Thursday, November 19, 2009
To the Editor:
Re "Schindler's Jews Find Deliverance Again" (The Week in Review, Feb. 13): Should those of us who were there nit-pick at inaccuracies in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," or remain silent and not distract from the film's power? I think it is important to point out inaccuracies, lest Holocaust revisionists do it for us.
Oskar Schindler's Jews almost certainly did not arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, and Edith Wertheim, whom you quote, is mistaken if she thinks the shower room in which she found herself on arrival was the gas chamber. Such a mistake is understandable, since none of us who arrived at Auschwitz and survived the initial selection at the "ramp" knew where we were or knew that death by gassing was the Nazi method for bringing about the "final solution."
Arriving Polish Jews had a stronger premonition that they might not leave the place alive than Jews from other countries, yet they too did not know gassing was the preferred method. The system of annihilation by gas could only be carried out if the victims believed they were going to the showers to be "disinfected."
The gas chambers had no plumbing for showers (though they had dummy shower heads) and no pipes that could deliver gas or water, as Mr. Spielberg's film implies. Zyklon B crystals in canisters were injected into the gas chambers by small openings in the ceiling or on the side, depending on which gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau was used.
Only a contingent of Czech Jews in 1944, who for Nazi propaganda had been allowed to live about six months in a separate enclave in Auschwitz before being sent to the gas chambers for "special treatment" (the Nazi euphemism for gassing), knew of their fate in advance, and they were literally whipped into the chamber.
Those of us who survived the initial selection and were deemed able to work for at least a short while found ourselves herded naked, with heads shaved, into showers, where, after brief contact with cold water, we were thrown some filthy zebra-stripe uniforms to start our new lives as concentration camp inmates.
It is impossible to portray in a movie the horror of Auschwitz or any other death camp. But Mr. Spielberg's film gives a new generation at least an inkling of what the Holocaust was about. ERNEST S. LOBET Glen Cove, L.I., Feb. 15, 1994
Re "Schindler's Jews Find Deliverance Again" (The Week in Review, Feb. 13): Should those of us who were there nit-pick at inaccuracies in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," or remain silent and not distract from the film's power? I think it is important to point out inaccuracies, lest Holocaust revisionists do it for us.
Oskar Schindler's Jews almost certainly did not arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, and Edith Wertheim, whom you quote, is mistaken if she thinks the shower room in which she found herself on arrival was the gas chamber. Such a mistake is understandable, since none of us who arrived at Auschwitz and survived the initial selection at the "ramp" knew where we were or knew that death by gassing was the Nazi method for bringing about the "final solution."
Arriving Polish Jews had a stronger premonition that they might not leave the place alive than Jews from other countries, yet they too did not know gassing was the preferred method. The system of annihilation by gas could only be carried out if the victims believed they were going to the showers to be "disinfected."
The gas chambers had no plumbing for showers (though they had dummy shower heads) and no pipes that could deliver gas or water, as Mr. Spielberg's film implies. Zyklon B crystals in canisters were injected into the gas chambers by small openings in the ceiling or on the side, depending on which gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau was used.
Only a contingent of Czech Jews in 1944, who for Nazi propaganda had been allowed to live about six months in a separate enclave in Auschwitz before being sent to the gas chambers for "special treatment" (the Nazi euphemism for gassing), knew of their fate in advance, and they were literally whipped into the chamber.
Those of us who survived the initial selection and were deemed able to work for at least a short while found ourselves herded naked, with heads shaved, into showers, where, after brief contact with cold water, we were thrown some filthy zebra-stripe uniforms to start our new lives as concentration camp inmates.
It is impossible to portray in a movie the horror of Auschwitz or any other death camp. But Mr. Spielberg's film gives a new generation at least an inkling of what the Holocaust was about. ERNEST S. LOBET Glen Cove, L.I., Feb. 15, 1994
Schindler's List" opened across Germany last Thursday, after a gala premiere in Frankfurt attended by Steven Spielberg and President Richard von Weizsacker, who said its lesson for his compatriots was the need for vigilance and open-mindedness as the best defense against intolerance.
Mr. Spielberg, who had received an anonymous death threat during the Vienna premiere last month, was given tight security, though a bomb threat forced one theater in Karlsruhe to delay the opening half an hour. Forty-eight theaters began showing the film Thursday, most to sellout crowds, according to the producers.
In Frankfurt, where Oskar Schindler lived in obscurity until his death in 1974 and where some of the Jews he saved from the concentration camps still remember him in their prayers, city authorities said they were considering sending all schoolchildren to see the film.
The director also shepherded openings last week in Cracow, where much of "Schindler's List" took place and was filmed, and in Israel. Most German theaters show the film as Mr. Spielberg made it, though voices are dubbed in German.
While elsewhere the film had been criticized for making a German the hero of a story about the Holocaust, in the country responsible for it the central point was this: Why only Schindler? Why did so few other Germans try to stop the death machinery? As Dieter Trautwein, a German Protestant minister who befriended him in the 1960's, asked after seeing the picture, "Where was everybody else?"
