A guide to Holocaust Remembrance Day programs at the movies and on TV

As 132 Israelis and citizens of other countries are currently held hostage in Gaza after they were kidnapped from Israel, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which will be marked this year from May 5-6, takes on an even sadder and more urgent meaning, and cinematheques and television networks are presenting a number of films and programs that can help deepen our understanding of the tragedy.

The dramatic series The Tattooist of Auschwitz begins showing a few days before Holocaust Remembrance Day on Hot and Yes, and the drama White Bird, about a girl who survives hiding out in France, which stars Helen Mirren, is still in theaters.

The new series We Were the Lucky Ones, about a Polish-Jewish family’s struggle for survival during the Holocaust and based on the bestselling novel of the same name, has just become available in Israel on Disney+.

KAN 11 will feature a documentary series with Akiva Novick, Go and Remember, about how the Holocaust is commemorated and how such commemorations have changed over the years, including during the last six months. It will also show Assaf Lapid’s fascinating, award-winning documentary The Return from the Other Planet, about the mysterious writer who called himself Ka-Tzetnik, whose pulp fiction novels about Auschwitz mesmerized and sometimes scandalized generations.

Yes Docu and Hot 8 will show a number of new documentaries, including The Jewish Nazi?, which tells the bizarre story of Alex Kurzem, a survivor who escaped the massacre of his family’s shtetl in Belarus in 1941. He was captured by a Latvian battalion, who gave him a uniform and a gun and made him their child mascot. The Jewish Nazi? is based on Kurzem’s bestselling book, The Mascot, and it traces his journey to Australia with his adopted Latvian family.

These channels will also show the documentary series Hitler’s Handmaidens, which tells how some German women played a much more central role in the Holocaust than previously thought.

Yes will show many feature films on its Yes Cinematheque channel, including Laszlo Nemes’s Oscar-winning Son of Saul, one of the most graphic and accurate dramatic films about the Holocaust ever made, (and which will also be shown on CellcomTV), as well as Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice, which stars Meryl Streep in an Oscar-winning performance as a gentile concentration-camp survivor in a relationship with an American Jew, played by Kevin Kline. Michel Kichka’s animated film My Father’s Secrets, about the son of an Auschwitz survivor, will premiere on Yes VOD and CellcomTV, and is highly recommended.

Hot 8 will show the film A Deal with the Devil?, by Avida Livny, a look at the little-known and very controversial agreement between Jewish leaders, the British, and the Nazi governments to allow 60,000 German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in 1933. Hot 8 will also show Paula Apsell and Kirk Wolfinger’s Resistance: They Fought Back, which tells previously unknown stories of resistance during the Holocaust. Hot 3 will feature a broadcast of the program Zikaron BaSalon, where Holocaust survivors share their stories with small groups in private homes. 

An extensive program of movies

The Tel Aviv Cinematheque will feature an extensive program of movies starting the week before Holocaust Remembrance Day. Among these will be Orna Ben Dor’s Because of That War, about the children of Holocaust survivors, including musician Yehuda Poliker, with the director attending to discuss the film. Isaac Brown’s English-language Traces, Voices of the Second Generation also looks at how the Holocaust affects the second generation. Yoav Paz and Doron Paz’s recent feature-film, Plan A, also in English, tells a fact-based story about Nakam, a group of survivors who planned to take revenge on Germany by poisoning the water system there.

Most of the programs at the Jerusalem Cinematheque are free of charge, and they include a screening of the movie One Life, which is still playing in other theaters around Israel, which tells the true story of a British man, Sir Nicholas Winton, played by Anthony Hopkins, who saved many Jewish children from Europe.

One of the Kindertransport children, George Shefi, will speak in Hebrew at the screening. It will also present AMCHA’s Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, with the participation of Holocaust survivors and their families, October 7 survivors, and evacuees from the North and the South. Singer Shuli Rand will perform and it will be hosted by Ofer Hadad.

For those who haven’t seen it or would like to watch it again, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the most famous Holocaust drama of all time, is available on Netflix and Apple TV+.