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    First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946
    First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946
    First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946
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    First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

    By Jeremy Hicks

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    Most early Western perceptions of the Holocaust were based on newsreels filmed during the Allied liberation of Germany in 1945. Little, however, was reported of the initial wave of material from Soviet filmmakers, who were in fact the first to document these horrors. In First Films of the Holocaust, Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of the horrors of Nazi rule.
    Even before the war, the Soviet film Professor Mamlock, which premiered in the United States in 1938 and coincided with the Kristallnacht pogrom, helped reinforce anti-Nazi sentiment. Yet, Soviet films were often dismissed or even banned in the West as Communist propaganda. Ironically, in the brief 1939-1941 period of Nazi and Soviet alliance, such films were also banned in the Soviet Union, only to be reclaimed after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, and suppressed yet again during the Cold War.
    Jeremy Hicks recovers much of the major film work in Soviet depictions of the Holocaust and views them within their political context, both locally and internationally. Overwhelmingly, wartime films were skewed to depict Soviet resistance, "Red funerals," and calls for vengeance, rather than the singling out of Jewish victims by the Nazis. Almost no personal testimony of victims or synchronous sound was recorded, furthering the disconnection of the viewer to the victims.
    Hicks examines correspondence, scripts, reviews, and compares edited with unedited film to unearth the deliberately hidden Jewish aspects of Soviet depictions of the German invasion and occupation. To Hicks, it's in the silences, gaps, and ellipses that the films speak most clearly. Additionally, he details the reasons why Soviet Holocaust films have been subsequently erased from collective memory in the West and the Soviet Union: their graphic horror, their use as propaganda tools, and the postwar rise of the Red Scare in the United States and anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateDec 3, 2019
    ISBN9780822978084
    First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946
    Author

    Jeremy Hicks

    After nearly dying at birth, Jeremy Hicks gave up his ghost during the sorrowful autumn of his twelfth year. The outsider that occupied his body from that point onward did the best it could to imitate him. However, this being’s bizarre sense of humor and inability to fully mimic human emotions kept it an outsider. After many unhappy years of trying to assimilate to this plane of existence and its daily doldrums, he turned to the cadre of demons in his life for other options. He teamed up with one of them inhabiting a ginger known as Barry Hayes and together they turned their nightmares into fiction. The writing team of Hicks & Hayes created an original horror-fantasy environment (FaltyrTM), wrote a screenplay (The Cycle of Ages Saga: Finders Keepers) to introduce it, and then adapted it into a novelization of the same name. As a result, their first novel was published by Dark Oak Press in August 2013; the second will be published in 2014. Jeremy co-owns Broke Guys Productions and served as Associate Producer on the independent horror film, “Curse of the Rougarou.” He is also a poet and short story writer. Three of his poems are available online via Yahoo! Voices; two of his short stories will be appearing in Dark Oak anthologies in early 2014 (Capes & Clockwork; Luna's Children).

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      Book preview

      First Films of the Holocaust - Jeremy Hicks

      PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

      Jonathan Harris, Editor

      First Films of the Holocaust

      SOVIET CINEMA AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE JEWS, 1938–1946

      Jeremy Hicks

      UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

      Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

      Copyright © 2012, University of Pittsburgh Press

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Printed on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Hicks, Jeremy.

        First films of the Holocaust : Soviet cinema and the genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 / Jeremy Hicks.

              p.    cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies)

          Includes bibliographical references and index.

          Includes filmography.

          ISBN 978-0-8229-6224-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

          1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in motion pictures. 2. Antisemitism in motion pictures. 3. Jews in motion pictures. 4. Motion pictures—Soviet Union—History.    I. Title.

          PN1995.9.H53H53 2012

           791.43'652924—dc23                                                         2012030693

      ISBN-13: 9780822978084 (electronic)

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      A Note on Transliteration

      Introduction

      1. Right off the Top of the News: Professor Mamlock and Soviet Antifascist Film

      2. The Beasts Have Taken Aim at Us: Soviet Newsreels Screen the War and the Holocaust

      3. Imagining Occupation: Partisans and Spectral Jews

      4. Dovzhenko: Moving the Boundaries of the Acceptable

      5. Mark Donskoi’s Reconstruction of Babyi Iar: The Unvanquished

      6. Liberation of the Camps

      7. The Dead Never Lie: Soviet Film, the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the Holocaust

      Epilogue

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Filmography

      Index

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      This book emerged from two sources. One primary origin lay in conversations with Howard Jacobs, whom I was lucky enough to teach; with Libby Saxton, a colleague at Queen Mary, University of London; and with Evgenii Tsymbal, a visiting scholar there. The other source was a chance discovery of documentary film footage relating to the Holocaust in the Russian documentary film archive (RGAKFD, Krasnogorsk). First and foremost, I owe a personal and intellectual debt to these people, as well as to that archive; its staff, especially Elena Kolikova; and the archive’s director, Natal´ia Kalantarova.