Perhaps because that question is so difficult to answer, Germans have shied away from dramatizing the subject themselves and, as with the "Holocaust" television series in the 1980's, are once again eagerly hearing and seeing how others see it, and them. CRAIG R. WHITNEY
Mr. Spielberg, who had received an anonymous death threat during the Vienna premiere last month, was given tight security, though a bomb threat forced one theater in Karlsruhe to delay the opening half an hour. Forty-eight theaters began showing the film Thursday, most to sellout crowds, according to the producers.
In Frankfurt, where Oskar Schindler lived in obscurity until his death in 1974 and where some of the Jews he saved from the concentration camps still remember him in their prayers, city authorities said they were considering sending all schoolchildren to see the film.
The director also shepherded openings last week in Cracow, where much of "Schindler's List" took place and was filmed, and in Israel. Most German theaters show the film as Mr. Spielberg made it, though voices are dubbed in German.
While elsewhere the film had been criticized for making a German the hero of a story about the Holocaust, in the country responsible for it the central point was this: Why only Schindler? Why did so few other Germans try to stop the death machinery? As Dieter Trautwein, a German Protestant minister who befriended him in the 1960's, asked after seeing the picture, "Where was everybody else?"
Perhaps because that question is so difficult to answer, Germans have shied away from dramatizing the subject themselves and, as with the "Holocaust" television series in the 1980's, are once again eagerly hearing and seeing how others see it, and them. CRAIG R. WHITNEY
MONDAY -- Emilie Schindler, the widow of Oskar Schindler, will be honored at the Plaza in a program with Dr. Frank Field of WCBS-TV and with Rena and Louis Fagen, who were saved from the Nazis by the famous Schindler list. The dinner-dance begins with cocktails at 6:30 P.M. The evening will benefit Shenkar College of Fashion and Textile Technology in Ramat Gan, Israel. Dietary laws observed. Tickets, $500, from (212) 947-1597. Foundling Hospital Dinner
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Spielberg's Framing of Oskar Schindler in the Movie
Another short clip about the framing of Oskar Schindler in the movie.
Spielberg's Framing of the Nazis in the Movie
Here is a short clip we put together concerning the film's framing of the Nazi soldiers.
Review by Anders Wik and Erik Nilsson Ranta of Moviemix
Schindlers list is made with a mixture of traditional filming and about 40% of handheld camera shots, This is to give the movie a more documentary feel to it, which together with the black and white color is stunningly beautiful. Many of the scenes look exactly like taken out of the elementary and junior high school documentaries, commonly watched in Europe. The music and footage is phenomenal and of course the acting. Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler is brilliant. His facial expressions are in many cases very precise to the actual pictures taken of Oskar Schindler in the 1940s. Ralph Fiennes, as Amon Goeth, the SS officer is also fantastic, really personifying evil. He had to gain 26 pounds in order to play the part which kind of looks somewhat awkward but the overall performance is great. Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern is also wonderful. The filth, stress and chaos from living in the ghettos can be seen in traces of Kingsley´s face. Most of the small parts are done very well too. Schindlers list is easily said a masterpiece from a theatrical standpoint. There are, according to many sources some inaccuracies in scenes and details but it is a Hollywood production from the director of E.T. so that can be overseen. The movie received 7 Oscars in 1993, one of which was for best picture. If you want to see a movie about the holocaust, or if you want to study this part of history, watching this movie is a great way to start.
http://www.moviemix.nu/filmrec.asp?ID=1464
Schindlers list is made with a mixture of traditional filming and about 40% of handheld camera shots, This is to give the movie a more documentary feel to it, which together with the black and white color is stunningly beautiful. Many of the scenes look exactly like taken out of the elementary and junior high school documentaries, commonly watched in Europe. The music and footage is phenomenal and of course the acting. Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler is brilliant. His facial expressions are in many cases very precise to the actual pictures taken of Oskar Schindler in the 1940s. Ralph Fiennes, as Amon Goeth, the SS officer is also fantastic, really personifying evil. He had to gain 26 pounds in order to play the part which kind of looks somewhat awkward but the overall performance is great. Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern is also wonderful. The filth, stress and chaos from living in the ghettos can be seen in traces of Kingsley´s face. Most of the small parts are done very well too. Schindlers list is easily said a masterpiece from a theatrical standpoint. There are, according to many sources some inaccuracies in scenes and details but it is a Hollywood production from the director of E.T. so that can be overseen. The movie received 7 Oscars in 1993, one of which was for best picture. If you want to see a movie about the holocaust, or if you want to study this part of history, watching this movie is a great way to start.
http://www.moviemix.nu/filmrec.asp?ID=1464
Results:
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), National Democratic Party in Germany, founded in 1964 and since 1996 led by Udo Voigt is the biggest national party in Germany. The party had great success in the election in 2004 when they entered in a cooperation with the German folk union and received 9,2% of the votes which meant 12 seats in the parlament. According to polls, in 2006, NDP received 6,5 % of the votes in the German election in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern area.
