The Holocaust in the arts and popular culture


has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.

Dance

The subject of the Holocaust has been depicted within modern dance. In 1961, Anna Sokolow, a Jewish-American choreographer, created her piece Dreams, as an attempt to deal with her night terrors. Eventually, it became an aide-mémoire to the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1994, Israeli choreographer Rami Be'er tried to illustrate the feeling of being trapped in Aide Memoire. The dancers move ecstatically, trapped in their turmoil, spinning while swinging their arms and legs, and banging on the wall; some are crucified, unable to move freely on the stage. This piece was performed by the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. In 2016, Tatiana Navka caused controversy when she and her dancing partner, Andrei Burkovsky, appeared in the Russian version of Dancing on Ice dressed as concentration camp prisoners.

Film

The Holocaust has been the subject of many films, such as Night and Fog, The Pawnbroker, The Sorrow and the Pity, Voyage of the Damned, Sophie's Choice, Shoah, Korczak, Schindler's List, Life Is Beautiful, The Pianist and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida, and the most comprehensive Holocaust-related film database, comprising thousands of films, is available at the Yad Vashem Visual Center.
Arguably, the Holocaust film most highly acclaimed by critics and historians alike is Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps. Many historians and critics have noted its realistic portrayal of the camps and its lack of the histrionics present in so many other Holocaust films. Renowned film historian Peter Cowie states: "It's a tribute to the clarity and cogency of Night and Fog that Resnais' masterpiece has not been diminished by time or displaced by longer and more ambitious films on the Holocaust, such as Shoah and Schindler's List."
With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has been an increased focus in recent years on preserving the Holocaust memory through documentaries. Among the most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, which attempts to tell the story in as much a literal manner as possible without dramatization. Reaching the young population is a challenge, as shown in Mumin Shakirov's documentary The Holocaust – Is It Wallpaper Paste? and Mickey Rapkin's short film The Anne Frank Gift Shop.

Central European film

The Holocaust has been a popular theme in cinema in the Central and Eastern European countries, particularly the cinemas of Poland, the Czech and Slovak halves of Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. These nations hosted concentration camps or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the gas chambers and, consequently, the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews have haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lent themselves more easily to exploring the subject. Although some directors were inspired by their Jewish roots, other directors, such as Hungary's Miklós Jancsó, have no personal connection to Judaism or the Holocaust and yet have repeatedly returned to explore the topic in their works.
Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska's semi-documentary The Last Stage and Alfréd Radok's The Long Journey. As Central Europe fell under the grip of Stalinism and state control over the film industry increased, works about the Holocaust ceased to be made until the end of the 1950s. Among the first films to reintroduce the topic was Jiří Weiss' Sweet Light in a Dark Room and Andrzej Wajda's Samson.
In the 1960s, several Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust, either directly or indirectly, had critical successes internationally. In 1966, the Slovak-language Holocaust drama The Shop on Main Street by Ján Kadár and Elmer Klos won a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. Another sophisticated Holocaust film from Czechoslovakia is Dita Saxova.
While some of these films, such as Shop on the Main Street, used a conventional filmmaking style, a significant body of films were bold stylistically and used innovative techniques to dramatize the terror of the period. This included nonlinear narratives and narrative ambiguity, for example in Andrzej Munk's Passenger and Jan Němec's Diamonds of the Night ; expressionist lighting and staging, as in Zbyněk Brynych's The Fifth Horseman is Fear ; and grotesquely black humor, as in Juraj Herz's The Cremator.
Literature was an important influence on these films, and almost all of the film examples cited in this section were based on novels or short stories. In Czechoslovakia, five stories by Arnošt Lustig were adapted for the screen in the 1960s, including Němec's Diamonds of the Night.
Although some works, such as Munk's The Passenger, had disturbing and graphic sequences of the camps, generally these films depicted the moral dilemmas the Holocaust placed ordinary people in and the dehumanizing effects it had on society as a whole, rather than the physical tribulations of individuals actually in the camps. As a result, a body of these Holocaust films was interested in those who collaborated in the Holocaust, either by direct action, for example in The Passenger and András Kovács's Cold Days, or through passive inaction, as in The Fifth Horseman is Fear.
The 1970s and 1980s were less fruitful times for Central European film generally, and Czechoslovak cinema particularly suffered after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary. Holocaust films from this time include Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay's The Revolt of Job, Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau, and Ravensbrück survivor Juraj Herz's Night Caught Up With Me, whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Steven Spielberg's similar sequence in Schindler's List.
Directors such as István Szabó and Agnieszka Holland were able to make films that touched on the Holocaust by working internationally, Szabó with his Oscar-winning Mephisto and Holland with her more directly Holocaust-themed Angry Harvest. Also worth noting is the East German-Czechoslovak coproduction Jacob the Liar in German and directed by German director Frank Beyer, but starring the acclaimed Czech actor Vlastimil Brodský. The film was remade in an English-language version in 1999 but did not achieve the scholarly acceptance of the East German version by Beyer.
A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to several more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's Korczak, Szabó's Sunshine, and Jan Hřebejk's Divided We Fall. Both Sunshine and Divided We Fall are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.
In comparison to movies from the 1960s, these current ones have been significantly less stylised and subjectivized. For example, Polish director Roman Polanski's The Pianist was noted for its emotional economy and restraint, which somewhat surprised some critics given the overwrought style of some of Polanski's previous films and Polanski's personal history as a Holocaust survivor.

