The Holocaust is commemorated in memorials and museums, studied in secondary and tertiary history courses, narrated and debated by academic historians, remembered and recorded in autobiographical memoirs and taped interviews with survivors, perpetrators and witnesses. In addition, a considerable number of television and theatrical documentaries, in which academic historians, survivors and witnesses provide commentary and testimony, have been devoted to the subject of the Holocaust. Some of these documentaries adopt a broad approach, focusing on the “big picture” and the major  issues; others adopt a narrower focus, concentrating on one particular nation, community or individual. Some document the systematic planning and stages of the implementation of the “Final Solution” - ghettoization, deportation, incarceration, gassing, incineration – throughout Europe; others document the experience of one particular group of victims. Some focus on the issue of widespread collaboration and complicity among Nazi-occupied populations, and/or the absence of effective intervention by the Allies; others reveal a particular local population’s sometimes enthusiastic complicity with Nazi atrocities. In contrast with these indictments of human brutality, callousness or indifference, a recent spate of more comforting (feel-good) documentary films celebrate particular individuals or groups of people who displayed compassion and gave assistance to Jews - commemorated as “Righteous Gentiles”, or those who had “the courage to care”.       

While documentary films have generally been considered appropriate ways to treat the subject of the Holocaust, dramatized films are much more likely to encounter criticism. In the early post-war period, when memories were still raw, many people thought it was best to avoid the subject, for one reason or another. The survivors wanted to rebuild their lives, not to dwell on the past or be reminded of their victimization and suffering; the perpetrators and collaborators were fearful of exposure and condemnation; the moralists and intellectuals felt it was too serious and too incomprehensible an issue to be handled by the movies – which they felt were liable to trivialize it. Many felt that any fictional treatment was inappropriate because fiction - whether popular entertainment or high art - smacks of falsity, of artifice, while the Holocaust was only too real, and they believed its reality could only be conveyed by factual documentation and testimony. Crass entertainment was definitely taboo – it amounted to a gross betrayal of the sacred memory of the victims. Even in the 1990s, the intellectuals accused Spielberg of  Hollywoodising the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993), of turning it into a spectacular epic movie with a Hollywood-style hero and villain and a happy ending, and attacked Benigni even more for turning the Holocaust into a celebration of life and an entertaining  comedy in Life is Beautiful (1998).

Two recent feature films concerned with the Holocaust have not aroused the controversies that accompanied Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful but may, as a result, have been overlooked by many viewers. Sadly, the absence of controversy often translates into a lack of box office. Undistinguished films can achieve wide distribution and high sales because they are deemed “controversial”; it has become a means of creating interest, another form of promotion. (The success of The Da Vinci Code is one example of this phenomenon.) Fateless and Everything is Illuminated, the two films I shall discuss, are alike in two respects - they did not get the attention they deserved; and they were both adapted from critically acclaimed works of literature - but otherwise they are very different in approach. In the rest of this article, I hope to demonstrate why they deserve attention and illustrate the differences between them.

The Hungarian film, Fateless, is a more conservative and more respectful Holocaust film than the American film, Everything is Illuminated. It has a single protagonist, a 14-year-old boy called Gyuri, and a linear narrative. It begins in Gyuri’s home just after the Nazi occupation of Budapest, and relates his subsequent experiences of confinement,  deportation, incarceration in three concentration camps, hard labour, illness, imminent death, last-minute rescue from the fires of the crematorium, hospitalization and liberation, concluding with his return to Budapest after the war. Based on the personal experiences of a survivor, it is a testimonial work. But it is not entirely realist in style. The scenes in the camps are rendered surreal through the magnificent cinematography - the use of light and colour in particular – creating a world of awful beauty and making the horrific events seem like a hazy hallucination. In homage to the somber nature of the subject and the documentary/newsreel tradition, as well as fidelity to the sole surviving images of the Holocaust (B&W photos and newsreels), the film is almost monochromatic, close to B&W. Sepia-brown tones are dominant in the Budapest scenes; misty greys and muted blues in the camp scenes. The radical reduction of the palette mirrors the radical restrictions of the protagonist’s life. The world is thus reduced in possibilities.  