http://sydsvenskan.se/varlden/article184469/Framgang-for-NDP-i-tyska-val.html
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), National Democratic Party in Germany, founded in 1964 and since 1996 led by Udo Voigt is the biggest national party in Germany. The party had great success in the election in 2004 when they entered in a cooperation with the German folk union and received 9,2% of the votes which meant 12 seats in the parlament. According to polls, in 2006, NDP received 6,5 % of the votes in the German election in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern area.
http://sydsvenskan.se/varlden/article184469/Framgang-for-NDP-i-tyska-val.html
According to Niven´s article Statistical surveys has shown that since German reunification in 1990, there has been an increase in growth of right-wing extremists. “There has been an accompanying rise in radical right-wing ideological agitation,” Niven says. The running and success of the film in Germany coincided with these occurrences.
According to a journal article by William J. Niven; Journal of European Studies, Vol. 25, 1995, “The Reception of Steven Spielberg´s ‘Schindler´s List’ in the German Media,” the press reviewed the film and published articles on Schindler. Articles also covered the people Schindler protected. There were debates accompanied with the film and television talk-shows.
The Spiegel writes "Schindler's story is all the more credible because it is told by the creator of 'E.T.' and 'Jurassic Park' and not issued by the Federal Institute for Political Instruction." Only neo-Nazis avoid seeing the film. "Nobody in our circles shows any great interest in it," says the head ideologist of the Hamburg Nationalist Party. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2206
Reviews in the U.S.
“Spielberg shows a firm moral and emotional grasp of his material. The film is an outstanding achievement,” John Gross, Hollywood and the Holocaust. (The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=2334)
Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Books, says in the review "Schindler's List": Imagining the Holocaust to Remember It, posted in the New York Times:
“There is a real photographic record of some of the people and places depicted in ‘Schindler's List,’ and it has a haunting history,”
"Schindler's List" brings a pre-eminent pop mastermind together with a story that demands the deepest reserves of courage and passion.”
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/spielberg-schindler.html
“Spielberg shows a firm moral and emotional grasp of his material. The film is an outstanding achievement,” John Gross, Hollywood and the Holocaust. (The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=2334)
Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Books, says in the review "Schindler's List": Imagining the Holocaust to Remember It, posted in the New York Times:
“There is a real photographic record of some of the people and places depicted in ‘Schindler's List,’ and it has a haunting history,”
"Schindler's List" brings a pre-eminent pop mastermind together with a story that demands the deepest reserves of courage and passion.”
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/spielberg-schindler.html
The Reception of Steven Spielberg´s Schindler´s List
Won 7 Oscars, 63 other awards and another 21 nominations. Oscars won for:
- Best Picture
- Best Art Direction-Set Decoration
- Best Cinematography
- Best Director
- Best Film Editing
- Best Music, Original Score
- Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Won 7 Oscars, 63 other awards and another 21 nominations. Oscars won for:
- Best Picture
- Best Art Direction-Set Decoration
- Best Cinematography
- Best Director
- Best Film Editing
- Best Music, Original Score
- Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
OSKAR SCHINDLER by David M. Crowe Westview Press/Perseus, 19.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 706, ISBN 081333375 19.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848
Most biographies are written against a sketchy background of historical events drawn with just enough broad strokes of the brush to provide context for a life. Martin Crowe's book, apart from the affecting last chapters on the autumn of Schindler's life, is just the opposite. The milieu in which Oskar Schindler, the famous saviour of Krakow ghetto Jews during the Holocaust, operated is presented in exhaustive and brightly lit detail, while Schindler himself haunts the pages as a shadowy figure, elusive to the eye. The explanation is twofold. Crowe's indefatigability as a researcher is beyond question. But Schindler was a minor figure in the great scheme of Nazi things and the evidence on which to build a biography is flimsy and bafflingly inconclusive. The greater part of it is to be found in those most tricky of source materials for the historian, personal memoirs and other after-the-event accounts, not least from Oskar himself. The second reason is that Crowe has not really set out to write a biography at all. His book is an investigation of the question whether Schindler is rightly to be considered a hero worthy of Jewish beatification as a 'righteous Gentile' and if the answer is yes, why and how did he pull it off?
