There’s something about the enormity of the issues involved here that makes this a very tough watch. (If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong. The Holocaust is not an easy issue to deal with. Films about it can consequently be tough to watch. And so they should be.) That combined with the near three-hour running time (this is not a complaint, honest) means it sat on my pending review pile for quite a while before I finally sat down and watched it.
I suspect Wilkinson is aware of this problem. As the film starts, he takes you (as it were) gently by the hand as he walks into Auschwitz and matter-of-factly discusses its horrors, helped by a man who works in the museum there and has probably helped numerous people before and since to come to terms with the implications of the place as they go round it. Insofar as one ever can.
We learn of the arrivals off the incoming cattle trucks who were told to go down the ten-minute walk to the showers to get themselves cleaned up. They would take off their clothes and fold them neatly so they could pick them up again afterwards. They were herded into the shower interiors, quite densely packed. And they never came out because these weren’t showers at all, but gas chambers used for the systematic elimination of many of the new arrivals. It’s sickening just to think about.
The people who herded them in were inmates themselves. If you were told you could do that job or join them in the gas chambers yourself, what would you do? [A quick aside: the extraordinary and brilliant subjective camera drama Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) goes a long way to understanding an inmate who does this job. Not that that’s possible.] As I say, trying to comprehend the inhumanity of this is really, really hard. These inmate-workers would be told, “the only way out of here is through the chimney.”
The screen shows well-put together maps of the place and gruelling archive footage is presented throughout the film in a non-confrontational, non-sensationalised way which helps. However, this material is, on the most fundamental human level, horrible. There’s a part of you that just wants to get away from the screen and throw up. People shouldn’t treat each other like this. Yet history testifies that they do, and we should never forget the fact. It’s the reason we need films like this, and the reason you need to watch it. Lest we forget, as they say.
Which implies that we know it all already. For myself, though, there is much in this film I didn’t know. Ranging from specific details about perpetrators large and small in the overall process that was the Holocaust right the way through to the scale of the operation (six million Jews turns out both an oversimplification and an understatement) and all the complicated ins and outs of the legal aftermath of the attempts both to track down and administer justice to the numerous perpetrators alongside the numerous attempts of all those involved to evade justice, all to often successfully. Much of what’s shown here is an indictment of humanity, although all the way through there are signs of hope as perpetrators are convicted and justice done. But it seems that too many get (got) off scot free or with woefully inadequate punishment for their appalling crimes. It’s not surprising that someone should want to make a film to address the burning question about the injustice of all this. Kudos to Wilkinson for doing so.
It may make for harrowing and deeply upsetting viewing, but at the same time, it’s consistently compelling. And it absolutely screams out to be seen.
After Auschwitz we move on to France, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria and, eventually, Germany. In his own county of Yorkshire which has a population of 5.4 million, Wilkinson attempts to get his head round the sheer enormity of the figures. For comparison, both Denmark and the US State of Maryland have populations of six million. If all those in Yorkshire were killed, he asks, would the UK government remain silent?
York, where the film has its premiere, is the site of England’s largest massacre of Jews in 1190, when some 150 were killed. Lest we think such things could never happen here.
Wilkinson also travels to Galway, Ireland to see the grave of William Joyce who broadcast German propaganda during the war as Lord Hawhaw. He was captured, tried and, in 1946, executed. His case is comparatively cut and dried compared to what happened to those Germans who abetted the Holocaust.
After Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the shock of what they found in the death camps, the Allies vowed to bring the Holocaust’s perpetrators to justice. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg is often cited, but in fact that was held in a building with the capacity to house no more than 24 defendants of whom three never made it to trial and only 12 received the death sentence.
Matters were scarcely helped by the Nazis’ use of law under the Third Reich. Prior to that, law in most European countries had been based on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, but the regime effectively suspended such considerations, creating a legal framework under which it was permissible to eliminate specific ethnic and other minorities. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ didn’t exist until its instigation for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-6.
Other trials followed, but the Allies failed to keep up the momentum as they became more concerned with the growing threat of the Soviets and the rise of the Cold War than with hunting down Nazi war criminals when Germany was economically on its knees. Finishing the job within Germany’s borders was left largely to Germany itself.
