Abstract
Among the myriad films on the plight of civilians in occupied Europe, this book establishes a thematic division that corresponds to the chronology of the conflict’s memorialization through the vectors of time and space defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as chronotopes. The result is a geo-political alignment that embeds historical and social parameters, showcasing artistic movements and taking into consideration technological developments. These co-ordinates radiate from the conflict’s geographical centres, France, the USSR and Poland, extending to the main allies, the USA and the UK, and occupied countries eventually situated behind the Iron Curtain. László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015), which outlines an escape attempt from Auschwitz in 1944, provides the point of departure for cinematic treatments of resistance and the Holocaust.
‘Earth conceal not my blood’ (Job). Inscription in Sobibor’s Memorial Site, Poland
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Notes
- 1.
On the Festival of Cannes’ website, the organizers list the requirements for the presentation of films. The first refers to its main objective in terms of ‘quality’, ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ as follows: ‘Its aim is to reveal and focus attention on works of quality in order to contribute to the evolution of motion picture arts and encourage the development of the film industry throughout the world’ (http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/participer/rules?id=2).
- 2.
See Jordan Cronk, ‘“Shoah” Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann Talks Spielberg, “Son of Saul”’, Hollywood Reporter, 5 February 2016 (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shoah-filmmaker-claude-lanzmann-talks-869931).
- 3.
Ed Vulliamy, ‘Claude Lanzmann: the Man who Stood Witness for the World’, Observer, 4 March 2102 (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/mar/04/claude-lanzmann-memoir-shoah-interview).
- 4.
These figures take into account the 1941 borders, which included segments from Romania and Czechoslovakia that Hungary had ‘lost’ in the Trianon Treaty after WWI. Within the pre-war borders, the death toll was nearly ninety per cent. Both figures include around 63,000 who died as a result of massacres or malnutrition prior to the armistice.
- 5.
Levi , Chapter 9: The Drowned and the Saved, in If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 2013), pp. 93–106.
- 6.
Levi , The Drowned and the Saved , trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 37, 35, 53.
- 7.
Italo Calvino, ‘Un libro sui campi della morte. Se questo è un uomo’. L’Unità , 6 May 1948; reprinted in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. by Ernesto Ferrero (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 306–7.
- 8.
Levi’s death, caused by a fall from a third-floor apartment, was ruled suicide, though the possibility of accidental death cannot be disregarded.
- 9.
Hilberg , Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). I explain in more detail Hilberg’s approach in Chap. 6: Righteous Gentiles (1987–2011).
- 10.
Nyiszli , Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (London: Penguin, 2012).
- 11.
Levi , The Drowned and the Saved , pp. 63–64.
- 12.
Jozef Warszawski , whose real name was Josef Dorebus, had arrived in Auschwitz from the French camp of Drancy. The men who managed to escape crossed the Vistula River, before hiding in an empty building in which they were tracked down by SS, who killed them and brought their bodies back to be displayed in the camp. See Müller , Eyewitness Auschwitz (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1999), pp. 159–60 for this uprising and Chap. 5, The Inferno (esp. pp. 120–60) for the organization of the resistance, the challenges that they faced and the role of Soviet POWs .
- 13.
Four women, led by Róża Robota, smuggled small portions of gunpowder daily to the camp resistance. The women were subsequently tortured and hanged on 6 January 1945.
- 14.
See ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics’, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258 (p. 84).
- 15.
Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012) and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
- 16.
On the importance of cinema prior to World War II, see Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: IB Tauris, 1987).
- 17.
Deutscher , The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
- 18.
The speech was delivered during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956 behind closed doors. Although the essence of the speech was widely discussed thereafter, it was only published in full in 1989.
- 19.
Michael R.D . Foot estimates around one 3200 women of a total of 13,000 agents. See SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 (Evesham: Greenwood, 1984), p. 62.
- 20.
