We Hope That You Enjoy the Holocaust

Remarkable films and plays about mankind’s most heinous genocide tend to come in clusters. If the Holocaust itself is stark and unchanging, every generation forges its own connection to that history, in its own distinct emotional register.

It is no coincidence, for instance, that Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro and Louis Malle’s Goodbye Children were released in the 1980s. “Both directors were born in 1932 and were finally able to process childhood memories fifty years later,” film historian Annette Insdorf observed in her book Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. For directors Roman Polanski, who made The Pianist, and Costa Gavras, who made Amen, both released in 2002, processing the events of their childhoods would take another two decades.

This past year on Broadway witnessed yet another outpouring of Holocaust-inspired dramas on stage and on screen. But the most recent cluster suggests that the task of dramatically exploring the roots and impact of the systematic extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry during World War II, the “Shoah,” or “catastrophe” in Hebrew, has grown ever more daunting.

In part, that’s because today’s playwrights and filmmakers lack the firsthand access of earlier dramatists to the genocide’s witnesses, perpetrators, and survivors. Reflecting that access, three of the best films of that earlier era—Night and Fog (1956) by Alain Resnais, The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Ophuls (1969), and Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour exploration of the Holocaust (1985)—were documentaries. So politically sensitive was the subject in the mid-1950s that French censors and the German Embassy in France tried to stop the release of Resnais’s Night and Fog at the Cannes Film Festival. Ophuls, the German French filmmaker, had an easier time a decade later exploring the collaboration between the Nazis and Vichy in his adopted France; Lanzmann, also French, examined Polish complicity in the annihilation of Europe’s Jews almost entirely through oral testimony from survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators.

By the time Steven Spielberg grappled with the Holocaust in 1993, many of its eyewitnesses had died and the risk of creating a work of “Holokitsch” had soared. Schindler’s List, which I greatly admired—then and now—focused on Oskar Schindler, the rescuer of Jews, or what my late husband, Jason Epstein, not a fan of the film, called an “exotic exception.” By lionizing a righteous, or not-so-righteous gentile, Spielberg was able to avoid what Jason called the “terrible questions” about how what was reputed to be Europe’s most civilized nation could have conducted the world’s first industrialized mass slaughter.

Spielberg is, of course, quintessentially American, which is to say an optimist, which perhaps explains why he chose to make a film about a savior rather than a victim or perpetrator. But that same impulse led to an unfortunate coda that undercut his film’s haunting depiction of Nazi evil.

The film’s last scene strove to conjure up, if not a happy, E.T. ending, a modicum of redemption. After his searing portrayal of the Jewish genocide in Warsaw and Auschwitz, his black-and-white film switched to technicolor in modern-day Israel where a parade of those lucky enough to have been on Schindler’s iconic list and their offspring honor their savior by laying stones on his grave. Try as he might, however, even Spielberg, one of our most gifted and successful filmmakers, could not slap a happy ending on the Holocaust.

This past season’s dramas struggled with the same dramatic challenges. Some were modern-day efforts to distill childhood memories into cinematic and theatrical sagas, not unlike France’s Truffaut and Malle. One of the most popular and best received plays this past season was Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. The play, a London import, was clearly intended to dramatize the playwright’s belated awareness of his Jewish ancestry. Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia as Tomáš Sträussler, inherited the name from his English stepfather. Stoppard is one of our finest playwrights, but this play was not his finest.

Named for the Jewish quarter of Vienna between 1899 and 1955, the play follows multiple generations of a wealthy Jewish family. Leopoldstadt had powerful moments, and a moving penultimate scene in which a cousin confronts the Stoppard-like character about his denial of the past and his own Jewish heritage. But the play was overwhelmed by too many poorly developed characters—31 in all. The New York production felt like more of a mess than the London version, with an American cast speaking with faux English accents in what was supposed to be Vienna.

Still, Leopoldstadt raised an essential question that European Jews faced before the Holocaust: Is assimilation the answer to antisemitism. The answer, following the Shoah, should be obvious, which may partly account for the play’s flatness. Its final scene, with a listing of the names of the family members who did not survive, was a kitschy cliche. And because almost none of Stoppard’s characters was well-defined, it was difficult to care about their fates.