Running through the book is a commentary on the versions of Schindler known to millions from Keneally's biographical 'novel' and Spielberg's film. Viewed as history, the film comes off badly. Take two key episodes. Spielberg, following Keneally, makes Schindler an eye-witness of the massacre of the children in the Kinderheim in the Krakow ghetto in March 1943. He almost certainly did not witness it. And though there may be little doubt that the event shocked him deeply, there is no evidence that it was a road-to-Damascus moment, transforming him into a warrior against the Holocaust. Nor did the famous scene in which Schindler dictates the names of 1,000 Jews to be saved from the death camps by removal from Krakow to his factory in Moravia ever take place. Indeed, Schindler played no direct part in the drawing up of the list.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-130213575/much-saint-oskar-schindler.html
Most biographies are written against a sketchy background of historical events drawn with just enough broad strokes of the brush to provide context for a life. Martin Crowe's book, apart from the affecting last chapters on the autumn of Schindler's life, is just the opposite. The milieu in which Oskar Schindler, the famous saviour of Krakow ghetto Jews during the Holocaust, operated is presented in exhaustive and brightly lit detail, while Schindler himself haunts the pages as a shadowy figure, elusive to the eye. The explanation is twofold. Crowe's indefatigability as a researcher is beyond question. But Schindler was a minor figure in the great scheme of Nazi things and the evidence on which to build a biography is flimsy and bafflingly inconclusive. The greater part of it is to be found in those most tricky of source materials for the historian, personal memoirs and other after-the-event accounts, not least from Oskar himself. The second reason is that Crowe has not really set out to write a biography at all. His book is an investigation of the question whether Schindler is rightly to be considered a hero worthy of Jewish beatification as a 'righteous Gentile' and if the answer is yes, why and how did he pull it off?
Running through the book is a commentary on the versions of Schindler known to millions from Keneally's biographical 'novel' and Spielberg's film. Viewed as history, the film comes off badly. Take two key episodes. Spielberg, following Keneally, makes Schindler an eye-witness of the massacre of the children in the Kinderheim in the Krakow ghetto in March 1943. He almost certainly did not witness it. And though there may be little doubt that the event shocked him deeply, there is no evidence that it was a road-to-Damascus moment, transforming him into a warrior against the Holocaust. Nor did the famous scene in which Schindler dictates the names of 1,000 Jews to be saved from the death camps by removal from Krakow to his factory in Moravia ever take place. Indeed, Schindler played no direct part in the drawing up of the list.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-130213575/much-saint-oskar-schindler.html
Once Reviled as Nazi Collaborator, Now a Savior
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
“Were you on the train?”
Hedy Mayer, Devora Spira, Peska Friedman and Berta Rubinsztejn felt no need to ask: which train? Only one train was on everyone’s lips on Tuesday night at a Manhattan gathering of Hungarian Jews who had escaped the Holocaust. There had been many trains to Auschwitz. There had been only one train to life, and the four women, now all in their 80s, had been on it, along with about 1,680 others.
It was a train from Budapest that stopped for several months at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and finally made its way to Switzerland and salvation. The trip was arranged in 1944 during the darkest days of the Nazi genocide by Rezso Kasztner, also known as Rudolf or Israel Kastner, a Jew who was to rescue more Jews than Oskar Schindler.
He had done this by negotiating face to face with Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of Hitler’s Final Solution, and paying $1,000 a head while concealing, enemies later said, the full measure of the peril that was to claim an estimated 550,000 of Hungary’s 825,000 Jews, and vouching at the Nuremberg trials for an SS colonel, Kurt Becher. For this, Mr. Kasztner was shot to death in 1957 at age 51 in Tel Aviv.
For years his name was anathema. Reviled as a Nazi collaborator whom an Israeli judge said had “sold his soul to the devil,” Mr. Kasztner, a journalist and official in Israel’s ruling leftist workers party, Mapai, was denounced in court, demonized in print and spat upon on the street. Rage against him brought down the Israeli government in 1955 and all but ignited a civil war. His three right-wing killers were pardoned seven years into their life sentences. Israel’s Supreme Court later cleared him of all charges, but the stigma stuck. His name graced no memorial walls, even at Yad Vashem, Israel’s shrine to victims of the Shoah, although in 2007 it accepted some of his papers.
But on Tuesday, growing research by historians and a long campaign by his aggrieved family and the many he saved culminated in a joyous tribute at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research at 15 West 16th Street, where a respectful new documentary about him was screened before its American movie house opening on Friday.
The two-hour film, “Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis,” took its director, Gaylen Ross, more than eight years to make. The movie presents new information, including allegations by the confessed gunman, Ze’ev Eckstein, that others were in on the plot but never prosecuted, and it has already been acclaimed in Israel, Canada, England and Hungary. It also suggests that Mr. Kasztner had acted with the knowledge of Jewish Agency officials he later protected.
“There were some things I didn’t know; there was a lot of politics involved,” said Gabriela Shalev, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, who listened to a discussion afterward with Ms. Ross, members of the Kasztner family and historians.
“We heard he was killed and we were shocked,” said Ms. Friedman, who had been on the train and now lives in Brooklyn. “He did not deserve it.”
Ms. Mayer, also of Brooklyn, said that she was several months pregnant when she boarded Mr. Kasztner’s train. Her child, Egon, was born in Switzerland and lived to become a professor of sociology at the City University of New York.
Ms. Spira, another Brooklyn resident, said it was not just the people on the train who were saved. “I have two children, 13 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren,” she said. “He saved them, too.”
