Guides @ UF: Resources for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust: Art, Film and Literature

Photography

Roman Vishniac exhibition: Born in 1897 to an affluent Russian Jewish family, Vishniac immigrated to Berlin in 1920 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. As an amateur photographer, he took to the streets with his camera throughout the 1920s and ’30s, offering astute, often humorous visual commentary on his adopted city and experimented with new and modern approaches to framing and composition. Documenting the rise of Nazi power, he focused his lens on the signs of oppression and doom that soon formed the backdrop of his Berlin street photography.

Erlich Photography: Holocaust Archive Series: The Holocaust Archives Series consists of photographs taken of the records of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany. ITS archive contains more than 16 miles of records and artifacts that reveal, with excruciating exactitude, the Nazi campaign to murder millions and eradicate European Jewry. Richard Ehrlich is the first and only photographer to gain permission to photograph these archives. The series was shown at the Craig Krull Gallery in Los Angeles in 2008, University at Buffalo, New York in 2009, and UCLA in 2010, and was the subject of an LA Times article. These photographs document the obsessive mentality of the Nazi regime. At a time of resurging Holocaust denial, these folders, storage boxes, stacks of papers, and ledgers—normally mundane paraphernalia of record keeping—provide painful and irrefutable evidence of history’s most unimaginable crime.

Holocaust Art

Artists' Responses to the Holocaust The artworks shown here explore a range of reactions to the Holocaust – from the deeply personal responses of survivors to the more documentary approach of official war artists recording the sights of Bergen-Belsen after its liberation in April 1945. Some of the artists created their works within the camps and ghettos, while others used art to express the experience after liberation. A number of the survivors who made their homes in Britain after the Second World War turned to art as an outlet for their trauma. Many of them found their experiences difficult to talk about and, in the decades immediately after the war, they were not always encouraged to discuss them. Their works capture the ongoing legacy of loss, desperation and exclusion.
David Crown Holocaust Prints The David Crown Holocaust Print Collection: David Crown (1924-2016) worked in many different media, although mezzotints were his special interest. Crown's artworks are held in numerous collections across America, Canda, Japan and Europe. The Holocaust prints are all intaglio; they were etched with nitric acid or using a mezzotint rocker. All of the prints were produced on zinc or copper plates; the indigo ink was hand-blended. Each plate had a potential edition size of 50 prints; however, only a few prints of each image were ever produced.
Yivo | Art and the Holocaust Article from the Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe online: https://yivoencyclopedia.org/default.aspx
Art & Remembrance Esther Nisenthal Krinitz was 15 in 1942 when Nazis ordered the Jews of her Polish village to report to a nearby train station. She chose to flee with her 13-year-old sister, never to see the rest of her family again. Decades later, determined to show her daughters the family she had lost, Esther created a series of 36 exquisite works of fabric collage and embroidery—a legacy of love, grief and the sheer force of memory.
Art from the Holocaust These artworks from the Yad Vashem Collection were created by artists between 1939 and 1945 and represent a living testimony from the Holocaust, as well as a declaration of the indomitable human spirit that refuses to surrender. These artworks comprise a small part of an exhibition to open in Germany on January 26, 2016 marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
USHMM Art and Memory Project The Art and Memory Project brings Holocaust history to life for Washington-area high school students, enabling them to learn about what happened directly from the survivors themselves and to create works of art based on the survivors’ experiences.

Music of the Holocaust

Image credit: Photo by Carl Socolow '77: https://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/1691/a_musical_witness.

Music and the Holocaust (ORT): musical works of diverse origin and style were performed and composed during the Nazi period. The Nazi Party itself made widespread use of music at rallies and public events, particularly marching music and rousing propaganda songs. In many of the ghettos and camps that were established across Nazi-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945, prisoners created and performed a wide range of new and existing music, particularly songs. Jewish inmates in the ghettos often wrote new Yiddish songs based on well-known melodies ...

USF Guide to Music of the Holocaust

USHMM list of music from the Holocaust: Music was heard in many ghettos, concentration camps, and partisan outposts of Nazi-controlled Europe. While popular songs dating from before the war remained attractive as escapist fare, the ghetto, camp, and partisan settings also gave rise to a repertoire of new works. These included topical songs inspired by the latest gossip and news, and songs of personal expression that often concerned the loss of family and home ...

Yad Vashem Exhibition: Music of the Holocaust: The twenty songs chosen for this virtual exhibition include street entertainment of the Lodz and Kovno Ghettos, professional popular music culture of the Yiddish theater in the Vilna Ghetto, and songs of the partisans of Vilna. In addition, the prophetic song “Es Brent” [Our Town Burns] which was performed in the Ghettos and camps, is included.