A more powerful exploration of European antisemitism was a three-hour-long revival of a Polish play titled Our Class, which was deserving of the misplaced accolades bestowed on Leopoldstadt. Written by the Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek, it focuses on 10 classmates—half Jewish, half Catholic—in a wartime Polish village. The play, which opened in London in 2009, finally made it to New York for a limited off-Broadway run at BAM Fisher in January. Adapted into English by Norman Allen and directed by Igor Golyak, it unflinchingly explores the antisemitism so deeply ingrained in Poland even before the Soviet Union briefly invaded and occupied the village.

Though the village is unnamed, it is reputed to be a fictional version of Jedwabne, which endured a similar pogrom. Original, harrowing, and occasionally savage, the play has an effective, minimal set—a giant blackboard, appropriately. Its dramatic anchor is a day in 1941 when Catholics rounded up 1,600 Jews, including some of their former classmates, locked them in a barn, and burned them alive. Later, the perpetrators conveniently blame the slaughter on the Nazis, a rewriting of history that persisted for decades both in the play and, alas, in modern-day Poland.

Some of the play’s most heinous characters go on to lead long, contented lives as pillars of their church and community, another example of fiction echoing reality. So much for the arc of history bending toward justice.

French antisemitism was the target of another sprawling, well-received play on Broadway this year. Prayer for the French Republic, by the talented Joshua Harmon, who wrote Bad Jews, a well-received dark comedy. Set in Paris in 2016-17, the play is about the Salomons, a well-assimilated Jewish family who have been making pianos in France since 1855 but are now confronting growing antisemitism in the country they have long considered their own.

After their son is attacked by antisemites near the school where he teaches, the family debates whether they should emigrate to Israel, which before Oct. 7 and the play’s creation seemed like a safer place. First produced off Broadway two years ago by the Manhattan Theatre Club, the theme of Jewish endangerment has become ever more pressing with the latest resurgence of antisemitism in France, which reported 360 antisemitic episodes in the first three months of this year, an average of four a day, and also in the United States, where the FBI reported that hate crimes involving Jews—who comprise around 2% of the U.S. population—now outnumber those against African Americans or any other group.

Despite being three hours long and exceptionally well-acted, the play had intellectual and emotional gaps. At the start of the play, for example, Marcelle Salomon (Betsy Aiden), a psychiatrist and the family’s overprotective matriarch, is devoted to France and mocks the notion of “aliyah” to Israel. Her sudden decision near the play’s end to desert France and move to Israel with husband Charles, whose family immigrated to France from Algeria, is both perplexing and unconvincing. Another flaw is Harmon’s devotion to lengthy diatribes. The family’s brilliant, but manic-depressive daughter (Francis Benhamou in her impressive Broadway debut) delivers one that lasts nearly 20 minutes.

Like Leopoldstadt, the play never really answers the vital questions it raises: chief among them, how and when do Jews know that it’s time to flee for safety to a place they may eventually be forced to abandon.

Despite the incredibly high artistic level of the plays themselves, none of the three broke new intellectual or emotional ground. “We know what happened,” said Robert Marx, president of the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation. “But why did it happen? In Our Class, for example, what was in the culture of that Polish village that made it so easy for the classmates to turn on their own? In a play about the Holocaust,” he said, “there should be something that goes beyond telling us what we already know.”

The exception this past season was a fourth play—a documentary drama that had an extended, but all-too-brief run just as the season was ending. Here There Are Blueberries, a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama, directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, recounts how archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum obtained, researched, and tried to make sense of a past depicted in a unique album of 116 photographs on 32 cardboard pages. The images are of the lives of Germans at ease at their place of work—Auschwitz.

The photos are utterly mundane—SS officers sunning themselves on the deck of Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge on the Sola River near the camp, officers flirting with secretaries and taking a smoking break, cheerful young female communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries, and Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant who assembled the album for still unknown reasons, lighting the camp’s Christmas tree.

The album stuns the curator on whose desk it lands—Rebecca Erbelding, well portrayed by Elizabeth Stahlmann—who quickly recognizes two of its subjects—Josef Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death,” and Rudolf Höss, a fervent Nazi and the administrative architect of the camp where 1.1 million died.

Her research reveals much about lesser-known complex figures—such as the album’s owner, who found it in an apartment in Germany while stationed there as a young army intelligence officer during the war, kept it for 60 years, and died soon after donating it to the museum.

