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REVIEWS OF MOVIES IN OUR HOLOCAUST MUSEUM
13 MINUTES
A 2015 release where in November 1939, after planting a home-made bomb inside a column of a Munich Beirkeller, Georg Elser, attempts to cross into neutral Switzerland but is caught at the border. His bomb detonates, but misses killing German leader Adolf HXTLER by just 13 minutes.
A DAY IN OCTOBER
A 1991 release, where during the month of October 1943, the Danish resistance movement and just plain ordinary citizens joined together in staging a mass exodus by fishing boats to neutral Sweden of their Jewish countrymen, practically on the eve of the Nazi's planned round-up and delivery to concentration camps of all Jews. Story is told from the point of view of one Jewish family.
A FILM UNFINISHED
A 2010 release, DOCUMENTARY which re-examines the making of an unfinished 1942 German propaganda film titled Das Ghetto, "The Ghetto" depicting the Warsaw Ghetto two months before the mass extermination of its inhabitants in the German operation known as the Grossaktion Warsaw. The documentary features interviews with surviving ghetto residents and a re-enactment of testimony from Willy Wist, one of the camera operators who filmed scenes for Das Ghetto.
A PROMISE TO MY FATHER
A 2013 release where we re-trace the steps of Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter as he returns to Poland and Germany for the final time to look for items buried in 1939 in the basement of his old home in Plock.
ADAM RESURRECTED
A 2008 release in which the film, part of which is told through a series of flashbacks, follows the story of Adam Stein, a charismatic patient of a fictitious psychiatric asylum for Holocaust survivors in Israel, in 1961. Adam was a comedian in Berlin prior to the Second World War, during which he was sent to a concentration camp. Adam manages to survive the war only because his pre-war act was recalled by an SS officer, who takes Adam as his "pet," insisting he act like a dog (as he did during one of his sketches). His humiliation was his ticket to survival, as he was even forced to play the fiddle as his wife and daughter were led to the gas chambers.
ADIRA
A release where during the Holocaust, a young Jewish girl flees from the grasp of the Gestapo and finds herself stranded on an abandoned farm.
ALONE IN BERLIN
A 2016 release where in 1940, a working-class couple in World War II-era Berlin, Otto and Anna Quangel, decide to resist Adolf HXTLER and the Nazis, after receiving news of the death of their only son. Their growing resistance to the regime is also strengthened by the fate of an old Jewish woman living in their building. Although the official deportation of Jews to death camps had not yet started, Jews have no recourse to any legal protection. Ruthless Nazis — and "non-ideological" common criminals — use the opportunity to loot the old woman's apartment with impunity. Despite the efforts of the Quangels and other kind neighbors to help her, the persecution ends with the old woman jumping to her death from a high window.
AMEN
A 2002 release where during World War II, Kurt Gerstein, a Waffen-SS officer employed in the SS Hygiene Institute, designs programs for the purification of water and the destruction of vermin. He is shocked to learn that the process he has developed to eradicate typhus, by using a hydrogen cyanide mixture called Zyklon B, is now being used for killing Jews and other "undesirables" in extermination camps. Gerstein attempts to notify Pope Pius XII about the gassings but is appalled by the lack of response he gets from the Catholic hierarchy. The only person moved is Riccardo Fontana, a young Jesuit priest. Fontana and Gerstein attempt to raise awareness about what is happening to the Jews in Europe but even after Fontana appealing to the pope himself, the Vatican makes only a timid and vague condemnation of HXTLER and Nazi Germany.
AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST
A 1994 release, where in 1937, a 17-year-old German Jew named Kurt Klein emigrated to the US to escape the growing discrimination against Jews that had become a terrible fact of life following HXTLER's rise in 1933. Together with his brother and sister, who had emigrated previously, Klein worked to establish himself so that he could obtain safe passage for his parents out of Germany. America and the Holocaust uses the moving tale of Klein's struggles against a wall of bureaucracy to free his parents to explore the complex social and political factors that led the American government to turn its back on the plight of the Jews.
ANTHROPOID
A 2016 release in which in December 1941, German occupation in Europe has neared its height. Two agents from the Czechoslovak exile government, a Slovak soldier, Jozef Gabčík and a Czech, Jan Kubiš are parachuted into their occupied country. Jozef is injured when he crashes through a tree upon landing, but both men set out to find their contact in the resistance movement. They are discovered shortly afterwards by fake resistance fighters who turn out to be traitors; one is shot by Jozef but the other man escapes. Stealing their truck, the agents head for Prague.
AUSCHWITZ
A 2015 release that is a docu-drama depicting the atrocities of the Holocaust set inside of the most notorious of concentration camps. Combining archival footage, dramatic reenactments and current on-camera interviews, the film attempts to provide the viewer with an understanding of the "how" and "why" of such genocide.
