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ABSTRACT
This article analyses the representation of Jewish leaders in Holocaust fiction films, particularly in relation to the ethical dilemmas confronted by members of the Judenräte (Jewish councils) and similar figures in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. With growing interest in the immensely complex circumstances that so-called ‘privileged’ Jews found themselves in, the interventions of Holocaust screen culture in this space are only beginning to be understood. A close analysis of two feature films dealing with Jewish leaders reveals that Holocaust cinema also plays an important role in exploring difficult questions around moral judgment, coercion, and compromise that are at the heart of what Primo Levi called the ‘grey zone.’
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 25.
2 See in particular Hilberg’s introductory sections of The Destruction of the European Jews.
3 Schweid, Wrestling Until Day-break, xx.
4 Langer, Versions of Survival, 72. Here Langer characterizes ‘choiceless choices’ as ‘crucial decisions [that] did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim’s own choosing.’
5 See in particular Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews.
6 Haas, Morality After Auschwitz, 161.
7 For detailed accounts of the diverse nature and behaviors of Judenrat officials, see Trunk, Judenrat; Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.
8 Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews, 76–108.
9 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 134.
10 Diner, Beyond the Conceivable, 117–8.
11 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 41, 43.
12 For a detailed discussion of the multiple layers and theoretical tensions within Levi’s ‘grey zone,’ see Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews, 42–75.
13 Cheyette, “The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi,” 61.
14 On the representation of ‘privileged’ Jews in memoir, see Brown, “Witnessing Moral Compromise” and “Traumatic Memory and Holocaust Testimony”; on literature, see Pettitt, “Jewish ‘Culpability’”; on historical writing, see Brown, “Beyond ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’” and “‘Privileged’ Jews, Holocaust Representation”; on video-testimony, see Brown, “Confronting ‘Choiceless Choices.’”
15 For an analysis of Schindler’s List and Nelson’s The Grey Zone, see Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews and “Marginalising the Marginal in Holocaust Films.” On Sargent’s Out of the Ashes, see Brown, “Revisiting the ‘Victim’/’Perpetrator’ Divide”; on Nemes’s Son of Saul, see Brown, “We Can’t Know What We’re Capable Of.”
16 See Brown, “Narratives of Judgment”; Baer, Spectral Evidence.
17 See, to name a few examples, Ginsberg, Holocaust Film; Gonshak, Hollywood and the Holocaust; Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust; Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust; Lichtner, Film and the Holocaust in France and Italy; Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz; Saxton, Haunted Images.
18 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 247.
19 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, 159.
20 Trunk, Judenrat, 12.
21 For further discussion of Gens’s story, see Arad, Ghetto in Flames; Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders.
22 Sobol, Ghetto. For a detailed discussion of Sobol’s play, see Rokem, “On the Fantastic in Holocaust Performances,” 45.
23 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 49.
24 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 125.
25 Ibid., 123.
26 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 9.
27 Dean, “Life and Death in the ‘Grey Zone,’” 218.
28 Saxton, Haunted Images, 3, 84.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Adam Brown
Dr Adam Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the ‘Grey Zone’ (Berghahn, 2013) and co-author of Communication, Digital Media and Everyday Life (Oxford UP, 2015). Adam’s interdisciplinary research has spanned Holocaust representation across various genres, women in film, surveillance cinema, mediations of rape, digital children’s television, nonhuman animal ethics, transmedia storytelling, and gaming cultures.