Much of the play’s emotional punch involves the museum staff’s debate over whether a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jewish genocide and its victims should display a work of Nazis at play. The album, after all, contained not a single photo of the inmates within the camp.

Thankfully, for the sake of history and the accuracy of our collective memory of the Holocaust, the museum director, Sara Bloomfield, deftly played by Erika Rose, and the photography director, featuring the incomparable Kathleen Chalfant, decide that the album must be shown, if only as evidence of what Hannah Arendt coined the “banality of evil,” the fact that atrocities are often perpetrated not by notorious villains, but by disturbingly ordinary people who cavort in gardens, grin for the camera, and yes, eat bowls of blueberries.

Woven together by stunning lighting, sound, and images from the album projected on massive screens behind the actors, the play relies on a series of interviews, the technique that Kaufman, Gronich, and their innovative Tectonic Theater Project used for its earlier, hugely successful play, The Laramie Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. Kaufman, whom I have admired since his dazzling play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, believes that documentary plays can be as emotionally powerful as their fictional counterparts, a view I share.

This is particularly true for dramas about the Holocaust, whose images and symbols have too often become cliches. They no longer haunt us as they once did—the endless references to the “6 million,” the stacks of thousands of shoes and eyeglasses that are now de rigueur at Holocaust museums in the West, the omnipresent photographs of camp survivors, half-starved Jewish skeletons in striped uniforms that dangle from their bones. Blueberries is a counterpoint to all that. The play approaches the Holocaust obliquely, focusing not on the genocide’s notorious villains, but rather on those anonymous ordinary people who collaborated with the Nazis. The play also pays tribute to the museum archivists, modern-day heroes whose quiet research documents the widespread complicity of average people in the Jewish slaughter. Karl Höcker, after all, the camp commandant’s assistant who assembled the album, was a bank teller—before and after the war.

The only real failing of Blueberries lies in the genre of theater itself. For this year’s most original, memorable films about the Holocaust carried far greater emotional heft and sounded far fiercer political alarms than most of their counterparts on stage. Contemporary filmmakers can conjure up images and create dramatic moments that are difficult, if not impossible to replicate in a theater.

Consider Zone of Interest, whose subject matter is similar in many ways to the innovative Blueberries. The film, which won an Oscar this year as best international feature film, also focuses on Auschwitz. Set adjacent to the death camp in the camp commandant’s home, the film, like the play, never shows us a victim. In fact, the Hösses seem to be just an ordinary family when we first see them picnicking by a river on a sunny afternoon and then returning to their unpretentious but well-appointed house. Hedwig Höss, terrifyingly played by Sandra Huller, the German actress who starred in Anatomy of a Fall, proudly shows off her greenhouse and garden with its neat rows of planted flowers, vegetables, and herbs to visiting family and friends, among them, her mother. Hedwig’s children frolic in the wading pool, ride horseback, and go off to school.

The action is all fairly mundane until husband Rudolf (Christian Friedel) appears the next morning in his Nazi uniform, dressed to kill for his day job. The family’s ability to live seemingly ordinary lives amid the evil around them is the contrast that lies at the heart of this original, wrenching film, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer and based loosely on Martin Amis’ less artistically successful 2014 novel by the same name.

The film’s soundtrack is a virtual second film, as the production team called it, crafted by sound designer Johnnie Burn who deserved to win Best Sound at this year’s Oscars. The audience hears but never sees the atrocities unfolding next door in the 15-square-mile “Interessengebiet,” the “Interest Zone.” Just beyond the tall wall that borders Hedwig’s garden, one can barely decipher the muffled sound of trains and gunfire, dogs barking, the shouting of orders and the soft screams of victims. But once those sounds register, you can’t stop hearing them.

Glazer’s harrowing film, unlike many others about Nazism, focuses mercilessly on our all-too-human ability to deny and compartmentalize evil, to avoid hearing and seeing what disturbs us. When Rudolf is promoted to another camp, Hedwig insists on staying on at her home to preserve her garden and the life she so clearly enjoys there.

The closest she and her five children come to the camp crematoria is the white ash that often drifts across the garden wall, ash that a prisoner tending her garden uses to fertilize the flowers by day and which float through the air like tiny snowflakes at night. But the ash so disturbs Hedwig’s mother, who once cleaned houses and is initially pleased by her daughter’s improved financial circumstances, that she leaves the next morning without saying goodbye.