      Once formulated, this research project would not have been realized as a book without the generous and gracious funding of the Philip Leverhulme Trust, enabling me to devote myself to research in the 2009–2010 academic year. Equally important has been the support from individuals in various quarters of Queen Mary: my immediate colleagues in the Russian department, Andreas Schönle, Anna Pilkington, and Olga Makarova; Rüdiger Görner, in the wider School of Languages, Linguistics and Film; and others in the college more generally.

      Other than the RGAKFD, a number of Russian archives have provided generous assistance to me in the pursuit and completion of this project. In particular, I would like to thank the staff of the RGALI, especially Dmitrii Neustroev and the director, Tat´iana Goriaeva; Gosfil´mofond, especially Valerii Bosenko and its deputy director and guiding light, Vladimir Dmitriev, who kindly gave me lifts, as well as its current director, Nikolai Borodachev; the Museum of Cinema (Moscow), especially Emma Malaia and the director, Naum Kleiman; and the GARF and RGASPI. British film collections have been no less accommodating to me, and I would like to thank the IWM (especially Matthew Lee), the BFI, and the National Film and Television Archive. I have also benefited enormously from the University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, the British Library, the Russian State Historical Library (Istorichka), the Russian State Library (Lenin´ka), and the British Film Institute Library.

      Friends who have helped me obtain materials and aided me in other ways include Evgenii Margolit, Nikolai Izvolov, Aleksandr Deriabin, Sergei Kapterev, Crispin Brooks, Barbara Wurm, and John Haynes. Other academic colleagues who have helped by commenting constructively and productively on various parts of this work include Karel Berkhoff, David Shneer, Olga Gershenson (whom I thank for sharing her thoughts with me and for her helpful critique of the errors in an earlier version of chapter 5), Natascha Drubek-Meyer, Valérie Pozner, Il´ia Al´tman, Valerii Fomin (even though he disagreed with the project), Julian Graffy, David Gillespie, Gil Toffell, Stuart Liebman, the members of the SSEES Russian Cinema Research Group, and participants at the numerous conference panels where I have given earlier versions of parts of the book. I would also like to thank Peter Kracht and the University of Pittsburgh Press for the interest they have shown in this project and the anonymous readers, especially the second one, whose comments helped me strengthen the book considerably.

      I would also like to thank Valérie Pozner, Birgit Beumers, and Dieter Steinert for permitting me to reproduce reworked versions of previously published material in chapters 3, 5, and 7.

      As with all my work, I owe an unpayable debt to Inger and Nina, who have endured, inspired, and sustained me.

      I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my friend Pete Glatter, who made me think.

      A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

      In the text, I follow Library of Congress transliteration standards except for a few famous Russian names, where I have used the familiar form. Thus, instead of Il´ia Erenburg, it will be Ilya Ehrenburg. The bibliography and endnotes, however, follow the Library of Congress norms throughout.

      I have also employed Russian versions of Ukrainian proper names, without diacritical marks, in the main text, because they are the forms most familiar to Western readers. I include myself in this number, as the greater part of my sources are Russian or English, not Ukrainian. Thus, I shall refer to Aleksandr and not Oleksandr Dovzhenko, to Kharkov and not the Ukrainian version Kharkiv, and likewise to Kiev and Babyi Iar, not Kyiv and Babyn Iar.

      Unless otherwise attributed, all translations are my own. Consequently, most of the film titles in the book are my own translations from Russian, and the reader may encounter them elsewhere in slightly different translations.

      Image: Map of wartime Europe showing German-Soviet border on 22 June 1941 and places named in the text. Map by Bill Nelson.

