Feeling “A Real Pain” on Holocaust Remembrance Day

April 23, which falls just after the joyous Passover season, is the date of this year’s Yom HaShoah, also known Holocaust Remembrance Day. It commemorates, especially in Israel, the approximately six million Jews senselessly slaughtered by the Nazi regime before and during  World War II.  Among local U.S. commemorations, I’ve just read about one planned for the very Catholic Loyola-Marymount University. But I was particularly struck by the upcoming event at UCLA Hillel, which plans to feature the screening of Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-honored 2024 film, A Real Pain.

What makes this choice so interesting is the fact that A Real Pain is not your average Holocaust movie. It’s not set during or immediately after what’s known as the Shoah. No one is in hiding, and we see no atrocities. (See, by contrast, such fine international films as Schindler’s List;, Au revoir les enfants; Europa Europa; Life is Beautiful; The Pianist; and Ida.)  A Real Pain, set in the present day, focuses on two American cousins whose distant Holocaust connection is their recently deceased Grandma Dori. In her will, she left the two young men the money for a brief heritage trip to Poland, where they could visit her former home and soak up the culture that made her the lifeforce she was. (No, she was not herself a Holocaust survivor, but any trip to Poland cries out for an acknowledgment of what happened on its soil.) 

In the course of their brief trip, we get to know their small group of fellow travelers: a mature married couple, an anxious divorcee, a deeply spiritual convert to Judaism who is a survivor of genocide in his native Rwanda. But the focus is on the two cousins: the tense, deeply-focused David (played by Eisenberg) and the free-spirited Benjy (Kieran Culkin), who mails a stash of weed to their first hotel and insists that David share it with him on the off-limits hotel roof. Part of the pleasure of the early going is seeing Benjy interact with his tightly-wound cousin, charming the other travelers with his ready sense of fun. Benjy also shows himself to be sensitive to their personal anxieties, but his manic insistence—as a Jew in Poland—on refusing to accept comfy first-class train accommodations leads to a worrisome outcome for all concerned. Gradually Benjy’s deeply troubled psyche comes into focus, along with David’s personal difficulty in accepting his cousin’s underlying sadness.

That’s when the little group pays a visit to the Nazi concentration camp known as Majdanek. (The film was shot almost entirely in Poland, with the full cooperation of the Polish government, which eventually made Eisenberg—a descendant of Polish Jews—an honorary citizen.) It’s a quiet and eerie segment, capturing the reverent silence with which the travelers absorb what little was left behind by their slain Jewish ancestors. No jokes here; Benjy is, for once, in full control of his behavior.

What follows, for the cousins is the long-awaited brief stop at the apartment complex where their grandmother once lived. It’s somewhat gratifying, somewhat not, to find themselves walking in her footsteps. In any case, the film ends as it ought to, with some smiles, some hugs, and some big questions. Benjy’s and David’s complicated inner worlds can’t be entirely blamed on the Holocaust, from which they are two generations removed and a continent away. But, over the years, I’ve known the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. They’ve been spared the agonies we know about, but their lives are still stamped with the aftereffects of what happened back then . . . what shouldn’t happen to anyone.

 

Ghosts in the Machine: The Zone of Interest

I didn’t really want to see The Zone of Interest. A movie set in the stately home of the Nazi overlord of Auschwitz hardly seemed like a lot of fun. Still, the awards for this German-language film—shot near the Polish burg where the events actually happened—keep on coming. There are five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer is up for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for this project, to which he has devoted his life for the past decade.

 For me watching The Zone of Interest was a matter of chance. I had a pass to see a new science fiction film set in Outer Space. But when I arrived at the theatre on a quiet weekday night, all the seats to the special screening were taken. That left me wandering the multiplex, aware I could duck into any auditorium without creating problems. And The Zone of Interest was starting in less than fifteen minutes. The universe seemed to be telling me something.