Where East Germany, as a newly formed Communist state, rebuilt its judiciary from scratch with entirely new appointments, West Germany retained many judges who had been in post during the Nazi era, many of whom were somewhat sympathetic to the murderers in the dock. In a very real sense, the post-war, West German judiciary had became Nazified.
Thus, in later West German trials, while some of the murderers received the full force of the law in the death penalty, many sentences were much more lenient or subsequently commuted so that, for example, a 20 year sentence became five years. There are also examples of murderers living in Germany who were never prosecuted, or who got off during a trial using the most spurious of defences. In many cases, these were people living under their real names.
Others fled, most infamously to South America, but to other countries as well, including the UK. In recent years, in his retirement, Nazi hunter Dr. Stephen Ankier researched their whereabouts, often to find the perpetrators he unearthed die of illness or old age before they could be brought to trial. The UK’s record on finding and prosecuting the perpetrators has been poor.
Getting Away With Murder(s) had its premiere on Thursday 9th November in at the Everyman Cinema, York. Dates for further screenings around the UK are constantly being added: click here to see if your town or city is listed yet. If it isn’t, then tell your local cinema you want to see it.
The film is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 1st, the 75th anniversary of the end of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
The title of this film – and the novel it’s based on – refers to a moment in which a peasant catches a bird, covers it with paint and releases it to the flock circling above. When the bird rejoins them, its altered appearance causes the group to swipe it to death. Meanwhile, the peasant observes with a gruff chuckle, amused by his casual sadism. This is the grim metaphor of The Painted Bird, a Holocaust film that meditates on prejudice, cruelty and just about every negative human instinct one can think of.
The story, allegedly autobiographical, follows a young boy leading a nomadic existence in a slew of Eastern European backwaters during the Second World War. Separated from his parents, he meanders from village to village, hissed at and beaten by almost everyone he encounters. Whether he’s cursed as a gypsy, a Jew or even a vampire – the boy is always a painted bird.
For Czech filmmaker Vaclav Marhoul, this relentlessly harsh story has been an 11-year passion project, and this shows in the quality of his grueling three-hour adaptation, which he wrote, directed and produced. It is a work of genuine auteurship that brushes shoulders with the likes of Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) and Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985).
What is most impressive about Marhoul’s film is how it captures the novel’s pace and brooding tone. The reticent first-person narrative has been adapted into a film of visuals and diegetic sound rather than dialogue, absorbing you with Vladimir Smutny’s stark, monochromatic camerawork. Indeed, it is quite uncanny how Marhoul presents Kosinski’s imagery just as you imagined it, capturing the sense of wilderness and base instinct that makes the novel so engrossing.
The narrative is chaptered according to whose guardianship the boy falls into: Marta, Olga, Miller, Lekh & Ludmila, et al. He experiences some mercy with these people, but it proves fleeting as wicked ulterior motives emerge. After all, he is traversing a war-ravaged landscape with little centralised authority, where the mob rules and order is maintained with arbitrary beatings.
Naturally, this violence begets violence, and there are shades of Bad Boy Bubby (Rolph de Heer, 1992) in how the young boy vents his anger. He is bottom of the totem pole wherever he goes, but with animals – namely a goat – he can exact savage revenge against his miserable existence. Soon, the boy graduates to humans, following the only moral instruction he is given during this hellish odyssey, “Remember… an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This commentary on the cyclical nature of violence is one of the most interesting features of Marhaul’s film and Kosinski’s book. It is the most twisted coming of age tale imaginable, depicting how abusers have often themselves been abused. After the litany of sadism and death the boy endures, it doesn’t bear thinking about what sort of man he will become.
It’s been 55 years since Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird was published in the United States. Kosinski would go on to befriend Peter Sellers, write the screenplay for Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) and give a memorable supporting turn in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981). But it is only now, thanks to Vaclav Marhaul’s dogged passion, that the late writer’s Goldingesque morality tale has been realised on the big screen.
The Painted Bird is out in cinemas on Friday, September 11th.