Mr. Kasztner’s daughter, Zsuzsi, 63, a nurse in Israel, and two of her three daughters — Merav Michaeli, 42, a television journalist, and Michal, 38, a marketing consultant — were smothered in embraces. “I want to thank you for your grandfather,” said Irene Grossman, 67, of Riverdale, in the Bronx, who was 3 years old when she joined her family on the train.
Manny Mandel, 73, a psychotherapist in Silver Spring, Md., who was also aboard the train, said he had heard all the stories about Mr. Kasztner’s outsize ego and abrasiveness. “I’m not sure I would have liked that man personally,” he said. “But if not for all that arrogance, imagine how he could have negotiated with Eichmann — he could have had him shot on the spot.”
Ladislaus Löb, 76, who was 11 when he was on the train, came to the screening from England, where he is emeritus professor of German at the University of Sussex; he published a book last year on his experiences and what he called Mr. Kasztner’s “daring rescue of Hungarian Jews.”
“He was a hero of circumstances,” Dr. Löb said. “Somebody had to do something. It’s better to save lives than not save lives.”
Ms. Rubinsztejn, also from Riverdale, claimed the last word before the Yivo Institute audience of 300. “Who has something to say about Kasztner should come to me,” she said. She was there, alive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22survivors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
“Were you on the train?”
Hedy Mayer, Devora Spira, Peska Friedman and Berta Rubinsztejn felt no need to ask: which train? Only one train was on everyone’s lips on Tuesday night at a Manhattan gathering of Hungarian Jews who had escaped the Holocaust. There had been many trains to Auschwitz. There had been only one train to life, and the four women, now all in their 80s, had been on it, along with about 1,680 others.
It was a train from Budapest that stopped for several months at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and finally made its way to Switzerland and salvation. The trip was arranged in 1944 during the darkest days of the Nazi genocide by Rezso Kasztner, also known as Rudolf or Israel Kastner, a Jew who was to rescue more Jews than Oskar Schindler.
He had done this by negotiating face to face with Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of Hitler’s Final Solution, and paying $1,000 a head while concealing, enemies later said, the full measure of the peril that was to claim an estimated 550,000 of Hungary’s 825,000 Jews, and vouching at the Nuremberg trials for an SS colonel, Kurt Becher. For this, Mr. Kasztner was shot to death in 1957 at age 51 in Tel Aviv.
For years his name was anathema. Reviled as a Nazi collaborator whom an Israeli judge said had “sold his soul to the devil,” Mr. Kasztner, a journalist and official in Israel’s ruling leftist workers party, Mapai, was denounced in court, demonized in print and spat upon on the street. Rage against him brought down the Israeli government in 1955 and all but ignited a civil war. His three right-wing killers were pardoned seven years into their life sentences. Israel’s Supreme Court later cleared him of all charges, but the stigma stuck. His name graced no memorial walls, even at Yad Vashem, Israel’s shrine to victims of the Shoah, although in 2007 it accepted some of his papers.
But on Tuesday, growing research by historians and a long campaign by his aggrieved family and the many he saved culminated in a joyous tribute at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research at 15 West 16th Street, where a respectful new documentary about him was screened before its American movie house opening on Friday.
The two-hour film, “Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis,” took its director, Gaylen Ross, more than eight years to make. The movie presents new information, including allegations by the confessed gunman, Ze’ev Eckstein, that others were in on the plot but never prosecuted, and it has already been acclaimed in Israel, Canada, England and Hungary. It also suggests that Mr. Kasztner had acted with the knowledge of Jewish Agency officials he later protected.
“There were some things I didn’t know; there was a lot of politics involved,” said Gabriela Shalev, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, who listened to a discussion afterward with Ms. Ross, members of the Kasztner family and historians.
“We heard he was killed and we were shocked,” said Ms. Friedman, who had been on the train and now lives in Brooklyn. “He did not deserve it.”
Ms. Mayer, also of Brooklyn, said that she was several months pregnant when she boarded Mr. Kasztner’s train. Her child, Egon, was born in Switzerland and lived to become a professor of sociology at the City University of New York.
Ms. Spira, another Brooklyn resident, said it was not just the people on the train who were saved. “I have two children, 13 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren,” she said. “He saved them, too.”
Mr. Kasztner’s daughter, Zsuzsi, 63, a nurse in Israel, and two of her three daughters — Merav Michaeli, 42, a television journalist, and Michal, 38, a marketing consultant — were smothered in embraces. “I want to thank you for your grandfather,” said Irene Grossman, 67, of Riverdale, in the Bronx, who was 3 years old when she joined her family on the train.
Manny Mandel, 73, a psychotherapist in Silver Spring, Md., who was also aboard the train, said he had heard all the stories about Mr. Kasztner’s outsize ego and abrasiveness. “I’m not sure I would have liked that man personally,” he said. “But if not for all that arrogance, imagine how he could have negotiated with Eichmann — he could have had him shot on the spot.”
