otto Lowy is featured in this television
episode that explores his own and Prague’s Jewish heritage. It recounts the
brutal shock of Nazi domination from 1938 and examines a number of artifacts
they confiscated as well as the legacy they extinguished. As he tells a local
Czech guide, “My presence somehow unsettles you…I am a part of that legacy. And
that’s what you see in my eyes and you don’t understand.” In the decades he
appeared on CBC, this was one of those rare moments of revelation that Lowy
likened to “undressing in public. You’re telling things that you don’t even tell
friends very often.”
A Prayer For the Dead: Herzl Kashetsky Fundy Community TV, Lisa Lamb,
prod/dir. 1997. 27m.
This video discusses the exhibition of paintings and
drawings by Canadian artist Herzl Kashetsky, who was inspired to create his art
based on photos he saw of Bergen-Belsen and his own contemporary visit to
several death camps. Alex Colville, who was a Canadian war artist, talks of his
experience arriving at Bergen-Belsen just after liberation. The most telling
moments in this low budget production are the heartfelt comments by the artists
as well as their graphic images. [Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal]
Each of Us Has A Name Cambium Film and Video Productions/Global TV, Fern
Levitt and Arnie Zipursky, dirs. 1999. 52m.
This is a video of the 1998 March of
the Living to death camps Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek in Poland. The
viewer follows a Canadian group of students and the four survivors who
accompanied them, all as part of the 7000 participants who made this pilgrimage.
The varied and earnest emotions of survivors and students are palpable as they
visit these sites, culminating in Majdanek’s “Mountain of Ashes” memorial, where
a student reads the poem that gave the film its title. This contemporary video
takes the viewer through these museums/memorials that bear witness to the
Holocaust. [Global TV]
Sunshine. Robert Lantos Productions (a coproduction of Canada,
Austria, Hungary and Germany) Istvan Szabo, dir. 1999. 180m.
This epic, with
very high production values, is the story of a fictive Hungarian Jewish family
from the 1800’s until the 1950’s. In World War II, the family’s earlier
conversion to Catholicism notwithstanding, they are singled out and deported as
Jews. One member (Ralph Fiennes) insists on keeping his Christian identity even
after being arrested and incarcerated in a labour camp; it will cost him his
life as he is crucified for not admitting he is a Jew. The Holocaust occupies
less than ten minutes of this three hour melodrama; the Nazis’ murder of 400,000
Hungarian Jews is a passing element. The story’s Jews are portrayed as ambitious
and earnest, people who became victims and then perpetrators, in a world where
politics is forever corrupt. [commercial video release]
*Zyklon Portrait. Wandering Tulip Productions Elida Schogt, dir. 1999
13m.
The filmmaker dedicates this documentary to her grandparents who were
transported from Westerbork, to Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. This evocation of
the Holocaust does not use familiar images but is in the form of a dialogue
between a mother who survived as a hidden child in Holland, and her daughter
today. The backdrop is a scientific account of, and impressionistic images of
the deadly zyklon gas. Diary selections from Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss,
serve as a chilling reminder of the monstrous inhumanity of the perpetrators.
This short and artful work is a useful catalyst for classroom discussion.
[wtp@interlog.com for release information]
*Let Memory Speak. Jewish Education Council of Montreal, Batia Bettman,
dir. 1999 27m.
This documentary video is an account of some 25 Jewish children,
many of whom survived the Holocaust. Their diaries, poems and memoirs, read by
contemporary teenagers, as well as their personal period photos, lend an
immediacy and authenticity to their tales of life before and during the war, and
after liberation. Other voices read poignant passages from Holocaust authors
Elie Wiesel and Aaron Appelfeld that help unify and contextualize the piece.
This short production is an excellent vehicle for stimulating group discussion.
Passengers
This short poetic compelling drama is an exploration of the relationship between a daughter and her father as she recalls his legacy including his Holocaust experience on the day of his funeral.
Children of the Storm Kuper Productions, Toronto and Vision TV, Jack
Kuper dir, 2000. 104m.
