★★★✩✩
Near the end of the first of three BBC 2 documentary episodes that chart the rise and fall of the Maxwell family, there’s a supposed revelatory moment. Before his conspiracy laden death, Robert Maxwell is visiting Yad Vashem, and breaks down when seeing the name of the village, now Solotvina in Ukraine, where he grew up.
He tells how when he returned with his wife years later, after most of his family were murdered in Auschwitz, after he’d become a war hero, after he’d been a Labour MP, after he’d started on his path to being a business mogul, he’d exclaimed to her: “Not a single Jew was left.” With tears in his eyes it was the most human he had been represented so far, his trajectory in the story more that of an unstoppable
monstrous force of nature. The moment is used as evidence of a crack in his armour before the fall, even suggesting it might have contributed to it.