Hedwig herself appears impervious to the horror around her. While she “shops” through clothing obviously seized from prisoners, one of her friends casually remarks over tea that she once found a diamond hidden in a tube of toothpaste. “They are so clever,” the friend says.

In an even more chilling scene, Frau Höss dons a floor-length fur coat in front of her bedroom mirror, while carefully checking the lining for hidden jewels. But before modeling her new coat, she closes the bedroom door, apparently aware that what she was doing is wrong.

Another fascinating examination of the Nazi past and its connection to the present is Occupied City by Steve McQueen, the much-admired British director who won an Oscar for Twelve Years a Slave. His documentary charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation house by house, street by street, from cafes to the Royal Concertgebouw. There is no archival footage. The only “talking head” is the narrator, Melanie Hyams, a British voice actor. Her tone is “just the facts, ma’am” dispassionate.

McQueen bases his script, such as it is, on his Dutch wife, the historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter’s “atlas” of Amsterdam under Nazi occupation—Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, a meticulously researched chronicle of life under the Nazi occupation during World War II. His technique is to open with a shot of a contemporary place in Amsterdam—a nightclub, a school, a museum, the docks, a canal—as Hyams reads a thumbnail sketch of what happened there.

We learn, for example, that an open square next to what is now the Hard Rock Cafe was once a prison yard where Jews were forced to march chanting: “I am a Jew, beat me to death, it’s my own fault.” A school is now the former headquarters of the secret police. What appears to be a nondescript home is a place where Dutch resistance members hid Jews before their escape by sea to England. A boarded-up storefront was the site of a cafe that after the Nazi occupation in 1940 was among the first to ban Jews. The camera moves steadily, but neither chronologically nor by neighborhood, from location to location, 130 of them, one after another, stating briefly what happened at each place.

Mercifully, McQueen did not include Prinsengracht 263, the building in which Anne Frank and her family hid, and there are only a few references to the Holocaust’s most famous victim. Perhaps McQueen avoided the building because the Dutch have turned it into one of Holland’s most popular tourist sites, part of a collective effort to erase Dutch complicity in the murder of Jews at a rate second only to that of Poland. Or perhaps he wanted his film to avoid endorsing the spirit of the Frank diary’s most celebrated infuriating line—“in spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” No one watching McQueen’s recitation of Jewish deportations and murder in Amsterdam or recalling that Frank and most of her family were betrayed by the Dutch and died at Auschwitz, can endorse that schmaltz.

Though ambitious, original and often gripping, the film is long—four-and-a-half hours with, mercifully, an intermission—too long for most viewers and even for several critics. But it could have been longer, said McQueen. In fact, he told IndieWire, he shot 36 hours of film around Amsterdam, where he now lives—nine times the length of the final cut.

But there is danger in the seemingly endless repetition of thumbnail sketches of what happened in each place—read in a dispassionate monotone. After a while, the dry compressed paragraphs about a place, what happened there, the fate of a victim, (usually “killed at Auschwitz,”) or a savior, or the Nazis who lived and worked in these buildings all begin to blur. “I’m afraid that at four hours, ‘Occupied City’ is enough to make the audience feel trapped,” wrote Owen Gleiberman, Variety’s chief film critic.

At moments, however, I yearned not for less, but more information about the people and places McQueen was filming. How many of those Dutch resistance fighters survived the war? Did the people in the contemporary homes and offices McQueen filmed know anything about the fate of those who had lived and worked there? Do the contemporary Dutch he films frolicking in swimming pools, skating on ponds, and protesting COVID restrictions in the town’s main square know that the Nazis were able to occupy Amsterdam with so few troops because the indigenous Dutch Nazi party was so strong?And was he really comparing protesters against the pandemic lockdown being countered by police and water cannons with what the Nazis did there?

Toward the film’s end, there is a brilliant scene of an empty tram traveling through the city in fog, coming into the sunlight and being cleansed with water at the end of its run, and a joyful rehearsal in a local synagogue for a bar mitzvah of the son of a biracial couple, an optimistic coda to a film that has focused unrelentingly on an ugly part of the city’s past. But it’s hard to judge from the film itself whether that ending has been earned—especially in a city where Jews are once again living in fear for their lives.