Select Holocaust Films

Accountant of Auschwitz, The (2018) In 2015, 94-year-old former German SS officer Oskar Gröning, nicknamed “The Accountant of Auschwitz”, went on trial in his home country, charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz in 1944. Gröning’s trial made headlines around the world as a frail old man took the stand to face his former victims.
Amen (2002) During WWII SS officer Kurt Gerstein tries to inform Pope Pius XII about Jews being sent to concentration camps. Young Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana gives him a hand.
Au Revoir les Enfants (1987) In 1944, upper class boy Julien Quentin and his brother François travel to Catholic boarding school in the countryside after vacations. Julien is a leader and good student and when the new student Jean Bonnet arrives in the school, they have friction in their relationship. However, Julien learns to respect Jean and discovers that he is Jewish and the priests are hiding him from the Nazis. They become best friends and Julien keeps the secret. When the priest Jean discovers that the servant Joseph is stealing supplies from the school to sell in the black market, he fires the youth. Sooner the Gestapo arrives at school to investigate the students and the priests that run and work in the boarding school.
Defiance (2008) The year is 1941 and the Jews of Eastern Europe are being massacred by the thousands. Managing to escape certain death, three brothers take refuge in the dense surrounding woods they have known since childhood. There they begin their desperate battle against the Nazis.
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Denial (2016) Based on the acclaimed book Denial: Holocaust History on Trial, DENIAL recounts Deborah E. Lipstadt’s (Academy Award® winner Rachel Weisz) legal battle for historical truth against David Irving (BAFTA nominee Timothy Spall), who accused her of libel when she declared him a Holocaust denier. In the English legal system, in cases of libel, the burden of proof is on the defendant, therefore it was up to Lipstadt and her legal team, led by Richard Rampton (Academy Award® nominee Tom Wilkinson), to prove the essential truth that the Holocaust occurred.
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Escape from Sobibor (1987) During WWII, the death camp at Treblinka had an escape, causing the Commandant at a similar camp in Sobibor to vow that his camp would never experience the same thing. But those who were its captives, the Jewish laborers that had been spared from the ovens, knew that they were on borrowed time and that their only hope was to escape... the only question was how to do it. However, because the Germans would kill an equal number of others whenever a group attempted to escape, the captives knew that if ever an escape was tried, all 600 prisoners in the camp would have to be included... Based on the book "Escape from Sobibor" by Richard Rashke, the book "Inferno in Sobibor" by Stanislaw "Shlomo" Szmajzner, and the manuscript "From the ashes of Sobibor" by Thomas "Toivi" Blatt.
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Europa Europa (1990) As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness. He is bounced from a Soviet orphanage, where he plays a dutiful Stalinist, to the Russian front, where he hides in plain sight as an interpreter for the German army, and back to his home country, where he takes on his most dangerous role: a member of the Hitler Youth.
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Fugitive Pieces (2008) A powerful and unforgettably lyrical film about love, loss and redemption, FUGITIVE PIECES tells the story of Jakob Beer, a man whose life is transformed by his childhood experiences during WWII. The film is based on the beloved and best-selling novel by Canadian poet Anne Michaels. Jakob’s story (Robbie Kay) begins in Poland in 1942, when he is nine years old. Nazi soldiers have murdered his parents and abducted his teenage sister, Bella. Traumatized by this horrific event, Jakob sneaks out of his hiding place and struggles to survive.
God on Trial (1986) Television play set in Auschwitz during World War II. Awaiting their inevitable deaths at one of the worst concentration camps, a group of Jews make a rabbinical court to decide whether God has gone against the Holy Covenant and if He is the one guilty for their suffering.
Grey Zone, The (2001) A Nazi doctor, along with the Sonderkomando, Jews who are forced to work in the crematoria of Auschwitz against their fellow Jews, find themselves in a moral grey zone.
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Ida (2013) The breathtakingly beautiful, Oscar-winning Ida is a moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, discovers a dark family secret dating back to the years of the Nazi occupation.
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In Darkness (2012) From acclaimed director Agnieszka Holland, In Darkness is based on a true story. Leopold Socha, a sewer worker and petty thief in Lvov, a Nazi occupied city in Poland, one day encounters a group of Jews trying to escape the liquidation of the ghetto. He hides them for money in the labyrinth of the town’s sewers beneath the bustling activity of the city above. What starts out as a straightforward and cynical business arrangement turns into something very unexpected, the unlikely alliance between Socha and the Jews as the enterprise seeps deeper into Socha’s conscience. The film is also an extraordinary story of survival as these men, women and children all try to outwit certain death during 14 months of ever increasing and intense danger.
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Jakob the Liar (1974) In Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, poor Jewish cafe owner Jakob Heym (Oscar®-winner Robin Williams Best Supporting Actor, 1997, Good Will Hunting) accidentally overhears a forbidden radio news bulletin signaling Soviet military success against German forces. To combat the overwhelming depression and suicide that pervades the ghetto, Jakob invents fictitious news bulletins about Allied advances against the Nazis. These lies keep hope and humor alive among the ghetto inhabitants, spirits are lifted, hearts are refreshed, and optimism is reborn. The Germans learn of the mythical radio and begin a search for the resistance hero who dares operate it.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) In 1948 Dan Haywood, an American judge recently defeated for reelection in Maine, arrives in Nuremberg to preside over the trial of several German judges accused of destroying law and justice to support Hitler's infamous mandates which took the lives of 6 million innocent people. From the moment the prosecuting attorney, Col. Tad Lawson, makes his emotion-packed opening statements, it is obvious that he is determined to obtain the maximum punishment for the judges. The defense lawyer, Hans Rolfe, counters by charging that if these men are guilty because they upheld the laws of their country, then all of Germany must be tried.