Josef Stalin is reputed to have said, ‘one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.’ Now, quoting a brutal dictator may seem dubious in the review of an Anne Frank documentary, but Stalin’s aphorism contained an unpleasant truth; it is much easier to empathise with the death of one or several individuals than the slaughter of millions, and the Holocaust was the greatest slaughter of them all – where does one begin to comprehend the suffering?
Primo Levi would echo this sentiment years later: ‘One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows.’ With #AnneFrank: Parallel Stories, filmmakers Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto seek to bring this tragically human facet of the Holocaust to the social media generation, especially young women.
This objective is highlighted by scenes of a young girl (Martina Gatti) visiting the sites of Anne’s life and the wider Holocaust, documenting her travels online with the handle @KaterinaKat. A shallow gimmick, some may think, but there’s a good chance it will resonate with its target audience.
The bulk of Parallel Stories is steered by Helen Mirren, who provides narration and readings of Anne’s diary. Mirren’s status lends sizeable heft to the documentary’s profile, but her recitals can be overly thespian. In fact, the film is best when it steps back from Anne Frank and its star narrator and documents the testimonies of five fellow Holocaust survivors: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci.
These ladies recount terrible hardship and suffering, but they do so with strength, defiance and even humour. They have beaten their oppressors and led long, fruitful lives. Especially characterful is Sarah, who has such a cheerful energy that she breaks into song on one occasion. The only strain of sadness running through these interviews is that Anne Frank would be the same age as these ladies if she was here today.
#Anne Frank: Parallel Stories contains no revelations, but it is compelling enough to be procured by teachers and museum curators. It is out in UK and Irish Cinemas from 27th January to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day. On Netflix in July.
From The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007) and Bent (Sean Mathias, 1998) to Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1994) and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), cinema has approached the Holocaust from almost all of its ghastly facets. This list collates a selection of the relative few that consider not the immediate act of genocide but its pernicious spectre. Some concern the overwhelming emotional impact on survivors, such as Sophie’s Choice (Alan J Pakula, 1992) and The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1966), while others, like Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012), Labyrinth of Lies (Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014) and Denial (Mick Jackson, 2016), concern comparative outsiders’ attempts to quantify the event and, in some cases, enact hard-nosed justice.
Below is the full list. The films are listed in chronological order.
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1. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1966):
An oft-neglected entry in Sidney Lumet’s remarkable career, The Pawnbroker is a sombre performance piece led by Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman, the titular pawnbroker. Nazerman is a learned man who, before the soldiers came, had a fulfilling life of family and intellectual curiosity. He managed to survive and flee to the United States, but the murder of his family has reduced his psyche to a barren, nihilist wasteland devoid of joy and personality. The burden of his terrible suffering has ground him down until he just cannot function emotionally, so he treats everyone and everything with a distant contempt. It is only when well-intentioned locals impose themselves on him that he is fired up, albeit with the purpose of trenchantly castigating their ingenuous, pedestrian lives.
The arrival of the warm, empathetic Geraldine, a neighborhood social worker, poses a test to the complexities of Nazerman’s granite exterior, but the film provides no easy answers to his trauma or the crime and hardship of the Manhattan slum in which he exists.
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2. Sophie’s Choice (Alan J Pakula, 1982):
Sophie’s Choice may appear to have that stale ‘prestige drama’ aura that The Reader has, but the titular ‘choice’ of this unusual film is far ghastlier than one can imagine. I entered with foreknowledge of her ‘choice’, but it is preferable that one does not, so it will not be repeated here.
The novel thing about Sophie’s Choice, for better or worse, is how we are told Sophie’s story through the perspective of Stingo, a soft southern writer. Some may make ideologically charged claims of the ‘male gaze’ when discussing Stingo, but he is better described as simply a distraction, an unnecessary narrative device. After all, Sophie’s desperate struggle and Streep’s virtuosic performance are more than enough to steer the narrative.
A justification for Stingo’s character, however, is that he serves as an amiable, grounded perspective in the utterly maniacal relationship between Sophie and Nathan (Kevin Kline), her psychotic partner. We join Stingo in observing the tempestuous dynamic that Nathan steers, which can range from displays of passionate affection to theatrically nasty arguments over the course of just one day.