Ladislaus Löb, 76, who was 11 when he was on the train, came to the screening from England, where he is emeritus professor of German at the University of Sussex; he published a book last year on his experiences and what he called Mr. Kasztner’s “daring rescue of Hungarian Jews.”
“He was a hero of circumstances,” Dr. Löb said. “Somebody had to do something. It’s better to save lives than not save lives.”
Ms. Rubinsztejn, also from Riverdale, claimed the last word before the Yivo Institute audience of 300. “Who has something to say about Kasztner should come to me,” she said. She was there, alive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22survivors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Ouch: The magic movie dust that lodges in our eyes
From 'Gone With the Wind' to 'Up', blubbing in the dark has been part and parcel of the cinema-going experience, writes Rob Sharp
'ET'
A sobbing mess of a man
'Up'
'Titanic'
'The Shawshank Redemption'
12345A square-headed man wearing huge glasses marries his childhood sweetheart. The pair renovate their house, and paint the walls of their unborn child's nursery. But the man's wife suffers a miscarriage. The couple manage to put the loss behind them, and grow old together, as devoted to each other as the day they met. We see the man entertaining his wife during her final illness, through an act of child-like playfulness – floating a balloon into her hospital room. A few moments later, we see him in a funeral home, surrounded by flowers.
This silent, four-minute montage, near the beginning of Pixar's latest animated blockbuster, Up, is fast becoming one of cinema's most memorable sequences. It should be credited, first off, for its efficiency: it packs in more about the back-story of 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, the film's curmudgeonly central character, than some movies manage in two hours. But it is increasingly infamous for another reason. It is making people – lots of people – cry.
Social networks are abuzz; it seems as if there isn't an office in the land that hasn't seen its ball-cracking manager spurt rivulets. So how has a computer-generated sourpuss reduced the cinema-going public to snivelling wrecks? Is it socially acceptable to cry at the cinema?
Okay, so there are plenty of examples of this kind of thing. There are classic movies – 1939's Gone With the Wind being mum's favourite weepie. More recently, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Tim Burton's 2003 flick Big Fish and Life is Beautiful (1997), among others, have seen the hordes flocking to cinemas to empty their lachrymal ducts. In medieval times, scholars believed we cried because we were getting rid of excess humour (the stuff they thought we were made of). These days scientists say it's just provoked by emotional extremes; especially intense in a heightened sensory environment, where the images are widescreen and sound comes at us from the full 360 degrees.
As far as emotional extremes go, the Up montage gives us an entire life's highlights. There are no dentist appointments or screaming rows; instead, it's someone's wedding day, or the dolling up of a childhood playhouse-turned-lovenest. The relationship between Carl and Ellie, his wife, is defined by emotional perfection: she is stunningly attractive and bonds with him despite his social awkwardness and cuboid looks (in fact she loves him for them).
Tear-jerkers are often associated with family, or close bonds. Who can avoid welling up when Tim Robbins' newly-emancipated Andy DuFresne is reunited with Red, his one-time fellow lag, at the end of The Shawshank Redemption?
And what about the ever-so-real finale to Saving Private Ryan, when Tom Hanks has completed his mission? You would need a heart of stone not to break down at his last words: "Earn this... earn it." Boom.
Redemption gets us going. It's an arguably cheesy, but well-known example: when the ghosts of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker appear at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983), there is a bittersweet moment of completion. We are both mourning the departed and finding solace in their new-found peace. In Big Fish, Albert Finney, playing a character who tells fantastical lies to spice up people's lives, is redeemed when he actually turns into a big fish at the movie's conclusion.
To make the Up montage, the film's director, Pete Docter, co-director and co-screenwriter Bob Peterson, and producer Jonas Rivera looked at a number of Super-8 film reels from family archives. They made the sequence silent, to more powerfully communicate how life's biggest moments are contained in its little pleasures. (This is, in case you were too busy wiping your eyes, one of the picture's central tenets.)
So, luckily for you, my over-emotional friend, it's all been planned from the offset. Proudly wear your emotional honesty on your snotty sleeve, and now revel in a few of cinema's other tear-jerkingly miserable moments.
I'm fine, seriously: Seven of the best
* It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
James Stewart as James Bailey runs around Beford Falls shouting "Merry Christmas"; you'd have to be Scrooge not to realise there's no place like home.
* E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
A latex alien embraces six-year-old Gertie, and utters the immortal line: "Be good." And thus reduces the world to a simpering mess.
* Bambi (1942)
"Boom," goes the hunter's gun. One man's meat is another's emotional baggage. The death of Bambi's mother means more than just a juicy cutlet.
* The Railway Children (1970)
One of the children, Bobbie, is reunited with her father in slow-motion through clouds of train steam, with the immortal lines: "Daddy! My Daddy!"
* Titanic (1997)
To some, the sight of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson sinking into the sea is a source of great pleasure; to most, it reminds them of their greatest lost loves.
* Watership Down (1978)
The rabbit Hazel dies, discards his body, heads towards the sun, and follows a shadowy figure into the afterlife. It's just like when that naughty fox killed Fluffy.