Literature

There is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of studying Holocaust literature is the language often used in stories or essays; survivor Primo Levi notes in an interview for the International School for Holocaust Studies, housed at the Yad Vashem:
On many occasions, we survivors of the Nazi concentration camps have come to notice how little use words are in describing our experiences... In all of our accounts, verbal or written, one finds expressions such as "indescribable," "inexpressible," "words are not enough," "one would need a language for..." This was, in fact, our daily thought; language is for the description of daily experience, but here it is another world, here one would need a language of this other world, but a language born here.

This type of language is present in many, if not most, of the words by authors presented here.

Accounts of victims and survivors

  • Joaquim Amat-Piniella wrote K.L. Reich, in which he describes his time at Mauthausen camp.
  • Jean Améry wrote At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.
  • Bruno Apitz, an East German author, wrote Naked Among Wolves.
  • Aharon Appelfeld wrote the satirical novel Badenheim 1939.
  • Alicia Appleman-Jurman wrote Alicia: My Story.
  • Inge Auerbacher wrote I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust.
  • Denis Avey wrote The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, where he describes his experiences as a prisoner of war.
  • Nonna Bannister wrote The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister, a collection of diary entries and memoirs she wrote before, during, and after her time in a Nazi labor camp.
  • Gad Beck wrote An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin.
  • Jurek Becker, East German Jewish author, wrote Jacob the Liar.
  • Mary Berg wrote The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto.
  • Pierre Berg wrote Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora.
  • Zdena Berger wrote Tell Me Another Morning about her experience in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen
  • Hélène Berr wrote a diary about experiences in Holocaust that was published as The Journal of Hélène Berr.
  • Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Informed Heart.
  • Livia Bitton-Jackson wrote I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust.
  • Aimé Bonifas wrote Prisoner 20-801: A French National in the Nazi Labor Camps in the summer of 1945, on his life in Buchenwald and other camps.
  • Cornelia ten Boom helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust and was imprisoned for her actions. Her book, The Hiding Place, describes the ordeal.
  • Tadeusz Borowski wrote This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and We Were in Auschwitz.
  • Thomas Buergenthal wrote A Lucky Child about his experiences of Auschwitz as a ten-year-old child.
  • Renata Calverley wrote Let Me Tell You a Story: One Girl's Escape from the Nazis.
  • Leon Cohen wrote From Greece to Birkenau: The Crematoria Workers' Uprising.
  • Arnold Daghani wrote Memories of Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor and The Grave is in the Cherry Orchard.
  • Gusta Davidson Draenger wrote Justyna's Narrative, a diary in which she describes the Jewish resistance in and around the Kraków Ghetto.
  • Charlotte Delbo wrote Auschwitz and After, a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau.
  • Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote The Ghetto Fights.
  • Cordelia Edvardson wrote Burned Child Seeks the Fire.
  • David Faber wrote Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor's Memoir.
  • Anne Frank wrote The Diary of a Young Girl.
  • Viktor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning.
  • Richard Glazar, who was one of only a small group of survivors of the Treblinka revolt, wrote an autobiographical book titled Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka.
  • Dorka Goldkorn wrote Memoirs of A Participant of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
  • Leon Greenman wrote An Englishman in Auschwitz.
  • Irene Gut Opdyke wrote In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer about how she rescued some Jews from deportation.
  • Fanya Gottesfeld Heller wrote Love in a World of Sorrow/''Strange and Unexpected Love.
  • Arek Hersh wrote A Detail of History: The Harrowing True Story of a Boy Who Survived the Nazi Holocaust.
  • Magda Herzberger wrote Survival about her early life, her time in the camps and her reunion with her mother.
  • Etty Hillesum wrote An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum.
  • Edgar Hilsenrath wrote Night, which describes life and survival in a Jewish ghetto in Ukraine, and The Nazi and the Barber, which describes the story from the point of view of a SS mass murderer, who later assumes a Jewish identity and escapes to Israel.
  • Eugene Hollander was a Hungarian who wrote From the Hell of the Holocaust: A Survivor's Story.
  • Sidney Iwens wrote How Dark the Heavens.
  • Marie Jalowicz Simon wrote Gone to Ground: One Woman's Extraordinary Account of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany.
  • Hermann Kahan wrote The Fire and the Light.
  • Trudy Kanter wrote Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler.
  • Imre Kertész wrote Fatelessness.
  • Ruth Klüger wrote Still Alive, which is a memoir of her experiences growing up in Nazi-occupied Vienna and later in the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt.
  • Josef Kohout's account of his imprisonment at Sachsenhausen concentration camp was published by journalist Heinz Heger as The Men With the Pink Triangle.
  • David Koker wrote At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943–1944.