Kline is excellent, genuinely unhinged; it is a performance that you remember. He takes second place, though, to Meryl Streep, who, with a pitch-perfect accent and masterful dramatic range, utterly becomes the tragic figure of Sophie Zawistowski.
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3. The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008):
The Reader has been described by several critics as ‘middle-brow’, a term that can smack of snobbery yet is appropriately leveled here. Stephen Daldry’s film concerns a whirlwind affair between Michael (David Kross), a bright young man with a flair for reading, and Hannah (Kate Winslet), an intense, aloof woman in her thirties who, in a rather contrived fashion, is revealed to have been a guard at Auschwitz and a separate, smaller camp.
Now the best thing about this somewhat middling film is the erotic candidness of their relationship. Their strange dynamic has real intimacy and a mystique that’s warped and unnerving. More pertinent to this list, though, is how the film depicts Germany’s reaction to the unique ghastliness of their recent history. During Hannah’s trial, there is a strong sense of unwillingness amongst the jury and the gallery to consider the abhorrent details of the Holocaust. They do not want justice, they want catharsis, so they will just convict whoever is accused in an attempt to reach it. This mob-thinking attitude is evident in both the jury and Michael’s university classmate Dieter (Volker Bruch), whose emotionally driven rants are unbecoming of a law student. However, these themes of collective memory and shame are better explored in other entries in this list.
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4. Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2011):
The title of this French drama echoes that of Sophie’s Choice and its significance is similarly hateful. The film opens by thrusting the viewer into a cramped apartment in Nazi-occupied Paris; in it is a family of four, gripped with fear as the authorities bang at their door. For thousands of Jews across France, this was the beginning of the end. French complicity in the Holocaust killed some 77,000 people, and Sarah’s Key depicts the frenzy and maddening injustice of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and beyond with visceral energy.
These moments are relayed to us through flashbacks, for the bulk of the film concerns Julia (Kristen Scott Thomas), an American journalist living in Paris. Having written about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup in the past, she becomes deeply curious when her French husband inherits a Parisian flat that his grandparents moved into in August 1942. Convinced that Jews had been evicted the property, she doggedly investigates until the ghastly truth is unraveled for all concerned.
It is an absorbing film, no doubt, and Thomas’s performance has a subtle and affecting emotional range despite her default frostiness. However, the contrast in intensity between the flashbacks and the contemporary story causes one to wonder if Sarah’s Key would have been better if it was solely a period piece, a feeling that is somewhat reinforced by lashings of melodrama towards the end.
And yet, despite the distractions of the narrative’s toing and froing, Sarah’s Key manages to thoroughly absorb, intrigue and invest you.
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5. Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012):
When the capture of Adolf Eichmann stirred up the collective memory of the Holocaust in 1960, the reaction was one of disgust and incredulity, even amongst the learned circles that Hannah Arendt belonged to. Eichmann was caricatured as an evil monster that was to be confronted with his crimes in a dramatic show trial and then sent to his death once some sort of catharsis had been achieved.
Such emotionally driven responses were understandable but most often crass and unhelpful. Arendt had no time for such simplistic, knee-jerk thinking and instead sought to understand and explain Eichmann’s reasoning and ideology. Her conclusion was the now famous ‘banality of evil’, which posited that Eichmann was not a psychopath but a mere bureaucrat – a normal person with petty careerist aspirations. This thesis alone was a cause for concern amongst friends and colleagues in academic and media circles, but it was her claim that some Jewish leaders acted in a quasi-complicit manner during the Holocaust that triggered a vicious backlash. Arendt became the target of character assassination from the press, her peers and the public, who inundated the New Yorker with angry phone calls and threatening, abusive letters that made the risibly stupid accusation that Arendt was somehow a Nazi sympathiser. Hit pieces were also published in the New York Times and her faculty ‘recommended’ that she resign. It was a despicable act of feeble group think that is all too familiar in our age of no-platforming and safe spaces.
