Until last month, I had never watched a film about the Holocaust. Not even Schindler’s List.
The Last Musician of Auschwitz, released to mark 80 years since the liberation of the death camp, seemed a good place to start, and not just because I was writing a feature about it, but because it was about music.
I've never been to Auschwitz. The director of the Last Musician… told me he hadn't either, before he spent a year going to and from the death camp to make his film – because it would be too painful.
“I have to be honest,” Toby Trackman confided, “At first, I was quite nervous about the idea of tackling this subject… the idea of opening a box that I've tried to leave shut for most of my kind of adult life. I knew that, if I had to do this project, then I would have to open that box and climb in it, and know everything about it and experience everything about it.”
I relate. And I'm not alone in actively avoiding films on the horror that is so close to home. A colleague told me that she, too, was too scared to face them, until her husband sat her down to watch them. And she was glad she did. If we as Jewish people aren’t brave enough to face them, she asked, how else would we avoid the danger of the Holocaust becoming fetishised and universalised? And how would we make sure our children are aware?
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the last surviving member of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, at home in LondonBBC/Two Rivers Media/Toby Trackman
Although is it really us who need to watch them, or the 52 percent of UK residents who a 2021 survey revealed are unaware that six million Jews were murdered? Introducing the screening, Suzy Klein – who commissioned the film for the BBC – said they wanted to capture on camera the remaining survivor of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, whose interview “stands as a piece of irrefutable first-person testimony”. The film, she said, provides “living proof” of what happened at Auschwitz when “toxic antisemitism” has only grown since October 7.
Are Holocaust films and books even made for us? Another colleague attended The Brutalist and when she sat stunned into devastated silence, feeling the weight of our people’s collective trauma as the end credits rolled, non-Jewish filmgoers around her raved about the performances, the cinematography. They seemingly altogether bypassed the survivor’s unimaginable trauma.
My only lesson on the horrors of the Shoah was at primary school – and it didn’t even mention Jews, although let’s just assume that was because we were too young for the details. If you didn’t have fair hair and light-coloured eyes, you might have been killed, the teacher said. I distinctly recall looking around the class until I locked eyes with the only other girl in my class who was equally dark-haired and dark-eyed. That’s us, then. The Jews.
But I haven’t needed to read the books or watch the documentaries to know what happened. In some strange, sad form of osmosis, perhaps we just absorb it.
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist, which has ten Oscar nominationsFilm still
Excellent as it was, in its mixture of archive footage, dramatisation and new recordings of music created and performed at the death camp, The Last Musician of Auschwitz evoked the exact emotions I had feared. It was devastating.
I felt sick, angry and unbearably sad; at one point, when it came to the story of a Jewish composer mother of two small boys singing with her littlest son in the gas chamber, this Jewish mother of two small boys screwed shut her eyes and imagined being anywhere but in that screening room.
But it also brought up something else: the strong Jewish spirit.
To hear the testimonies of survivors, and the stories of these extraordinary musicians who performed or composed, secretly in acts of personal resistance, even in the most harrowing of places, was to feel pride in those who showed such resilience. It was stories such as that of the Polish composer Szymon Laks who wrote and played a quartet in the camp (when music written by any Jewish composer was forbidden) that ensured we left the screening feeling not crushed, but inspired.
Perhaps it is time, finally, for me to face Schindler’s List.