 I guarantee I don’t want to re-watch The Zone of Interest anytime soon. But that doesn’t take away from the dazzling filmmaking I saw on screen. Everything in the movie is meant to unsettle the viewer, from the ominous dark screen that lingers at the beginning to the eerie soundtrack, intended to remind us that on the other side of the garden wall from the Hōss family’s comfy digs are the crematoria in which thousands of Jews are daily being sent to their deaths. We never see the victims, but it’s impossible to forget about them. Early in the film, Frau Hōss receives a bundle from a local man. In it is a full-length fur coat that she tries on, admiring herself in a mirror. She digs a lipstick out of a coat pocket, checking that out too. It’s clear to us, though the words are never quite spoken, that the coat was ripped off one of Auschwitz’s Jewish victims. Frau  Hōss accepts it with equanimity, perfectly satisfied with the facts of her life: her children, her garden, her subservient domestic staff, her husband with his snug Nazi uniform and tall, shiny boots.

 Husband Rudolf (an actual historical figure) seems at first glance nicer than his chilly wife. He dotes on the five kids, for one thing, and loves fishing in the local river, until he comes upon something ominous that we suspect is human remains. Otherwise he’s busy playing politics with regard to his superiors, is seen counting a very large pile of cash, and (as is suggested in an eerie scene) has been having his way with one of the local housemaids. Late in the film, he returns to Headquarters to be feted and given a higher position. At an elegant soiree in a magnificent ballroom, he climbs to the balcony and looks down on all the beautiful people below. Then, in a late-night phone call, he tells his wife that he fantasized about the effort it would take to gas them all, given the challenges of the room’s high ceiling.

 That’s one way in which we see the Nazi outlook shaping those who accept it. In a movie that always remains low-key, we also watch one of the Hōss sons cheerily lock his little brother in the family greenhouse, enjoying the terror he’s creating. And there are mystery moments when the ghosts of the dead seem to be walking. I was glad to leave this world and retreat to a nearby café   where Frank Capra’s delightful It Happened One Night was playing out on a blank wall. Phew!

 

Home for the Holidays: the Poignant Lessons of “The Long Way Home”

The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg just before the start of Rosh Hashanah has introduced many of us to the Jewish High Holy Day period, which begins with a New Year celebration and culminates 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement. This designated period of self-scrutiny has encouraged me to be introspective too. In a contemplative frame of mind, I watched The Long Way Home, a documentary that won a 1998 Oscar for its unsparing look at what happened to European Jewish refugees after their liberation from Nazi death camps in 1945. The footage, movingly narrated by Morgan Freeman, is a reminder of the power of documentaries to unearth aspects of reality we’d prefer to keep hidden. Moriah Films, the production arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (which is the sponsor, as well, of L.A.’s Museum of Tolerance) is adept at using documentaries to drive home lessons from the past that impinge on our lives today.

 Appropriately, the clip below from The Long Way Home contains archival footage of an event that’s both hopeful and painfully sad: of Holocaust survivors crowded together on Yom Kippur day at the Feldafing Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, fervently chanting memorial prayers for the loved ones they’ve lost at the hands of Nazi overlords. It’s September 1945 and they’re alive, though barely: in many cases their entire families have been wiped off the face of the earth.

 What makes the moment disturbing rather than triumphant is the fact that this D.P. camp—like others scattered across Europe—is being run like a military prison.     There’s barbed wire and cramped barracks: harsh discipline, too, for those who don’t follow the rules. As someone says, “the camp is filthy beyond words, sanitation is virtually unknown. With few exceptions the people of the camps themselves are demoralized beyond the hope of rehabilitation.” Over a shot of a group of men sprawled in a heap, staring off into space, a camp inhabitant chimes in: “We are living like a litter of puppies.” A visiting U.S. official named Harrison sends home a damning report: “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.” He fears this is a lesson that the German people will be happy to take to heart: that Jews are indeed not worthy of being considered human beings.

