The West’s defining genocide had a mixed year on stage and screen
Remarkable films and plays about mankind’s most heinous genocide tend to come in clusters. If the Holocaust itself is stark and unchanging, every generation forges its own connection to that history, in its own distinct emotional register.
It is no coincidence, for instance, that Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro and Louis Malle’s Goodbye Children were released in the 1980s. “Both directors were born in 1932 and were finally able to process childhood memories fifty years later,” film historian Annette Insdorf observed in her book Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. For directors Roman Polanski, who made The Pianist, and Costa Gavras, who made Amen, both released in 2002, processing the events of their childhoods would take another two decades.
This past year on Broadway witnessed yet another outpouring of Holocaust-inspired dramas on stage and on screen. But the most recent cluster suggests that the task of dramatically exploring the roots and impact of the systematic extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry during World War II, the “Shoah,” or “catastrophe” in Hebrew, has grown ever more daunting.
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Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.
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