Unlike most other Holocaust films, the characters in Fateless visibly undergo bodily change in the course of the film, realistically recording the physiological impact of   malnutrition, corporal punishment and disease. (The actors were actually put on a starvation diet.) But the film is even more unusual in another way. It has no dramatic climax or final revelation to provide us with a satisfying emotional release or meaningful insight at the end of the film. Each scene is played out in real time, followed by a fade out; there is no attempt to fill in the blanks in between; the separate episodes become graphic moments in an unexplained (perhaps inexplicable) trajectory.

The visual impact of the film is in large measure due to the fact that it was directed by a master cinematographer. Lajos Koltai is noted for his work as a cinematographer on the films of his fellow-countryman Istvan Szabo and the Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore – many of which focus on the Nazi and Fascist eras. But the script was written by Imre Kertesz, who adapted it from his autobiographical novel based on his own experiences as a fourteen-year-old. Originally called Fatelessness, and first published in 1975, Kertesz’s book received little attention at home or abroad until Kertesz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Since then, the book has been translated into English and adapted to the screen. The novel is told from the point of view of naïve young Gyuri, a fictionalized version of the author, in a series of detailed snapshots of remembered incidents, presented in chronological order, from his last days in Budapest before being apprehended en route to work and transported to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald and finally to Zeitz, where he performs arduous labour until he is too ill to work and is returned to Buchenwald for his final days, but miraculously evades certain death and cremation through the intervention and medical care of two fellow prisoners, a doctor and a young male nurse, on the eve of liberation. The novel ends, as it began, in Budapest, with Gyuri feeling estranged from the morbidity of fellow survivors and the sympathy of strangers.

 With its conventional realist style and linear chronology, the novel is not markedly experimental but it has a subtle yet strong dramatic power. It derives its impact from the bemused, rather matter-of-fact tone of the descriptions of the horrific events and experiences Gyuri witnesses and undergoes – and from the use of irony. Gyuri is a naive, well mannered and sensible boy, who reacts and responds to his experiences according to normal civilized codes of morality, good taste and conduct in a situation of such extremity and barbarity that his feelings and conduct seem ridiculously, pathetically, inadequate and inappropriate. He admires the beauty of the landscape around Buchenwald, as though it were a scenic resort rather than a concentration camp; he makes excuses for brutal behaviour in others, as though it were an understandable lapse of good manners; he finds orthodox religious practice meaningless mumbo-jumbo and cannot understand why he cries when the old Jews mumble the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead for their slaughtered comrades.   

The other respect in which Kertesz departs from conventional Holocaust memoirs is in the way he insists on the presence of love and happiness in the camps. Other survivors may have acknowledged the help they received from relatives and friends, enabling them to survive, but tend to portray the world of the camps as one of unredeemed gloom and unending suffering. Kertesz insists on having experienced love and happiness, amidst the horrors. He is morally supported and physically protected by a young man from Budapest called Bandi Citrom, who treats him like a beloved baby brother; he is lovingly nurtured in the hospital by a Polish lad working as a nurse, a fellow prisoner who devotes himself to his care. Without this love, he would not have survived; but it is all the more treasured because the recipient is habitually the target of brutal animosity. He also records the moments of happiness – the rest periods after long hours of arduous labour; the bowl of soup or crust of bread after long hours of starvation; the luxury of sleeping on a real bed after months of sleeping on hard boards; these experiences were treasured because they were so rare. It may seem like an exaggeration to call this “happiness”, but it is generally true that we only really appreciate things when we have been deprived of them. In the midst of massive misery, a little easing of oppression and deprivation is a big improvement, and little things can provide much pleasure.      