To her credit, Arendt remained absolutely steadfast, skewering her hysterical critics with considered argument and barbed wit. Barbara Sukowa’s performance captures Arendt’s conviction brilliantly, both her intellectual conviction as well as the intimate love she has for her husband Heinrich, which is keenly reciprocated. Of course, Arendt was not beyond reproach, no intellectual is, but the controversy depicted in Hannah Arendt was not a sensible dialogue but mob-thinking outrage. The ultimate message of this story is that the bulwark of reason, logic and dialogue should always be upheld, even when faced with the most horrendous circumstances.
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6. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013):
Ida (also pictured at the top of this article) is firmly within the Eastern European tradition of harsh realism; its brooding tone and stark aesthetic having much in common with films like A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988) Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2008). Where Ida differs is its overwhelming reliance on mood to tell it story. It is reserved, perhaps to a fault, but the glumness of the characters, their situation and their surroundings go some way in capturing the zeitgeist of post-war Poland, which had survived the apocalyptic brutality of one enemy only to be occupied by another for four and half decades.
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7. Everything is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2014):
Adapted from Jonathon Safran Fore’s precocious autobiographical debut novel, Everything is Illuminated is by some measure the most offbeat and unconventional film in this list. It has more than a whiff of Wes Anderson in the visual way it depicts the protagonist’s obsession with mementoes as well as the quirky characters that assist him in his Ukrainian odyssey. Despite this, it avoids poor taste for it eschews sentimentality and does not overbear you with its idiosyncrasies.
Some critics have noted the loss of substance in the transition from page to screen, and it is, to be frank, one of the more frivolous entries in this list, more so than Remember. While ‘frivolous’ is not a word many would like to be associated with this subject, Everything is Illuminated has enough offbeat charm and striking cinematography to find an audience.
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8. Denial (Mick Jackson, 2014):
In 2016 British director Mick Jackson returned to form with Denial, which depicts the Irving vs Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial, a landmark event in postwar Holocaust denial. Early in the film, a student of Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) asks a question regarding Holocaust denial to which Lipstadt replies that she does not debate Holocaust deniers. This sentiment would be acceptable for your average Holocaust denier or troll, but David Irving, an historian whose early work has been praised by the likes of John Keegan and Hugh Trevor Roper, wasn’t and isn’t that.
This is a problem, for the best way to defeat a warped, dishonest argument is with a reasoned, factual one – not indignant dismissal. Weisz’s Lipstadt displays this righteous indignation on several occasions and it is rather unbecoming of a professional historian, Jewish or not. The veracity of Weisz’s performance is unclear, but it felt as if these moments of emotional anger – especially during heated exchanges with her legal team – were written for the purpose of conflict and drama. It would have been better if these passages were replaced with wider dissections of Holocaust denial, chiefly the Leuchter Report. Despite the brevity of the trial scenes and Denial’s rather televisual style, though, it remains a robust drama that captures the stress and weight of the courtroom and serves as a stimulating gateway to the subject of Holocaust denial.
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9. Labyrinth of Lies (Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014):
Labyrinth of Lies is not an emotionally involving film, but as a dramatisation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials it is well considered and illuminating. It follows Johann Radmann, a young, quixotic lawyer whose righteous indignation sees him launch a pointed investigation into those who collaborated with the concentration camp system.
He points out that just 150 people were convicted at Nuremberg, yet this figure seems to be sufficient for the average citizen of Frankfurt, for the knowledge of what happened in the camps was seemingly too much to bear. Indeed, the film’s depiction of the Germans’ wilfull ignorance of their immediate history is shocking as it is compelling. It reflects the paradigm shift that occurred in Allied foreign policy, which sought to transform their former enemy into a bulwark against the new Red Threat. Once the immediate denazification process was complete, seeking justice for the Holocaust was not a key interest or indeed an interest at all amongst much of the German and Nato establishment. It is in this contentious atmosphere that Radmann pursues the almost insurmountable task of bringing the collaborators to justice, and we see both the nobility and toxic alienation that comes with hardnosed perseverance against the maddeningly blinkered status quo.