AUSCHWITZ
A 2004 release that presents contemporary and documentary footage of the concentration camp as well as images of items in the collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
BENT
A 1997 release is about Max a promiscuous gay man living in 1930s Berlin. He is at odds with his wealthy family because of his homosexuality. One evening, much to the resentment of his boyfriend, Rudy, Max brings home a handsome Sturmabteilung (SA) man. Unfortunately, he does so on the Night of the Long Knives, when HXTLER ordered the assassination of upper echelon SA corps. The Sturmabteilung man is discovered and killed by SS men in Max and Rudy's apartment, and the two have to flee Berlin.
BIRD CATCHER, THE
A 2019 release, is a suspenseful, coming of age story set against the backdrop of violence and prejudice. Inspired by the little-known actual stories of Norwegian Jews during World War II. This film uncovers a hidden slice of history that grips at the heart and inspires us all at the deepest level - it’s a profound fable of identity and loss, of forced migration and the cost of war. Esther, a Jewish girl, has her world torn apart when the Nazis unleash their reign of terror on her small town. On her attempt to escape to Sweden, Esther ends up on a occupied farm where she befriends Aksel. To save herself from being discovered by the Nazis, she disguises herself as a boy. The daily challenge to keep her true identity a secret leads to a series of choices and consequences which shift the paths of all those around her.
BLACK BOOK
A 2006 release where in 1944, Dutch-/Jewish singer Rachel Stein is hiding from the Nazi regime in the occupied Netherlands. When the farmhouse where she has been hiding is destroyed by an Allied bomber, she goes to see a lawyer named Smaal, who has been helping her family. He arranges for her to escape to the liberated southern part of the country. Aided by a man named Van Gein, Rachel is reunited with her family and boards a boat that is to take them and other refugees to the south.
BLIND LOVE
I bought this movie at the bookstores at Auschwitz-Birkenau, for the Holocaust Museum in our home, called, BLIND LOVE: A HOLOCAUST JOURNEY THROUGH POLAND WITH MAN’S BEST FRIEND. It is a film about 6 blind Israeli’s and their guide dogs, that are taken around to different places in Poland where the Holocaust took place, and them being taken on the March of The Living at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
BONHOFFER AGENT OF GRACE
A 2000 release that discusses what a moral person is to do in a time of savage immorality? That question tormented Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German clergyman of great distinction who actively opposed HXTLER and the Nazis. His convictions cost him his life. The Nazis hanged him on April 9, 1945, less than a month before the end of the war.
BOOK THIEF, THE
A 2013 release where in 1938, young orphan, Liesel, arrives at the home of her new foster parents, Hans and Rosa. When Hans, a kindly housepainter, learns that Liesel cannot read, he teaches the child the wonders of the written language.
BORDER STREET
A 1948 release in which in Poland in the summer of 1939 there was the deepest peace. The place of action is initially an ordinary Warsaw apartment building. The tenants are of different nature and social background. The peace comes to an abrupt end when the German Wehrmacht invades the Polish capital. Suddenly everything changes overnight, the Polish residents are harassed, their Jewish fellow citizens are persecuted and arrested.
BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, THE
A 2008 release where Bruno, an eight-year-old German boy living in Berlin, is uprooted to rural occupied Poland with his family after his father Ralf, an SS officer, is promoted. Bruno notices a concentration camp near the back garden from his bedroom window but believes it to be a farm; his mother Elsa forbids him from going in the back garden.
BOYS FROM BRAZIL, THE
A 1978 release in which a young, well-intentioned Barry Kohler stumbles upon a secret organization of Third Reich war criminals and Neo-Nazis holding clandestine meetings in Asuncion, Paraguay and finds that Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, is with them. He phones Ezra Lieberman, an aging Nazi hunter living in Vienna, Austria, with this information. A highly skeptical Lieberman tries to brush Kohler's claims aside, telling him that it is well known that Mengele is living in Paraguay.
BROKEN SILENCE
A 2002 release is a gripping documentary whose protagonist, a Roma radio-reporter, tries to understand what happened to the Sinti and Roma during the Second World War.
CABARET
A 1972 release, one of my top 25 Holocaust movie, where in 1931 Berlin, young American Sally Bowles performs at the Kit Kat Klub. A new British arrival in the city, Brian Roberts, moves into the boarding house where Sally lives. A reserved academic and writer, Brian wants to give English lessons to earn a living while completing his doctorate. Sally tries to seduce Brian, but he tells her that on three previous occasions he has tried to have sexual relationships with women, all of which failed. They become friends, and Brian witnesses Sally's bohemian life in the last days of the Weimar Republic. When Brian consoles Sally after her father cancels his meeting with her, they become lovers, concluding that his previous failures with women were because they were "the wrong three girls". meeting with her, they become lovers, concluding that his previous failures with women were because they were "the wrong three girls".
CHOSEN, THE
A 1982 release where two young men come of age in this story of faith and friendship in 1940s Brooklyn. Robby Benson plays a deeply religious Jewish youth embroiled in a conflict between old ways and new.
COME AND SEE
A 1985 release where in 1943, two Belarussian boys dig in a sand-filled trench looking for abandoned rifles in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Their village elder warns them not to dig up the weapons as it would arouse the suspicions of the occupying Germans. One of the boys, Flyora, finds an SVT-40 rifle, though both of them are seen by an Fw 189 flying overhead.
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