 President Truman appealed to British prime minister Clement Attlee to make the humanitarian gesture of admitting a large number of displaced Jews to Palestine, but his request was flatly turned down. Soon after the heart-wrenching Yom Kippur service at Feldafing Camp, General Eisenhower himself came to visit, along with General George Patton. Eisenhower too was dismayed by the camp’s squalor, and demanded changes. Patton thereby removed military guards, but considered this a major mistake. As he noted in his diary, “If the Jews were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camps. They’d spread over the country like locusts . . .  [Sympathetic U.S. official] Harrison and his ilk believe the D.P. is a human being, which he is not. This applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”

Chilling words, which help explain a widespread way of thinking that allowed the Holocaust to occur in the first place. To his everlasting credit, Eisenhower removed Patton (whose blunt heroics we well know through the 1970 film starring George C. Scott) from having a say over the fate of displaced Jews. Still, the documentary shows how their tragedy continued even once the war was over.

 

Hiding in Plain Sight: “The Two of Us”

As (thanks to the COVID pandemic) we self-isolate from the outside world, it’s easy to compare ourselves to Anne Frank and her family, sheltering in that tiny attic. Big difference, of course: the Franks and others like them were hiding from human enemies, who’d be glad to ship them off to death camps if they ever showed their faces. The distinction between a virus and a flesh-and-blood foe is obvious. Viruses don’t care who gets in their way. Humans choose their victims, selecting some, letting others go on with their lives, untouched.  During the dark days of World War II, the revelation of who you were could mean your death at the hands of someone who hated you solely because of the accident of your birth.

These thoughts occurred to me at a timely moment: tomorrow is a day set aside to remember the victims of the Holocaust,. A slew of Holocaust movies, from both American and European filmmaker make clear what social isolation is REALLY like. One that was released back in 1967 comes from France. Claude Berri’s The Two of Us  is striking because it’s a Holocaust film without death camps and  without serious violence. In fact the world it shows us is for the most part fairly pleasant.

It’s 1944, and a Jewish family living in Paris under the Vichy regime is having a hard time keeping a low profile. The Langmanns’ nine-year-old son Claude is a mischievous boy who always seems to be getting into minor trouble. For his own protection, and theirs, his parents reluctantly ship him off to live in the countryside with the elderly father of a friend. They’ve schooled him to take on a new surname, to pretend to be Roman Catholic, and (above all) never to let anyone see him unclothed from the waist down.

Pépé Dupont, whom Claude quickly learns to call Grandpa, is a man of the soil. He’s so uncouth and so earthy that Zorba the Greek would seem like a suave urbanite by comparison. Claude’s first glimpse of him occurs at his kitchen table, where he’s feeding his large elderly dog with a spoon. Pépé  (memorably played by the award-winning Michel Simon) has a good heart: alone among those in his community he’s become a vegetarian, rather than eat any of the beloved rabbits he and his wife raise. But if he loves animals, he’s less sure about people. He hates many of them on principle: the Communists, the English, the Americans. Above all, he has no use for Jews, whom he pictures in terms that might have come straight from a textbook for Nazi children. Jews, he insists, are easy to smell out.  Claude of course keeps silent about his own background, and soon he and Pépé are enjoying a warm familial relationship.

If this were an American movie, there’d be, toward the end, a big revelation scene in which Claude’s masquerade would be uncovered and lessons would be learned. Instead The Two of Us ends on an ambiguous note: we’re simply not sure if Pépé ever becomes aware of the deception, nor do we know the extent to which Claude’s “innocent’ questions about Jews are asked with an ulterior motive. Frankly, I liked the way the film left me with matters to ponder. One of them is the fact that Claude Berri, making his directorial debut, was born to Jewish immigrant parents and named Claude Berel Langmann. In 1944 he was nine year old. This film doesn’t claim to tell HIS story, but he surely knew in his bones the world he showed on screen.