The best exchanges are between Radmann, his journalist ally Thomas Gnielka and Auschwitz survivor Simon Kirsch, who develop some degree of comradeship. Again, though, Labyrinth of Lies does not leave an impression on an emotional level. It focuses instead on period detail, both aesthetically and politically, illustrating the willful amnesia and eventual reckoning in the formative years of the German Republic.
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10. Remember (Atom Egoyan, 2015):
The premise of Remember stretches credibility to its limits, beyond it in some cases, yet Atom Egoyan’s film is compulsive viewing thanks to its energetic plotting and Christopher Plummer’s superb central performance as Zev Guttman, an elderly Auschwitz survivor, Alzheimer’s sufferer and recent widow who resides in an American nursing home.
Zev’s Alzheimer’s manifests itself in sudden bouts that can attack at any moment, yet fellow resident and Holocaust survivor Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) reminds Zev of what he promised to do when his wife died. In a haze of confusion, Zev agrees to honour his promise, which is to hunt and kill Otto Wallisch, the SS Blockfuhrer who murdered their families before immigrating to America under the name of Rudy Kurlander.
Armed with a Glock handgun hidden in his wash bag, Zev’s mission takes him across North America in what film critic Richard Roeper described as a ‘mash-up of The Terminator, Marathon Man and Memento’. Roeper’s summary makes it seem more ludicrous than it is, though, because the immediate and overarching concern is not the confrontations Zev has to make but the jeopardy of his advanced age, which coils you with unease as he navigates a world that he can barely operate in. Indeed, Plummer succeeds in distracting you from the implausibilities of the narrative by imbuing his performance with vulnerability and grandfatherly benevolence that causes you to invest in his character and his story.
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HONOURABLE MENTION – Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961):
Much like Labyrinth of Lies would do 50 years later, Judgment at Nuremberg depicts the messy, overwhelming task of holding to account the bureaucrats and middle managers of the Nazi regime. Like all good legal dramas there are scathing zingers fired between the prosecution and the defence, but the film’s three-hour commitment to educating its audience despite being merely inspired by the Nuremberg Trials causes one to wish they were watching an actual documentary account of the event rather than a semi-fictional one.
Time doesn’t always heal, particularly when the wound is way too profound. The inability to forget sometimes prevails in one’s life. And the inability to express their suffering can haunt and torture the victims until the end of their days, however long they live. Thankfully cinema is here in order to speak up for people. And that’s precisely what Destination Unknown does: it gives voice to Holocaust survivors still alive seven decades later after their ordeal came to an end.
The film by Claire Ferguson, who is no stranger to the subject of mass murder (she edited Nick Broomsfield’s 2003 doc Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), is a remarkable and intimate portrait of the few who dodged almost-certain death under the Nazi regime and lived to tell their story at old age. Some made it it by working for Oskar Schindler, others in hiding and a few defied all odds and survived the horrors inside the concentration camps. To this day, they still have nightmares that they are drowning or walking on corpses.
The coloured talking heads testimonies are contrasted against black and white footage from the war (particularly from the Soviet Liberation Army), as well as images of these people visiting the places of horror at present time (including the camps of Plaszów and Auschwitz). The colour of the latter is very faint, lifeless and dull, as if the filmmaker wanted to remind us that these places are no longer functional, and they can no longer kill people. The colour red is nowhere to be seen now. Nor is blood. Nor is death.
The movie also investigates the immense altruism of German industrialist Oskar Schindler as well as the extreme sadism of Commandant Amon Goeth. While the factory-owner spent all of his fortune saving his Jewish workers, the military officer entertained himself by shooting Jews with his rifle from his balcony. He even smile at his own trial after the War. The survivors speak of both the absurd monstrosity (which Hannah Arendt famously described as “the banality of evil”) and the sheer humanity that they encountered along their way, particularly in the figure of these two very different men, both members of the Nazi Party.
While poignant and sobering, Destination Unknown probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, specially if you’ve seen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The 1993 classic also portrays Schindler and Goeth, played by Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. It’s a still valuable historical register.
Destination Unknown is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 16th.