The Greek and Albanian partisans were equally important. However, in the case of Greece, the Second World War was soon followed by a bitter civil war. The conflict lasted until 1949, when the communist-led Democratic Army of Greece was defeated by the governmental forces supported by the UK . On this topic, see John L. Hondros, ‘Greece and the German Occupation’, The Greek Civil War 1943–50, ed. by David Close (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 32–57; and Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (Baltimore: Yale University Press, 1993).
- 21.
My study has benefited from Jurica Pavičić’s knowledge of Partisan Films, and I wish to thank Pavičić for sending me a copy of ‘Titoist Cathedrals: Rise and Fall of the Partisan Film’ before its publication in Titoism, Self-Determination, Nationalism, Cultural Memory, Volume Two of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Stories Untold, ed. by Gorana Ognjenović and Jasna Jozelić (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 37–65.
- 22.
Rousso uses the neologism ‘résistancialisme’ to denote the mythology of resistance in The Vichy Syndrome : History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994).
- 23.
Hobsbawm and Ranger , The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- 24.
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 22.
- 25.
Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
- 26.
Nora , ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–24.
- 27.
Paxton , Vichy France : Old Guard and New Order , 1940–1944 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1972). Paxton revised some claims in subsequent editions of his work (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
- 28.
Rousso , The Vichy Syndrome (see note 22); Azéma, La collaboration: 1940–1944 (Paris: PUF, 1975).
- 29.
See Paxton , Vichy France : Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
- 30.
Pavone , A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, trans. by Peter Levy and David Broder (London: Verso, 2013). Pavone’s book was first published in Italy in 1991 with a different subtitle Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza, which translates as ‘Historical essay on morality in resistance’.
- 31.
See Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006). Arendt’s collection of articles were written during Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker and first published in 1963. The book has seen multiple re-editions and translations, including the first translation into Hebrew by Ariel Uriel in 2000.
- 32.
Hobsbawm calls ‘Age of Extremes’ the years of the ‘short twentieth-century’, from 1914 until the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the USSR in 1991. His ‘Age of Catastrophe’ embraces the time from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War , 1914–45. See Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth-Century, 1914–1991 (London: Penguin, 1994).
- 33.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s book was republished in an enlarged version in 1947. See The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Baumann , Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Agamben , Remants of Auschwitz : The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002) and State of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- 34.
I borrow the term revenant from Lanzmann . See Ed Vulliamy. ‘Claude Lanzmann: the man who stood witness for the world’. (See note 3).
- 35.
Styron , Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979).
- 36.
In Pakula’s film , the main protagonist, Sophie (Meryl Streep), is a Polish Christian woman whose father is an antisemite. Arrested and taken to Auschwitz with her two children, Sophie is given the choice to which the title alludes between her two children, one of whom is to die and the other to survive.
- 37.
Police Battalions were also involved in massacres directly, as investigated by Christopher Browning’s now classic, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). Direct involvement of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht has been amply documented. See, for example, Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (London: Allen Lane, 2008), pp. 58–60 and passim. Omer Bartov has charted the transformation of the Wehrmacht into a victim of the war by German historians in the 1980s, arguing against ‘the bizarre inversion of the Wehrmacht’s roles proposed by all three exponents of the new revisionism, whereby overtly or by implication the Army is transformed from culprit to saviour, from an object of hatred and fear to one of empathy and pity, from victimizer to victim’. See Bartov, ‘Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich’, ed. by Christian Leitz, The Third Reich: The Essential Readings (London: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 129–150 (p. 148). Bartov pays special attention to the vindication of German soldiers in cinema in ‘Celluloid Soldiers: Cinematic Images of the Wehrmacht’, in Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy: Essays in Honour of John Erikson, ed. by Ljubica Erikson and Mark Erickson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), pp. 130–143.
- 38.
Tec , Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- 39.
Magilov, ‘Jewish Revenge Fantasies in Contemporary Film’, in Jewish Cultural Aspirations, ed. by Bruce Zuckerman, Ruth Weisberg and Lisa Ansell (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), pp. 89–109.
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Camino, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Memories of Resistance and the Holocaust on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49969-1_1
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