This video centers on interviews with dozens of the 1100
Jewish refugee orphans who came to Canada under the postwar Canadian Jewish
Congress War Orphans Project. Their stories describe survival of the Holocaust
and the difficult transition to establish new lives in foster homes. Historian
Irving Abella relates the sorry Canadian wartime record, including Ottawa’s
rejection of 5000 Jewish refugee children, all of whom subsequently perished.
These survivors reflect the endurance and determination that allowed them to
succeed at last in a Canada that was slowly becoming an open and inclusive
society. [Jewish Public Library, Montreal]
The Fear of Felix Nussbaum Kuper Productions, Toronto, Vision TV and
Bravo Newstyle Arts Channel, Jack Kuper dir, 2000. 52m.
German-Jewish
artist-in-exile Felix Nussbaum’s single wish was to ensure his art would be
saved and its imagery serve as a testament to his and countless other Jews’
agony while hiding from the Nazis, knowing that deportation to Auschwitz meant
certain death. Such was his fate and his home town of Osnabruck has created a
Felix Nussbaum Society and museum that tells this remarkably talented artist’s
story through his works and letters. This video is both a guide to the museum
and serves as a reminder that within Germany today many are committed to
memorializing those who perished in the Holocaust. [Jewish Public Library,
Montreal]
Varian’s War Alliance Atlantis Communication, 2000. 121m.
Lionel
Chetwynd, dir/writer. Based on a true story, American activist Varian Fry
(William Hurt) worked tirelessly in Vichy France to help 2000 refugee (largely
Jewish) intellectuals and artists including Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt to
escape to the U.S. High production values, competent if conventional direction,
but a plodding screenplay make one think of a Canadian Schindler’s List
without Spielberg’s cinematic tensions. This made for tv story of humanitarian
values demonstrates the ongoing difficulties of many Canadian features. It fails
to convey the profound impact of the Nazi revolution beyond a two dimensional
development of character and dramaturgy.
*Hidden Heroes Windbourne Productions, Vision TV and the Dutch
Reformed Church Karen Pascal dir/producer 2000. 52m.
Based on the book Hidden Children by André Stein, this well crafted
documentary tells the poignant story of two surviving Jewish Dutch sisters who
were hidden during the Nazi occupation. Courageous Dutch citizens, motivated
largely by their religious beliefs, sheltered hundreds of such children. Others
acted out of political commitment to the Resistance, where some 28,000 perished.
If many Dutch Christians “adopted” Jewish children out of religious duty, most
Jews were not converted but told to “play” act as Christians. Final statistics
are overwhelming: of Holland’s 110,000 Jews deported, only 6,000 survived. The
final scene with the sisters at Westerbork transit camp, now a memorial, is
emotionally moving. [Vision TV, History Channel ]
Hanna’s Suitcase Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Karen Levine,
producer, 2001. 30m. CBC Newsworld documentary, also available in online format at:
The Tokyo Holocaust Education and Resource Centre under director Fumiko Ishioka acquired a suitcase belonging to Holocaust child victim Hanna Brady of Czechoslovakia. Ishioka travels to the Czech Republic, then Toronto, where she finds Hanna’s brother George, the sole survivor of the lost family. They subsequently tour with the suitcase and as George shows photos of the family’s life before the war, they tell Hanna’s story of deportation to Thereisenstadt and then to Auschwitz, where she perished. The suitcase, photos and survivor’s testimony bring Hanna’s poignant story to children who might otherwise be unable to grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust. [CBC television has aired the film on numerous occasions on The National]
Requiem for the Missing: On the works of Yehouda Chaki Joshua Dorsey (in
collaboration with Bravo, Fact and National Film Board of Canada) Joshua Dorsey,
dir. 2000. 10m.
Artist Yehouda Chaki works on his powerful installation Mi Makir (Who Will
Ever Know?), a series of dozens of heads painted in dark watercolours running in
horizontal and vertical sequence, with a large mound of books-as-monuments in the
center. Each book cover expresses an individually crafted essence-- of either of
its lost owner or its contents, both denoting and connoting the culture and
civilization that were lost in the Holocaust. Besides capturing Chaki’s creative
process, Dorsey also employs a visual analogy to the Maelstrom that consumed
these missing and now anonymous lives. The video is a superb catalyst to engage
classroom discussion about art and the Holocaust.