  • Simone Veil wrote A Life
  • Jerzy Kosiński wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The Painted Bird.
  • Hanna Krall wrote The Subtenant, her account of a Gentile family protecting her by pretending she was part of their household.
  • Clara Kramer wrote Clara's War: One Girl's Story of Survival.
  • Anatoly Kuznetsov's novel Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel is about the Babi Yar massacre.
  • Estelle Laughlin wrote Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey Out of the Holocaust.
  • Olga Lengyel wrote Five Chimneys, where she describes her life in Auschwitz–lBirkenau and highlights issues of special importance to women.
  • Primo Levi wrote If This Is a Man and The Truce, which describe his time in Auschwitz and his journey back home as well as The Drowned and the Saved, which is an attempt at an analytical approach.
  • Victor Lewis wrote Hardships and Near-Death Experiences at the Hands of the Nazi SS and Gestapo.
  • Leon Leyson wrote The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible… on Schindler's List.
  • Marceline Loridan-Ivens wrote a memoir But You Did Not Come Back, which details her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
  • Jacques Lusseyran wrote the autobiography And There Was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance about his life before WWII, his work in the resistance, and his experience in Buchenwald concentration camp
  • Arnošt Lustig wrote Night and Hope about his life in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
  • wrote An Ordinary Camp about her time at Ravensbrück subcamp in Neubrandenburg.
  • Ruth Minsky Sender has written three memoirs about her experience: The Cage, To Life and Holocaust Lady.
  • Filip Müller wrote Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, where he describes his work in the Sonderkommando.
  • Irène Némirovsky wrote Suite française which portrays life in France between June 1940 and July 1941, the period during which the Nazis occupied Paris.
  • Ana Novac wrote The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months in Auschwitz and Plaszow.
  • Miklós Nyiszli wrote Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account where he describes his work, which included medical experiments with and autopsies of other inmates.
  • Henry Orenstein wrote I Shall Live: Surviving Against All Odds 1939–1945, a memoir of his experiences during the Nazi Holocaust and his survival in five concentration camps.
  • Boris Pahor wrote Necropolis, which tells the story from the point of view of survivor who is visiting Natzweiler-Struthof camp, twenty years after he was there.
  • Samuel Pisar wrote Of Blood and Hope.
  • Sam Pivnik wrote Survivor – Auschwitz, The Death March and My Fight for Freedom.
  • Schoschana Rabinovici wrote Thanks to My Mother, which gives a detailed view of Jewish life in Vilnius and the Vilnius Ghetto, as well as of her life in concentration camps.
  • Chil Rajchman wrote The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir.
  • Tomi Reichental wrote I Was a Boy in Belsen.
  • Emanuel Ringelblum wrote Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto.
  • Marija Rolnikaitė wrote I Must Tell.
  • Eva Schloss wrote Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank.
  • Magda Riederman Schloss wrote We Were Strangers: The Story of Magda Preiss.
  • Pierre Seel wrote I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual, a memoir of his imprisonment as a homosexual in the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp and his subsequent deportation.
  • Jorge Semprún's first book, The Cattle Truck, recounts his deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald in fictionalized form.
  • Joseph Shupac wrote The Dead Years, about his time in Majdanek, then Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen.
  • Tadeusz Sobolewicz wrote But I Survived, about his life in Auschwitz and five other concentration camps.
  • Mieczyslaw Staner wrote The Eyewitness, where he recounts his experience in the Kraków Ghetto and the Płaszów concentration camp.
  • John G. Stoessinger wrote From Holocaust to Harvard: A Story of Escape, Forgiveness, and Freedom.
  • Władysław Szpilman wrote The Pianist which tells about the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
  • Shlomo Venezia wrote Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz.
  • Felix Weinberg wrote Boy 30529: A Memoir.
  • Helga Weiss wrote Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp.
  • Gerda Weissmann Klein wrote All But My Life, which is an autobiographical account of the Holocaust.
  • wrote Death Brigade/The Janowska Road, where he describes his work as part of Sonderaktion 1005, of burning more than 310,000 bodies close by Janowska concentration camp.
  • Alter Wiener wrote From A Name to A Number: A Holocaust Survivor's Autobiography.
  • Jankiel Wiernik wrote A Year in Treblinka.
  • Elie Wiesel wrote Night about his deportation to Auschwitz, as well as Dawn and Day.
  • Samuel Willenberg wrote Revolt in Treblinka.
  • Miriam Winter wrote Trains: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during and after World War II, in which she describes her survival of the Holocaust as a "hidden child".
  • Eva Salier wrote The Survival of a Spirit for teenagers and preteens. It recounts her story and highlights the role of humor as a coping mechanism making note that, "Mad as it may sound, there was a funny side even in Auschwitz".
  • Selma Van de Perre wrote My Name is Selma'' depicting her experience first as a resistance fighter, and later in a concentration camp. Although she was Jewish, she was imprisoned as a political prisoner due to her false papers.