Kertesz is an actual Holocaust survivor, one who very nearly did not survive. Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of the novel, Everything is Illuminated, was born well after the war and was only 24 when he published his book in 2002. He belongs to a totally different generation, two generations removed from Kertesz’s. In addition, he is an American, not a European, so the events of the Holocaust are not only removed in time but also in space from his personal experience. Foer is an experimental writer and his novel is post- modern rather than modern. Kertesz’s story is linear and realist and has one single protagonist; Foer’s novel constantly shifts between past and present, between different narrators, and between literary genres – embracing comedy, magic realism, suspense action, melodrama, love story and tragedy. It is the story of a young American Jewish writer caller Jonathan Safran Foer who goes to the Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the Holocaust. There he befriends a young Ukrainian named Alex (aka Sasha), who is also a would-be writer, and who acts as his translator and guide. The book is in part written in the form of letters sent to Jonathan by Alex, and in part wildly absurd fictional recreations of the 200-year history of the shtetl of Trachimbrod, the Ukrainian village where his grandfather was born, penned in magic realist style by Jonathan and sent in instalments to Alex. Comedy abounds. Alex’s letters are hilarious, his language an inventive form of fractured English, a crazy mixture of pompous phraseology and vulgarisms. Jonathan’s history of the shtetl is full of absurdly comic incidents – over-the-top sexual exploits, bizarre and improbable events. The journey on the road to Trachimbrod is full of crazy caper adventures: the car is driven by a cantankerous blind man; they are accompanied by a farting dog; the dog attaches himself to Jonathan, who is allergic to dogs; the carnivore Ukrainians can’t cope with Jonathan’s strict vegetarianism. Both Jonathan and Alex are mercilessly caricatured: Jonathan is a prissy and pedantic intellectual, a compulsive collector of trivia, obsessed with health, cleanliness and tidiness; Alex is a macho posturer and would-be womanizer, besotted with American culture, full of unrealizable ambitions and illusions about his abilities. However, the crazy comedy gives way at the end of the book to horror and tragedy – when the dramatic re-enactment of the destruction of Trachimbrod and the murder of its Jewish inhabitants during WW2 is followed by the suicide of Alex’s grandfather, whose guilt-ridden memories of the historical incident have been revived by the journey to the site with Jonathan.

The film, Everything is Illuminated, cuts out large chunks of the book, all those which are concerned with the fictionalized history of Trachimbrod, confining itself largely to the central three characters – Jonathan, Alex and Alex’s Grandfather – and to their journey to find the shtetl and the woman who saved Jonathan’s grandfather. Apart from a few scenes set in New York, establishing Jonathan’s obsessive concern with his family history and compulsive collecting habits, the film is entirely set in the Ukraine, although it was actually filmed in the Czech Republic. While the bulk of the action takes place in the present, in post-communist Ukraine, there are brief subjective flashbacks to the dramatic events surrounding the destruction of Trachimbrod and murder of its inhabitants, shown from Alex’s grandfather’s point of view – i.e. from the POV of a witness. Unlike the dark, almost monochromatic Fateless, this film is shot in brilliant colour in bright sunshine. In fact the colours are so brilliant and the landscape scenes so beautifully picturesque that they smack of deliberate artificiality. Some of the elaborate fictional devices employed in the novel are retained in the film: the caricatured characters, Alex’s comic language, the chapter headings, the crazy comic adventures on the journey to Trachimbrod; the shift from absurd comedy to tragedy at the end. The three central characters are well portrayed by one Hollywood star – Elijah Wood – and two Russians. The tall, gangly exhibitionist Eugene Hutz is quite superb as Alex; he is a gypsy musician from the Ukraine now resident in New York. The grandfather is portrayed by a veteran Russian actor. Though an American film, much of the dialogue is in Russian with English subtitles; and some of the humour derives from Jonathan’s incomprehension of the offensive language spoken in Russian, which we can understand through the subtitles and which Alex turns into polite language when he translates it for Jonathan.

Because of its entertaining qualities, Everything is Illuminated may have more appeal to young audiences than Fateless. Because it is the imaginative creation of a young contemporary American, it shares many characteristics with other products of current popular culture. It mixes genres – it is part road movie, part comedy, part suspense thriller – and yet deals with serious ongoing issues. Like Jindabyne, it shows how the present is haunted by the past, how the landscape is inscribed with historical memories, how painful and difficult it is to acknowledge the injustice and trauma engendered by deeply entrenched racism.             

Notes:

Imre Kertesz’s novel, Fateless, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, and published by Vintage Books, is available in bookshops and libraries.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illunminated, is published by Penguin Books, and is available in bookshops and libraries.

The DVD of Everything is Illuminated is available in video rental stores for hire and for sale. 

The movie version of Fateless has had a short commercial release in Australian capital cities and was shown at the 2006 Auckland Film Festival. It is distributed in Australia by Dendy Films.

Imre Kertesz’s 2002 Nobel Prize acceptance speech is accessible on the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2002/kertesz/lecture/