      Introduction

      For many, the Holocaust has become the most important historical event of the twentieth century. Indeed, it has become part of the American experience, providing Americans a point of reference firmer even than the Civil War or Pearl Harbor.¹ As an extreme of human behavior, it informs not only the understanding of history but also contemporary politics as the international community strives to comprehend, prevent, or prosecute programs of genocide, a term itself coined to describe the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews.

      Images, especially cinematic ones, have been a crucial means for inculcating public awareness of the Holocaust. Indeed, widespread Western skepticism about Nazi crimes was decisively defeated by screening newsreels of the camps at the end of the war. More recently, several popular films, including Marvin J. Chomsky’s Holocaust television miniseries (1978) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), further raised mass consciousness about the Holocaust. While these are reconstructions, audiences are also familiar with fragments of the original newsreel images, which have been recycled for both authorial films, such as Alain Resnais’s seminal Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard [1955]), and TV documentaries, such as the final two parts of Thames TV’s 1973 World at War (The Final Solution, directed by Michael Darlow), to name but two.

      Yet rarely do we pause to reflect on the genesis of the newsreel images. This oversight masks an extraordinary ignorance about the first moving images to depict the Holocaust not taken by perpetrators themselves. These little-considered films were made and shown before the newsreels showing U.S. and British soldiers liberating camps in Germany in 1945, usually regarded as the first films of the Holocaust. The neglected images—Soviet wartime films—are cinema’s initial attempts to represent the Holocaust, the subject of this study.

      Above all, identifying and examining these movies will shed new light on the apparently familiar subject of humanity’s first encounter with images of the Holocaust. By shifting the focus away from the familiar territory of the 1945 U.S. and British newsreels and to that of Soviet newsreels, documentaries, and features, we can better observe how the unprecedented sights of brutality were grasped within established narrative frameworks. For the Soviets, this meant adapting representations of Nazi atrocities so as to convey a Soviet version of the Holocaust, to Sovietize it, to claim the victims as their own, a process that can be compared to American filmmakers’ later tendency to Americanize the same events. By analyzing how Soviet filmmakers shaped and distorted their discoveries, we can better understand and guard against analogous appropriations of the Holocaust by other factions.

      Such an analysis not only reveals a great deal about the effects of cultural, political, and ideological biases on Holocaust film but also illuminates the process of cinematically representing the Holocaust, the ways in which narrative tropes for its representation were elaborated. This comprises the passage from eyewitness testimony and firsthand accounts, on the one hand, to the reportorial gathering information and shaping narratives, on the other.

      Finally, focusing on this body of films also enables a greater understanding of less-considered dimensions of history proper—specifically, of the initial stage of the Holocaust, the Nazis’ mass murder of Soviet Jews, which began in 1941, before the construction of the death camps and gas chambers. It likewise enables a rare insight into the unique culture of the wartime Soviet Union, which experienced a distinct moment of spontaneous de-Stalinization.²

      The Soviet Union and the Holocaust

      Investigating Soviet wartime cinema’s depiction of the Holocaust may seem a deliberately paradoxical and provocative endeavor. For one thing, it is anachronistic in that the filmmakers did not perceive these works as depicting the fate solely of Jews and certainly not as documenting the Holocaust, for that term became widespread even in the English-speaking world only beginning in the 1960s. Indeed, Soviet authorities rejected the very notion of the Holocaust and restricted the representation and discussion of the fate of Jewish victims of the Nazis’ genocidal activities as being separate from that of Soviet citizens more generally and other occupied peoples.³ In the context of the Soviet rejection of the word, it is worth considering its coinage. This word is a deeply problematic one in that it bears long-standing Christian associations and implies sacrifice, a repellent notion when used to describe the Nazis’ murder of Jews. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has shown persuasively, the term Holocaust used as a label for these horrific events possesses a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic.⁴ Other candidates, however, have their own difficulties. The main rival term, Shoah, a Hebrew word for catastrophe that dominates usage in France and elsewhere, has unwarranted suggestions of divine retribution,⁵ and the metonym Auschwitz, which Agamben employs, itself has the unfortunate effect of distracting attention from the millions of Jews not killed in the death camps. Consequently, I will employ the inadequate term Holocaust because, despite its unfortunate and unwarranted associations, it enjoys wide acceptance in the English language, especially since the 2005 U.N. resolution on Holocaust remembrance.⁶