* Schindler's List (1993)
Real-life survivors saved by Oskar Schindler place pebbles on his grave – a Jewish remembrance ritual.
October 25, 2009
http://www.tribune.ie/magazine/features/article/2009/oct/25/ouch-the-magic-movie-dust-that-lodges-in-our-eyes/
From 'Gone With the Wind' to 'Up', blubbing in the dark has been part and parcel of the cinema-going experience, writes Rob Sharp
'ET'
A sobbing mess of a man
'Up'
'Titanic'
'The Shawshank Redemption'
12345A square-headed man wearing huge glasses marries his childhood sweetheart. The pair renovate their house, and paint the walls of their unborn child's nursery. But the man's wife suffers a miscarriage. The couple manage to put the loss behind them, and grow old together, as devoted to each other as the day they met. We see the man entertaining his wife during her final illness, through an act of child-like playfulness – floating a balloon into her hospital room. A few moments later, we see him in a funeral home, surrounded by flowers.
This silent, four-minute montage, near the beginning of Pixar's latest animated blockbuster, Up, is fast becoming one of cinema's most memorable sequences. It should be credited, first off, for its efficiency: it packs in more about the back-story of 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, the film's curmudgeonly central character, than some movies manage in two hours. But it is increasingly infamous for another reason. It is making people – lots of people – cry.
Social networks are abuzz; it seems as if there isn't an office in the land that hasn't seen its ball-cracking manager spurt rivulets. So how has a computer-generated sourpuss reduced the cinema-going public to snivelling wrecks? Is it socially acceptable to cry at the cinema?
Okay, so there are plenty of examples of this kind of thing. There are classic movies – 1939's Gone With the Wind being mum's favourite weepie. More recently, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Tim Burton's 2003 flick Big Fish and Life is Beautiful (1997), among others, have seen the hordes flocking to cinemas to empty their lachrymal ducts. In medieval times, scholars believed we cried because we were getting rid of excess humour (the stuff they thought we were made of). These days scientists say it's just provoked by emotional extremes; especially intense in a heightened sensory environment, where the images are widescreen and sound comes at us from the full 360 degrees.
As far as emotional extremes go, the Up montage gives us an entire life's highlights. There are no dentist appointments or screaming rows; instead, it's someone's wedding day, or the dolling up of a childhood playhouse-turned-lovenest. The relationship between Carl and Ellie, his wife, is defined by emotional perfection: she is stunningly attractive and bonds with him despite his social awkwardness and cuboid looks (in fact she loves him for them).
Tear-jerkers are often associated with family, or close bonds. Who can avoid welling up when Tim Robbins' newly-emancipated Andy DuFresne is reunited with Red, his one-time fellow lag, at the end of The Shawshank Redemption?
And what about the ever-so-real finale to Saving Private Ryan, when Tom Hanks has completed his mission? You would need a heart of stone not to break down at his last words: "Earn this... earn it." Boom.
Redemption gets us going. It's an arguably cheesy, but well-known example: when the ghosts of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker appear at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983), there is a bittersweet moment of completion. We are both mourning the departed and finding solace in their new-found peace. In Big Fish, Albert Finney, playing a character who tells fantastical lies to spice up people's lives, is redeemed when he actually turns into a big fish at the movie's conclusion.
To make the Up montage, the film's director, Pete Docter, co-director and co-screenwriter Bob Peterson, and producer Jonas Rivera looked at a number of Super-8 film reels from family archives. They made the sequence silent, to more powerfully communicate how life's biggest moments are contained in its little pleasures. (This is, in case you were too busy wiping your eyes, one of the picture's central tenets.)
So, luckily for you, my over-emotional friend, it's all been planned from the offset. Proudly wear your emotional honesty on your snotty sleeve, and now revel in a few of cinema's other tear-jerkingly miserable moments.
I'm fine, seriously: Seven of the best
* It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
James Stewart as James Bailey runs around Beford Falls shouting "Merry Christmas"; you'd have to be Scrooge not to realise there's no place like home.
* E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
A latex alien embraces six-year-old Gertie, and utters the immortal line: "Be good." And thus reduces the world to a simpering mess.
* Bambi (1942)
"Boom," goes the hunter's gun. One man's meat is another's emotional baggage. The death of Bambi's mother means more than just a juicy cutlet.
* The Railway Children (1970)
One of the children, Bobbie, is reunited with her father in slow-motion through clouds of train steam, with the immortal lines: "Daddy! My Daddy!"
* Titanic (1997)
To some, the sight of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson sinking into the sea is a source of great pleasure; to most, it reminds them of their greatest lost loves.
* Watership Down (1978)
The rabbit Hazel dies, discards his body, heads towards the sun, and follows a shadowy figure into the afterlife. It's just like when that naughty fox killed Fluffy.
* Schindler's List (1993)
Real-life survivors saved by Oskar Schindler place pebbles on his grave – a Jewish remembrance ritual.
