The Holocaust, as seen through the eyes of five international filmmakers, will air on five successive evenings on a U.S. cable network.
Collectively titled “Broken Silence,” the series, to be televised on Cinemax, from April 15-19, at 7 p.m., consists of one-hour documentaries from Hungary, Argentina, Russia, Czech Republic and Poland — each in its native language with English subtitles.
The series is one more spinoff from the prodigious work of Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has videotaped the testimonies of more than 50,000 survivors in 57 countries and 32 languages.
While the massive testimonies are still being cataloged, the Shoah Foundation has already culled its archives to produce three prize-winning documentaries and two educational CDs.
Cinemax made tapes of three of the five films available for previews, of which the most impressive is the Hungarian entry, “Eyes of the Holocaust” by director Janos Szasz.
The son of two Holocaust survivors, Szasz focuses on the experiences of child survivors and dedicates the film “to the 1.5 million children who perished, and for those who survived and had children of their own.”
As in the other films, the actual survivor testimonies form the backbone of the documentary, but Szasz interweaves some devices that might have been jarring in a filmmaker of less artistic sensitivity.
One such device is to have a young girl read out the dictionary definition of a topic, such as “anti-Semitism,” “ghetto” and “deportation,” and then graphically illustrating the topic with archival footage.
Throughout, there are the haunting eyes of children, tearful and bewildered as they are separated from their parents, huge in the gaunt faces of death camp survivors.
The one-time child survivors, now old, remember well: The gleeful laughter of their neighbors as the Jews march to the deportation trains, concentration camp life in which “there was no space for solidarity, everyone had to trample on the others,” and the sad conclusion, “God was not there in Auschwitz.”
Russia’s “Children from the Abyss” also concentrates on the younger victims of the Holocaust, with director Pavel Chukhraj largely letting the horrifying facts and reminiscences speak for themselves.
Leafing through old family photo albums, Chukhraj creates a picture of prewar Jewish life in the Soviet Union that seems a touch too idyllic.
Curious, in the light of Stalin’s subsequent paranoid anti-Semitism, is the faith of some death camp inmates that “If Stalin knew what was happening here, he would save us.”
Another delusion by some as the deportation trains rolled onward was that “We are being sent to Palestine — it’s warm there.”
Most gut-wrenching are the recollections of the child survivors of Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered, and the sadistic brutality of the Ukrainian police.
The Czech Republic’s “Hell on Earth” was directed by Vojtech Jasny, who fought the Nazis as a partisan after his father was murdered in Auschwitz.
He focuses on the sad history within his country’s borders: Hitler’s rapturous reception by the Sudeten Germans in 1939, then the occupation of Prague, and, after he war’s beginning, establishment of the “model” ghetto at Theresienstadt.
In Czechoslovakia, as in Austria, the anti-Semitic laws which took years to evolve in Germany, were imposed full-blown and immediately on Czech Jews.
As throughout conquered Europe, most Czech Jews ended up in Auschwitz, and the graphic details of the survivors’ recollections bear out their insistence that “it is impossible to share our experiences, they can’t be captured.”
James Moll, who won an Oscar for the documentary “The Last Days,” served as over-all producer for “Broken Silence.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