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Life is Beautiful (La Vita E Bella) (1997) Guido is a charming, bumbling Jewish waiter whose colorful imagination and playful spirit help him to woo a beautiful schoolteacher. The couple marries and has a young son, but before long their idyllic world is threatened by Nazi soldiers who force the family into a concentration camp. Guido must now use his imagination again.
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Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989) A movie depicting the life of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. After being liberated from an Austrian concentration camp in 1945, Wiesenthal agrees to work with the American War Crimes Unit to document the horrifying deeds of the Third Reich and to help apprehend the guilty. As he begins his work, he slowly pieces his own life together. Wiesenthal is reunited with his wife, whom he had believed was dead. In Vienna, he opens a documentation center, but his increasing devotion to hunting down the architects of the Holocaust begins to take a toll on his personal life. His investigations lead to the arrest and trial of Franz Murer, the "Butcher of Vilna," and Adolf Eichmann.
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Numbered (2012) Auschwitz prisoners, both Jewish or non-Jewish, were tattooed with serial numbers, first on their chests and then their left arms. An estimated 400,000 numbers were tattooed in Auschwitz and its sub-camps; only some several thousand survivors are still alive today. NUMBERED is an explosive, highly visual, and emotionally cinematic journey, guided by testimonies and portraits of these survivors. The film documents the dark time and setting during which these tattoos were assigned as well as the meaning they took on in the years following the war. In fact, the film’s protagonist is the number itself, as it evolves and becomes both a personal and collective symbol from 1940 to today. These scars, paradoxically unanimous and anonymous, reveal themselves to be diverse, enlightening, and full of life.
The Pianist (2002) The Pianist was adapted by U.K. playwright/screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Dresser) from the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who detailed his survival during World War II. A celebrated composer and pianist, he played the last live music heard over Polish radio airwaves before Nazi artillery hit. During the brutal occupation, he eluded deportation and remained in the devastated Warsaw Ghetto. There, he struggled to stay alive even when cast away from those he loved. He would eventually reclaim his artistic gifts, and confront his fears, with aid from the unlikeliest source — a German officer who helped him hide in the final days of the war.
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Red Trees (2017) Red Trees is director Marina Willer’s attempt to understand today’s refugee crisis through the story of her own family, one of only twelve Jewish families to survive the Nazi occupation of Prague during World War II. The story is told through Marina’s voice and her father’s Alfred Willer, who witnessed the loss of most of his family and friends, but survived to build a post-war life as an architect in Brazil, becoming an inspiration to the next generations of his family from his daughter Marina through to his grandchildren.Red Trees is a story of acceptance, colour and hope.
Resistance Banker, The (2018) Risking his family and future, a banker in occupied Amsterdam slows the Nazi war machine by creating an underground bank to fund the resistance.
Schindler's List ... this incredible true story follows the enigmatic Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who saved the lives of more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust. It is the triumph of one man who made a difference and the drama of those who survived one of the darkest chapters in human history because of what he did. Meticulously restored from the original film negative in pristine high definition and supervised by Spielberg, Schindler’s List is a powerful story whose lessons of courage and faith continue to inspire generations.
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Son of Saul October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son.
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Sophie's Choice Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline), he learns that Sophie is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.
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Shoah Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.
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Holocaust in Film: indexes

[see also documentaries under the Holocaust: Secondary Sources tab]

A-Z: Films|USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia:

A list of films selected by the compilers of the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia listed alphabetically.

List of Holocaust films (Wikipedia):

This is an index of films that deal with the Holocaust in Europe. Films dealing with the subject of the Holocaust include both documentary and narrative films. These films were produced from the early 1940s before the extent of the Holocaust was widely known and have continued to be made since then. The films span multiple genres, with documentary films including footage filmed both by the Germans for their propaganda purposes and by the Allies, compilations, survivor testimonies and docudramas, and narrative films including war films, action films, love stories, psychological dramas, and even comedies.