      Like many historical terms, this one is further problematic in the timeframe of events it designates. Although few serious historians would dispute that the murder of 6 million of Europe’s 8 million Jews constitutes the central event that Holocaust film must strive to convey, this atrocity formed the culmination of a process that can be traced back to earlier Nazi policies of expelling Jews from German public life and ultimately from the country itself. Indeed, the roots of the Holocaust may be traced further back, to the deeply entrenched anti-Semitism that has marked Europe’s Christian culture for centuries. Yet this cultural context yielded a systematic policy to kill all Jews only in Nazi Germany, so that we must seek the immediate roots of the Holocaust in the Nazis’ acquisition and exercise of power after 1933.⁷ Consequently, I begin my study with Soviet depictions of the Nazis’ prewar persecution of Jews.

      The notion that Soviet Russia may have played a pivotal role in exposing the Holocaust may seem strange. After all, popular perceptions in the English-speaking world link Russia and anti-Semitism: pogrom is one of few Russian-language loan words in English. This association has been passed on through folk memory as important Jewish immigrant communities came to the United States in particular: Jews made up some 80 percent of the approximately 1,288,000 who left the Russian Empire between 1897 and 1915, perceiving it as a place that violently persecuted, humiliated, and discriminated against Jews.⁸ As Yuri Slezkine has pointed out, czarist Russia legally discriminated against everyone apart from the czar since it conferred no universal rights on citizens, but Jews nonetheless faced particular problems. Long-standing enmities toward Jews increased as industrial modernization began to destroy their traditional economic roles and crafts in the 1880s, leading them to migrate to urban centers. Once there, they met anti-Semitic barriers such as residency restrictions and quotas limiting entry to higher education, preventing Jews from seizing the opportunities generated by the ongoing changes to society.⁹ In consequence, Jews were disproportionately attracted to the revolutionary movements and played an important part in the Russian Revolution. Even though the Bolshevik Party possessed a smaller Jewish membership (4 percent) than did the other socialist parties, some of its most prominent members, such as Lev Trotskii, Iakov Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigorii Zinov´ev, were Jews.¹⁰ Moreover, despite hostility to the Bolsheviks from the wider Jewish population, the Whites actively fomented anti-Semitism and conducted pogroms against Jews under their control, using the prominence of Jewish Bolsheviks as a key element in their propaganda.¹¹ When much of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia emigrated, the revolution offered previously undreamed of opportunities for educated Jews in particular; as an additional attraction, their loyalty was assured, for they could hardly harbor secret sympathies for the anti-Semitic Whites.

      While the revolution interrupted the pattern of legal discrimination against Jews, this did little to alter grassroots anti-Semitism. Indeed, the association of Jews with the Soviet state aggravated such sentiments, even though the Bolsheviks took care to monitor, repress, and publicly deprecate such views.¹² Jews within the political elite suffered as much as others did during the Great Terror of the late 1930s, but their lack of any other homeland, which distinguished them from Germans or Poles, for example, meant that the NKVD was less likely to see Jews as potential foreign spies.¹³ Nevertheless, those who replaced purged Jews in the state and party apparatus tended to come from the emerging generation of Soviet-educated ethnic Russians, and a renewed focus on Russian cultural identity gained momentum.¹⁴

      It is sometimes thought that Stalin was throughout an anti-Semite and that the anti-Semitic policies adopted toward the end of World War II expressed his true intentions. The evidence for this is contradictory, however, and has been effectively countered by the Russian historian Genadii Kostyrchenko, who sets out a far more convincing narrative in which these policies reflected the Stalin regime’s abandonment of internationalism in favor of a growing Russian nationalism and imperial chauvinism—a populist rather than personal agenda.¹⁵

      Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was indisputably the site of the Germans’ first mass killings of Jews, which followed the Nazi invasion of 22 June 1941. Russia itself, the territory of the contemporary Russian Federation, is seldom seen as a center of Nazi killing, and compared to Poland it was not. Nonetheless, more Russian Jews were murdered than Dutch or French, although the fate of Russian Jews has been far less extensively represented or discussed than has that of their Western European counterparts, a situation that began to change only with the end of the cold war.¹⁶ Indeed, it is possible to find even recently published books, Web sites, and so on that entirely exclude any testimony relating to the first stage of the killings, the mass shootings that claimed the lives of approximately 1.5 million Soviet Jews.¹⁷ Moreover, a common historical sleight of hand calculates the death toll of Jews in Poland according to that nation’s pre–September 1939 borders, yielding a figure of 3 million, rather than to those of the postwar state. In consequence, western Ukraine, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union in September 1939 and invaded by Germany as being part of the Soviet Union in 1941 (and which is now part of the post-Soviet state of Ukraine), still has its half a million Jewish dead conventionally added to those of Poland. The Russian historian Il´ia Al´tman goes further, arguing that the Jews living in the formerly Polish, Baltic, and Romanian territories might all more plausibly be defined as Soviet dead, since the invading Nazis began killing these 3 million Soviet citizens because they were not just Jews but Soviet Jews. The resulting figure of Soviet Jews killed is nearer to 3 million, approximately half of all the Jews killed, rather than the conventional figure of 1.5 million.¹⁸ While it may seem macabre to dispute the citizenship of the dead in this manner, such figures nevertheless help show more broadly where and why the Holocaust occurred. The Soviet Union was the site of a brutal initial stage of the genocidal killings and as such was in a privileged position to see and represent the unfolding horror in journalism, literature, photography, and film. Recently, representations of the Holocaust in these other media have attracted public attention; examples of such representations include a major retrospective of the graphic art of Zinovii Tolkachev, whose albums contain eyewitness portrayals of the liberation of Majdanek and Auschwitz;¹⁹ a book devoted to the Soviet Jewish photographers’ depictions of the Holocaust;²⁰ and new studies of and translations of works by the journalists Vasilii Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg.²¹ In addition, the Black Book of Russian Jewry itself has been published in English and other languages, including Russian. But Soviet wartime cinema’s depictions of the Holocaust have until now been all but forgotten.

      Soviet Cinema

      Soviet montage cinema from the 1920s was and still is internationally acclaimed (e.g., the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov), but the nation’s cinematic culture from the 1930s and 1940s has received far less attention; many film critics have assumed that the coming of sound obstructed contemporary international reception of these films, whose lack of artistic worth warrants their obscurity in any event. As a number of studies have shown, however, this is at best partially true. Despite the Soviet Union’s increasingly oppressive internal climate of show trials and the Great Terror, a small but influential audience in large cosmopolitan cities, such as New York and London, still saw Soviet films and associated them with sophisticated technique and the morally serious use of cinema.²² Soviet cinema’s ongoing reputation enabled these works to continue to reach Western audiences right up to and, in countries not occupied by the Nazis, throughout the war, forming a chapter in film history now largely forgotten, especially in the West.

      Nevertheless, despite the almost universal ignorance of its filmic depictions of the Holocaust, the Soviet Union was the only anti-Nazi power to be occupied but still free to make and distribute its own films, uniquely positioning it to make the first cinematic depictions of liberation from Nazi occupation. Indeed, the Soviets had depicted Nazi persecution of the Jews prior the war, at least until the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. With the invasion of 22 June 1941, they began first to mention Nazi atrocities and then to make films recording them. The earliest of these films dates from the initial liberation of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in November 1941, during the Soviets’ first defeat of the Germans, in the Battle of Moscow. Soviet filmmakers continued to make such newsreels throughout the rest of the war, culminating in records of the death camp at Majdanek following its liberation in July 1944 and the one at Auschwitz in January 1945. Although the Soviet productions almost always deliberately understate the distinct fate of Jews by lumping together all the Nazis’ victims, including Soviet Jews, non-Jewish Soviet citizens, those of other nationalities, and political prisoners, they occasionally do explicitly identify Jewish victims. This footage thus constitutes both a visual record and an initial effort, albeit one deeply flawed and sometimes reluctant, to grasp and reconstruct the events of the Holocaust and to come to terms with its ramifications. The newsreels may be seen as a cinematic equivalent of Vasilii Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s Black Book of Russian Jewry, a compilation of documents on the Nazi extermination of Soviet Jews that was banned in 1946.²³ As the first examples of an important genre of cinema, these films deserve to be rescued from oblivion, reviewed, reconcontextualized, and reconsidered.