October 25, 2009
http://www.tribune.ie/magazine/features/article/2009/oct/25/ouch-the-magic-movie-dust-that-lodges-in-our-eyes/
Schindler's list discovered in Australia
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Apr. 6, 2009
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
A copy of the list compiled by German businessman Oskar Schindler which saved hundreds of Jewish workers during the Holocaust has been discovered by a researcher at an Australian library.
Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list containing the names of 801 Jews, as they sifted through boxes of manuscripts of Australian author Thomas Keneally.
The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was discovered between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said Monday, according to AFP.
Pryke said the list was "one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century."
"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," she added. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."
She said the library had no idea the list was among six boxes of material acquired in 1996 relating to Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, originally published as "Schindler's Ark" and which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1993 film, Schindler's List.
Pryke said that Schindler actually compiled a number of lists as he urged Nazi bureaucrats not to send his workers to the death camps.
She said the document found by the library was given to Keneally in 1980 by Leopold Pfefferberg - named on the list as Jewish worker number 173 - when he was persuading the novelist to write Schindler's story.
Schindler's list discovered in Australia
Apr. 6, 2009
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
A copy of the list compiled by German businessman Oskar Schindler which saved hundreds of Jewish workers during the Holocaust has been discovered by a researcher at an Australian library.
Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list containing the names of 801 Jews, as they sifted through boxes of manuscripts of Australian author Thomas Keneally.
The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was discovered between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said Monday, according to AFP.
Pryke said the list was "one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century."
"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," she added. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."
She said the library had no idea the list was among six boxes of material acquired in 1996 relating to Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, originally published as "Schindler's Ark" and which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1993 film, Schindler's List.
Pryke said that Schindler actually compiled a number of lists as he urged Nazi bureaucrats not to send his workers to the death camps.
She said the document found by the library was given to Keneally in 1980 by Leopold Pfefferberg - named on the list as Jewish worker number 173 - when he was persuading the novelist to write Schindler's story.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1238562921626&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Apr. 6, 2009
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
A copy of the list compiled by German businessman Oskar Schindler which saved hundreds of Jewish workers during the Holocaust has been discovered by a researcher at an Australian library.
Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list containing the names of 801 Jews, as they sifted through boxes of manuscripts of Australian author Thomas Keneally.
The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was discovered between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said Monday, according to AFP.
Pryke said the list was "one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century."
"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," she added. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."
She said the library had no idea the list was among six boxes of material acquired in 1996 relating to Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, originally published as "Schindler's Ark" and which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1993 film, Schindler's List.
Pryke said that Schindler actually compiled a number of lists as he urged Nazi bureaucrats not to send his workers to the death camps.
She said the document found by the library was given to Keneally in 1980 by Leopold Pfefferberg - named on the list as Jewish worker number 173 - when he was persuading the novelist to write Schindler's story.
Schindler's list discovered in Australia
Apr. 6, 2009
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
A copy of the list compiled by German businessman Oskar Schindler which saved hundreds of Jewish workers during the Holocaust has been discovered by a researcher at an Australian library.
Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list containing the names of 801 Jews, as they sifted through boxes of manuscripts of Australian author Thomas Keneally.
The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was discovered between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said Monday, according to AFP.
Pryke said the list was "one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century."
"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," she added. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."
She said the library had no idea the list was among six boxes of material acquired in 1996 relating to Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, originally published as "Schindler's Ark" and which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1993 film, Schindler's List.
Pryke said that Schindler actually compiled a number of lists as he urged Nazi bureaucrats not to send his workers to the death camps.
She said the document found by the library was given to Keneally in 1980 by Leopold Pfefferberg - named on the list as Jewish worker number 173 - when he was persuading the novelist to write Schindler's story.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1238562921626&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
BIOGRAPHY:
Oskar Schindler
Born April 28, 1908
Zwittau, Moravia, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died October 9, 1974
Frankfurt Germany
Oskar Schindler joined the Nazi Party for business and began selling black market goods to the German Army and the SS. Schindler started employing Jews in his facrory because he could pay them less. He began employing Jews that the German army would concider unable to work. He saved over 1,200 Jews by employing them in his factory and proving to the SS that they were valuable workers. He became friends with key with SS members which made it easier for him to buy Jews and bribe German officials. Some fifty-six thousans Jews lived in the ghetto when Schindler started his factory. There are now 7,000 decendents from the Jews Schindler saved.
Oskar Schindler
Born April 28, 1908
Zwittau, Moravia, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died October 9, 1974
Frankfurt Germany
Oskar Schindler joined the Nazi Party for business and began selling black market goods to the German Army and the SS. Schindler started employing Jews in his facrory because he could pay them less. He began employing Jews that the German army would concider unable to work. He saved over 1,200 Jews by employing them in his factory and proving to the SS that they were valuable workers. He became friends with key with SS members which made it easier for him to buy Jews and bribe German officials. Some fifty-six thousans Jews lived in the ghetto when Schindler started his factory. There are now 7,000 decendents from the Jews Schindler saved.
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