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ABSTRACT
This article contrasts the Spanish The Angel of Budapest and the Italian Perlasca to demonstrate the process of constructing a national Holocaust hero. The two biopics have identical plots, albeit with different leading heroes: the Spanish Angel Sanz Briz and the Italian Giorgio Perlasca are pitted against each other. By emphasizing the rescuers actions, these films seek to mask the complicity of Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy in the Holocaust. While both films romanticize central characters, the Italian movie represents failed rescue and violence, whereas the Spanish film transforms the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry into a feel-good movie, centering on Christian values.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Conferencias de Historia: Héroes Translation and transcription of the author.
2 Linhard, Jewish Spain, 100.
3 During the Franco dictatorship there was only one way of remembering the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which was a fight against evil, where the only dead to be remembered were those of the right-wing parties or the Nationalists or the Fascists. After the death of Franco a ‘Pact of Silence’ was self-imposed. The silence would be eventually broken when the generation of grandchildren embarked upon a journey to better understand their family histories and the past of their countries. At the beginning of the new millennium a “memory-boom” erupted and hundreds of novels, movies, and history books dealing with the legacies of the past suddenly appeared.
4 Rother, “Myth and Fact,” 51.
5 Many historians share the opinion that Francoist Spain intervened more actively on the part of Sephardic Jews only after the tide of the war turned with the landing of the Allied troops in Normandy in June, 1944. Relatively speaking, Hungarian Jews received more help from the Spanish government because their deportation occurred in the late war period.
6 Perra, “Legitimizing Fascism,” 97.
7 Baer and Sznaider, Memory and Forgetting, 13.
8 Ibid. 93.
9 Rother, “Myth and Fact,” 63.
10 Nidam-Orvieto, Italy and Jews.
11 Perra, “Between National and Cosmopolitan,” 96.
12 Original title: La banalità del bene. Storia di Giorgio Perlasca.
13 Original title: Un español frente al Holocausto.
14 Anderson, Imagined Communities.
15 Horowitz, “Good for Jews?,” 125.
16 McGlothlin, “The ‘Wrong’ Victim.”
17 Kapczynski, “Singular Jew,” 117.
18 Ortov, “Schindler’s Holocaust,” 46.
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Éva Serfőző
Éva Serfőző is a PhD Candidate in Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. As a literary scholar with a focus on dictatorship, collective memory, and human rights, she is interested in the ways we reconstruct our narratives of the past in the wake of a political transition process. Her current research examines how the memories of the national dictatorships in Spain (1939–1975) and Hungary (1949–1990) interact with memory discourses concerning the Holocaust.