The Struma Simcha Jacobovici productions ??? Simcha Jacobovici, dir. 2001
92m.
This is a documentary account of an expedition to find the remains of the
sunken Jewish refugee ship The Struma which lost all but one of its 779
passengers in February 1942. Turkish authorities towed the ship out of Istanbul
harbour into the Black Sea where a Soviet torpedo sank it. The sole survivor is
the centerpiece of this moving documentary.
The Turkish government, embarrassed by its erstwhile involvement, is opposed
to this expedition, led by a man whose grandparents were aboard the doomed ship.
The moral issue of governments and people who were bystanders to the Holocaust
is prominent.
*Still (Stille) Hahn and Daughters Productions, Wendy Oberlander,
dir.writer, producer, 2001, 25m., video.
Oberlander looks for her place in the
stories of her mother’s and grandmother’s past in this video about the
evanescence of time. In seamlessly bonding music and editing, she narrates a
visual/verbal collage of fragmentary details of her family’s memories of
persecution in, and flight from Germany in 1938. She plays them against
‘imaginary’ images, home movies and documentary footage from the period, and
thus creates an imagined time and place. In a lyrical deliberation about the
‘sound of memory,’ she provides the viewer with something familiar, yet remote,
as she reaches back to perform conversations with people she will never meet.
This personal artistic work also entices the general audience.
*Haven Alliance Atlantis Communications, Citadel Entertainment, Paulette
Breen Productions, John Gray, dir. 2001, 180m
This made for television
miniseries is based on the true story of Ruth Gruber, who traveled to Europe to
help escort 1000 Jewish war victims to the United States.
*Undying Love: A Collection of Love Stories Undying Love and La Fete
Productions, Helene Klodawsky dir./writer, 2002, 87m , video.
In this
high-profile shortened-for-television documentary, Holocaust survivors tell of
their struggle to regain their identities as loving humans in spite of the
traumas they had faced. As they describe coping with daily life in Canada and
post Holocaust trauma over the decades, it is clear how their love was the key
element in their recovery of ordinary life. A combination of documentary,
historical footage, staged dramatic moments, with original musical score, this
video’s high production values demonstrate the incalculable value of survivor
testimonies. [CTV]
Je me souviens (I Remember) Les productions quatre jeudis Eric R. Scott,
dir./producer, 2002, 50m., video (subtitled).
Le Devoir, the newspaper of
Quebec intellectuals, ran 1007 articles in the 1930’s that were pro-fascist and
antisemitic. Interviews with apologists and opponents today reveal the tenor of
the times and the powerful role intellectuals played in perpetuating this
atmosphere. Academic Esther Delisle angrily attacks the Establishment for its
position of “Everyone knows, but no one should say” with regard to her own
attempts to reveal Quebec’s shameful intellectual past, including a postwar
policy of welcoming Nazi collaborators from France and of trivializing the
Holocaust.
The
Boys of Buchenwald Paperny Films Distributed by the National Film Board of
Canada. Audrey Mehler, dir. 2002 47m.
Almost six decades after their liberation from Buchenwald, the "boys,"
Holocaust survivors Robbie Waisman, Elie Wiesel and Joe Szwarcberg meet again,
touring locales in France where they recovered from their traumatic
concentration camp experiences. Their enduring friendship helped them to rebuild
their lives and to rediscover a world they had lost. This documentary, filled
with archival footage and photos, is an excellent introduction to the subject.
Come Out Fighting. The 761st
While not a specific Holocaust film, this story of the 761st tank battalion in World War II recalls the segregation of the U.S. armed forces and the determination of this first black armoured battalion to show its worth, both in the Battle of the Bulge and in Gen. Patton’s dash into Germany and Austria. Backed by familiar and unfamiliar stock shot footage, several veterans describe the enormity of the human catastrophe they discovered upon liberating Mauthausen “It was worse than slavery was ever thought to be,” states one. Two camp survivors salute the 761st for preventing more loss of life. Perhaps affected by the experience, some veterans helped form the backbone of the postwar U.S. civil rights movement. (Made for History Channel’s Turning Points in History.)