      Cinema’s First Confrontation with the Holocaust

      The historiography of the Holocaust contains a large number of accounts that trace Western society’s first confrontation with the tragic events therein. Many of these accounts relate to the prewar period, as does the historian Tony Kushner’s indicatively titled book The Holocaust and the Western Liberal Imagination. Such studies ask what Western society knew, when it knew this, and what more it might have done to save Jews from the Nazis.²⁴ This is of course an instructive and important line of inquiry, but curiously, such studies never discuss the Soviet Union’s efforts to help the Jews—or the lack thereof. This is frustrating, for Soviet actions played an important part in the events of the Holocaust. One the one hand, the Soviets occupied a pivotal role in defeating the Nazis and thus arresting their attempt to kill all Europe’s Jews; on the other, however, the Soviets’ earlier failure to stop the Nazis and their signing of the nonaggression pact contributed to the Nazis’ advances at least as much as Western actions did. Indeed, the partition of Poland, which resulted directly from the pact, led to the first Nazi-imposed Jewish ghettoes in German-controlled Poland.

      This flaw in historical focus is understandable; after all, the 1930s Soviet Union was a deeply oppressive and thoroughly illiberal society that many people would have wanted to flee, since those who took refuge there, especially from Nazi Germany, remained at risk. At the same time, however, the narrative of reactions to and representations of the situation in Germany cannot be properly understood without reference to the Soviet picture. Soviet prewar film portrayals of the Nazi persecution of Jews are a great deal more candid than either British or American images, and had they not been systematically marginalized and ignored, they might have triggered a more timely response to the international political and refugee crises faced in the last years of interwar peace.

      The process by which these works were obscured was briefly interrupted to a degree during the war but has since resumed through historians’ claims, for example, that the British public during World War II was sheltered from images of death and atrocity in newsreels.²⁵ Similar sorts of claims have been made of the United States. Yet these assertions are predicated on analyses of only British or American films.²⁶ They ignore the fact that Soviet films depicting atrocity had already been shown to large numbers of spectators in both countries, including the Oscar-winning Moscow Strikes Back (1942).

      Some studies do mention that the Soviets represented the camps before British and Americans did, but they discount the footage as being pale (Abzug), as unauthenticated and therefore lacking impact (Caven), or as less immediate and entirely staged (Delage).²⁷ These interpretations of the Soviet films appear to be based on little or no knowledge of them, however, and seem to assume that they were not widely seen in the West, consequently had little impact, and must therefore have been poor pieces of filmmaking.

      Whatever the rationale, the conclusions are not sound, for the Soviets had been showing images of Nazi atrocities since 1941, both screening them at home and sending them abroad. These were significant films that elaborated a set of conventions for representing such horrific sights. Soviet filmmakers also documented the two still-remaining death camps they discovered. When the December 1944 Soviet film of the Majdanek camp reached the West, however, it was censored, notably in France. Even where it was shown, such footage was treated with an enormous degree of suspicion,²⁸ for it differed in important ways from the newsreels made by the British and the Americans. For example, the Soviet films of Majdanek and Auschwitz showed fewer bodies because they depicted extermination camps in which corpses had been incinerated on a mass scale. Thus the Soviet filmmakers had to confront a central problem in representing the Holocaust: extrapolating the scale of the dead from a killing process that destroyed almost all traces of the victims—except, as both of these films tellingly show, their material effects: clothes, shoes, and so on. To this day, museums employ such artifacts to evoke the nature and scale of the catastrophe. Moreover, the Soviet films avoid an error common in Western films, that of treating concentration camps as the epicenter of the Nazi killing machine. Instead, while they do not explain the factors, especially ethnicity, determining the different fates of those who entered the camps, they suggest that the death camps’ extermination function was primary in all camps.

      These films also help us understand how filmmakers and photographers among the Western liberators reacted when confronting the camps, for many of their accounts may be compared with similar reactions by Soviet camera operators. The dichotomy between witnessing these scenes and fulfilling the role of the reporter is evident in the account of Roman Karmen, who recalls himself and his colleagues overcoming their emotions as they recorded images of civilians killed by the Nazis near Moscow in 1941 and 1942 but weeping as they saw the rushes. Similarly, the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, on an assignment for Life magazine, recalls truly registering the sights for the first time only on seeing the eventual prints, when the protective veil had been lifted.²⁹

      The comparison with Soviet representations of Nazi atrocities also betrays a gulf in attitudes. For instance, the British journalist Edwin Tetlow recalled: Writing my story emptied me of emotion, restoring me to a realization that I was not a participant in the horror but a professional observer with the duty of telling others what Belsen was like.³⁰ By contrast, Soviet media people, from their first such experiences in Russia in the winter of 1941 to the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, unfailingly stressed their identification with the dead as part of their professional function. Moreover, if Soviet camera operators or photographers felt disgust at their own searching for effective compositions in the scenes before them, as the British photographer George Rodger did when filming Belsen, they did not act as Rodger did, abandoning their assignments as a war correspondent, nor would they have been allowed to do so.³¹ The Soviets were less sympathetic to the expression of private, unpoliticized distress or trauma.

