Remembering the Holocaust on screen

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held on January 27 and will be marked by special movie and television programming. It takes place on the anniversary of the day the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp, and is distinguished from Yom Hashoah, Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place in the spring and commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that took place on that date. 

Marking January 27 in Israel tends to be a more modest event than the commemoration in the spring. But this year, following the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which was carried out by Hamas on October 7 and led to the outbreak of war, the programs addressing the event at movie theaters and on television will have special resonance.

The Tel Aviv Cinematheque is showing movies throughout the day to mark the event. Among these will be feature films, including Steven Spielberg’s classic Schindler’s List. If you haven’t seen it for a long time, now is the chance to see it on the big screen, where it has much more impact than on television.

There is also The Shadow of the Day by Giuseppe Piccioni, which tells a more intimate story about the lesser-known topic of racial laws against Jews in Mussolini’s Italy. It stars Riccardo Scamarcio as a repressed, pro-Fascist restaurant owner who falls for a young Jewish woman (Benedetta Porcaroli), who is hiding her identity and comes to work as a waitress. Piccioni said in an interview last year, “It’s a love story, but not only a love story.”

Rapito (aka Kidnapped) by Mario Bellocchio, will be shown at both the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Cinematheques, and it deals with a strange antisemitic incident in Italy in the 1850s where a Jewish boy was kidnapped and forced to convert to Catholicism.

The documentaries to be shown include Resistance – They Fought Back, which was directed by Kirk Wolfinger and Paula S. Apsell (see adjacent story) Giado – Holocaust in the Desert, by Sharon Yaish and Golan Rise, about a concentration camp in the Libyan Desert, where Libyan Jews were sent, and Where Are You Going, directed by Jasmine Kainy, a look at Ya’akov Gilad, a composer who cowrote Yehuda Poliker’s album, Ashes and Dust, which is about coming to terms with the Holocaust experiences of their survivor parents, who takes a trip to Poland with his mother.

Hot 8 is showing The European Dream by Mooly Landsman, which looks at the long, complicated fight by two grandsons of German families who live in America and Argentina to recover the artwork stolen by the Nazis from their relatives.

More Holocaust content will be available on Netflix 

You might be surprised how much Holocaust content is available on Netflix, mostly documentaries, but a few feature films as well. I recommend the 2016 drama, Denial, which stars Rachel Weisz as historian Deborah Lipstadt, who is now the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, and which tells the story of a trial in which she was sued for libel by a prominent Holocaust denier.

Ordinary Men is a documentary about the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads that committed much of the killing – mainly by mass shootings of Jews – before the death camps were created.

This is not an easy documentary to watch, but I learned a very interesting fact from it: Any Nazi soldier who said that he did not want to take part in these massacres was simply excused, with no consequences. Presumably had they all refused, it would have caused a problem for the Nazi leadership and perhaps even prevented the massacres.

If you want to enjoy a drama that is a bit lighter, try the miniseries Transatlantic, which tells the story of Varian Fry, a journalist who organized the rescue of Jews and others threatened by the Nazis in Vichy France in the early 40s.

Many legendary artists and writers who took shelter in a villa owned by a friend of Fry’s are featured in the film, among them Marc Chagall, Walter Benjamin, and Max Ernst.