The
Fifth Province National Film Board of Canada Don McWilliams, dir. 2002 72m
Shot in Canada, France, Latvia, Cyprus and Africa, this documentary examines
lives that have been irrevocably changed by the trauma of war: Latvians exiled
by war in 1944, a German photographer defined by the Nazi nightmare, a French
novelist haunted by the childhood memory of the death of his father, the plight
of a Greek-Cypriot woman in the wake of the Turkish invasion in 1974, and a
massacre by Nazis in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944. These
testimonies, enhanced by startling images that use special effects animation,
song and poetry, establish a. unique approach to the usual treatment of this
subject.
From Despair to Defiance:
Interviews with ghetto fighters and historians (Yehuda Bauer is especially effective) who chronicle this historic event, “fighting for three lines in the history books” as one combatant put it. Most of Warsaw’s Jews who did not perish from disease and hunger were transported to Treblinka and death. Mordecai Anilevitch, the young resistance leader, said it was important that the world know the Jews did not die without a fight. This video shows original footage and still photos of the ghetto before, during and after this heroic resistance. The detailed testimonials are moving and overall make for an excellent historical account. (History Channel; not yet available to public)
Nicky’s Children Matej Minac, dir. Trigon Productioons/CBC in cooperation
with Czech and Slovak TV and Slovak Film Institute 2003 45m.
Originally
Nicholas Winton, The Power of Good, this video, written and narrated by
CBC’s Joe Schlesinger, is his own story. He and 6 other Jewish Czech/Slovak
children discuss their anguished rescue by a self-effacing charitable Nicholas
Winton, who saved 2000 child refugees in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1939.
He brought them (including Schlesinger) to safety in England but never spoke of
his charitable deed over a lifetime. Late in life, several hundred learned for
the first time who had saved them. We watch a surprise meeting between dozens of
them and Nicky on a British television show. This story emphasizes how
individual decency can reinforce ideas of what ‘civilized’ means. (CBC, 2003)
Prisoner Of Paradise. Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender dirs,
Canadian–American production, PBS, BBC, U-5 Productions, History Television
Canada, Alliance Atlantis distributors 2003, 97m.
Nominated for an Academy
Award, this documentary film, narrated by Ian Holm, is the story of
Theresienstadt inmate Kurt Gerron, a renowned Jewish movie director/actor in
pre-Nazi Germany, who collaborated with the Nazis to direct the propaganda film
The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews (1944). The propaganda showed
Theresienstadt idyllically, covering up its horrific conditions. On screen
survivors resent Gerron's collaboration, but others claim he received Jewish
elders’ permission to make the film in order to delay Jews’ `transport,' to
certain death. The philosophical issue of this ‘Devil’s Bargain’ perplexes the
viewer. Gerron’s images lied to the world, convincing many that rumours of mass
murder by Germany were untrue, yet in producing them, Gerron believed he delayed
(his and the) victims’ destruction. (History Channel 2005)
Hitler: The Rise of Evil Christian Duguay, dir. Alliance Atlantis/CBS
television 2003, 4 hours.
This 2 part miniseries tries to humanize Hitler, ignoring the child
and caricaturing the failed artist and rising politician. Called “trivializing
and offensive” by the Anti-Defamation League, it reiterates the long held German
myth that Hitler hijacked Germany politically and established his tyrannical
regime ruthlessly. In ignoring the wider picture of Germans’ acceptance of and
belief in the Fuhrer Principle, the film fails to articulate historical forces
like the antisemitism/anti Bolshevism that defined Nazi ideology. Even if actor
Robert Carlyle’s Hitler is a believable, wicked, spittle- spewing megalomaniac,
the series’ greatest error is to subscribe to the myth of “Great Men Make
History” and to end in 1934. Hitler’s nemesis, the Jews, seem one dimensional.