      Impossibility of Witnessing

      Humanity’s first reactions when discovering the true scale of Nazi atrocities can be understood in theoretical terms as well as from the previously articulated historical perspective. Any theorization of film representations of the Holocaust confronts a fundamental problem: apart from a few reels of film and still photographs that the Nazi mobile killing squads took of their victims in Soviet territory, as well as a handful of photographs taken in the camps, no direct documentation of the killings exists. This catastrophe continues to challenge notions of memory, history, and their representation.³² Thus, all films of the Holocaust are in some sense reconstructions, whether capturing direct witness testimony from survivors and perpetrators or filtering material into a subsequent commentary by the immediate liberators or others.³³ Visual images recording the immediate aftermath of the liberation essentially have this same quality of secondhand reconstruction, although they may also record evidence: the corpses and other traces of the dead, as well as the scene and means of murder. In each case, the moments of the Holocaust’s nearly six millions killings were not recorded, and memory intervenes between the moment of seeing an atrocity, of witnessing it, and that of recounting it in testimony, whether verbal, visual, or a combination of both in film.³⁴

      This gap between the event and its representation has been described in the psychoanalytically inflected notions of trauma and the Nachträglichkeit, or belatedness, of its expression. The most significant films addressing the Holocaust, starting with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, did not appear until over a decade after the events.³⁵ Yet this breach between the event and images of it applies very differently to the films I will discuss. More recently, the project of mapping ethical concerns onto those of film studies, undertaken notably by Libby Saxton, has shifted the focus to the manner in which films depict such events, onto the gaps, ellipses, silences and lacunae in the films themselves rather than in film history. What they do not show is held to grant the greatest insight into the filmmaker’s ethical vision.³⁶

      Yet the greatest film of the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), deliberately foregrounds such ellipses, the unrecorded images that haunt the visible ones, so as to push spectators to imagine the terrible reality that persists in the memory of those interviewed and to grasp that the most important scenes are those not recorded. In contrast, the films I examine here attempt to cover up and repress their lacunae. Hence, one of my main tasks in this book is to locate and begin to scrutinize these blank and blanked-out spots. Such equal attention to both the manner of depiction and the substance depicted relates to the theoretical paradigm of film and ethics; nonetheless, the work required to identify the films’ significant silences about the Holocaust is considerable, and the project of doing so occupies more of the book than does explicit analysis through the vocabulary of the poststructural approach to ethics.

      While the filmmakers did, in three or four instances, strive to openly depict the fate of Jews as Jews, the political climate of the wartime Soviet film industry made these exceptions rare. Even when filmmakers attempted this, they tended to avoid making Jews the exclusive focus of their films, implying or suggesting more than they showed or stated. For the most part, the filmmakers went along with the dominant wartime discourse, wherein victims were designated as Soviet, as was resistance, and both were implicitly Russian.³⁷ Even so, several fiction films mention the fate of the Jews or Nazi attitudes toward the Jews either at initial script stages or peripherally in the final film. Finally, some films document Nazi atrocities, in particular showing the victims of shootings and their mass graves in Russia and Ukraine or the death camps in Poland. Final films in this category sometimes mention that most of these victims were Jewish, and sometimes the initial footage clearly indicates this, but more frequently they keep silent on the matter.

      In each instance, through a careful search of recently published or as yet unpublished archival materials, the silences of these films can be made to tell a significant and rarely heard story of the Holocaust. The film archives contain never released, discarded newsreel footage from camps liberated by the Soviets that identifies the victims as predominantly Jewish (in Majdanek, Klooga, and Auschwitz). The various paper archives contain camera operators’ itemizations of their footage (i.e., montazhnye listy, or dope

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