(CBS television; not yet available for sale/rental)
Samuel Bak: Painter of Questions, Christa Singer, dir. TVO, Rogers
Cablefund, Bravo & Vision TV, 2003 47m. video.
Painter Samuel Bak, a child
survivor of the Holocaust thanks to the charity of Catholic monks, has been
painting a lifetime. An onscreen docent explains to students some of the 100
compelling, surrealist, yet metaphysical Bak images at a Boston exhibit.
Onscreen, Bak admits how the emotional impact of the Holocaust pervades his
work, while historical photos and footage of his return to Vilnius provide
context to this aesthetically moving and well crafted documentary. To an
impressive background score of original music, Bak explains that his fractured
still-lifes and uprooted trees signify his desire to integrate the violence of
the world into an art that denies the possibility of ever reconstructing what
had once existed. He rejects fashionable conceptual art in favour of
representational paintings that try to repair a broken universe. As a painter of
questions, he admits his most constant query is why he survived. Perhaps the
answer lies in his paintings that bear witness to memory, tragedy and the
affirmative nature of art, life and willpower.
Glove
Story Sarah Lazarovic, dir. National Film Board of Canada, 2005 11m.
82-year old Hungarian Holocaust survivor Magda Zimmering conducted a successful
letter writing campaign to have a street and park named after Raoul Wallenberg,
the Swedish diplomat who rescued her and thousands of other Jews from certain
death. She uses her dogged determination and letter writing skills again to try
to recover her lost sheepskin glove, a precious gift from her late husband. She
writes to a national newspaper, lands on the front page, and tells her story to
Canadians.
Holocaust: A Music Memorial Film James Kent, dir. British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC); Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC; Telewizja Polska
(TVP, Poland); Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF, Germany) 2005 88m.
Theodore
Adorno’s warning about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz echoes
throughout this well intentioned international effort. Shot for television in
winter at Auschwitz, the performers, Camerata Silesia, Sinfonietta Cracowia, and
The Smith Quartet, as well as pianist Emanuel Ax, try to evoke some of
the atmospherics of this place of damnation as they play Bach , Chopin, Mozart,
Schubert, Victor Ullmann and Steve Reich. The absence of titling is noteworthy,
yet the music’s emotional earnestness does succeed occasionally. (We see
hundreds of victim photographs while Steve Reich’s relentless string sounds
evoke train transports.) Other times, played or sung to a backdrop of images in
vibrant colour, the music lulls, or even distracts the viewer. If a viewer does
not know the history, this narration-less opus seems abstract, sad, yet
hauntingly beautiful for reasons that beg for verbal explanation.
Once
a Nazi Frederic Bohbot, dir. Bunbury Film and Ontix Media. 2006 46m.
For 50 years Montreal professor Adalbert Lallier of Concordia University kept
secret his wartime membership in the Waffen SS. He had remained silent about war
crimes he witnessed in seven concentration camps, until it became clear he could
help convict his former commanding officer by testifying at Germany’s last
war-crimes trial. In his old age, Lallier has sought some sort of moral closure
for his years of silence, and this documentary conveys the ambivalence that both
Jews and Germans alike feel about him. (Distributed by the National Film Board
of Canada)
Note: To order any of the abovementioned films associated with the National Film Board of Canada, call toll-free in Canada: 1-800-267-7710 or in the US, 1-800-542-2164.
For international distribution, contact:
International@nfb.ca.
Gary Evans, historian and author, is an adjunct professor in the Department
of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He wrote two groundbreaking books
on Canadian film, John Grierson and the National Film Board of Canada: The
Politics of Wartime Propaganda (1984) and In the National Interest: A
Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949-1989 (1991) both
from the University of Toronto Press. In 2005 he published John
Grierson:Trailblazer of Documentary Film (XYZ Publishing, Montreal). This
book, a popular biography for non academics, was a finalist in the 2006 Grand
Prix du Livre de Sherbrooke. It sheds some light on the lack of public
information in Canada about Europe’s unfolding Jewish tragedy. Professor Evans
was also a contributing historian to, and editor of the 1998 cd- ROM and
website, A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust. He may be reached by email
at <gary.evans@uottawa.ca>