FILMING THE SHADOWS — DAISY ASQUITH

20,000 words, University of Brighton 2012

Chapter One: Testimony and Performance

- Performed Testimony

- Unperformed Testimony

- Listeners

Chapter Two: The Challenges of Representation

-The Limits of Representation

- How Shoah escapes the Limits

- The Use of Archive

Chapter Three: Mediation and Transmission

- Filming

- Truth and Artifice

- Audiences

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Introduction

“Nothing worse should happen!” - survivor Freddie Knoller

Holocaust survivors seem to know things that the rest of us don’t and for this they are equally feared and revered. Dori Laub has called them “bearers of a secret”2.They have information about human nature which doesn’t translate into any language yet they are on a mission to communicate their experiences so that the Holocaust is not forgotten.This is the purpose of their testimony; to let people know what humans are capable of doing to each other, in the faint hope they may not do it again. It is an uncomfortable message they have: that humanity is not innately kind, and that people can’t be trusted.The Holocaust is not a story of good triumphing over evil, as it’s audience would like it to be. Its message is often not very clear, plagued as it is by being misunderstood or mistranslated by audiences, hijacked by Rabbis and politicians in service of their own causes, labelled unreliable by historians due to failures in memory and by the awkward fact that some survivors feel the need to romanticise, embellish and imbue their stories with false heroism.3

Many survivors choose never to speak about their experiences, preferring instead to try and forget and move on, or being unable to remember as a result of being deeply traumatised. Lyotard has described the Holocaust as “an earthquake so powerful that it destroyed its measurements.”4 The very experience of the Holocaust wiped out much of the possibility for recording or remembering the events. As Dori Laub has written,“massive trauma precludes its

1 Freddie Knoller at home, roll 6, 11 Nov 2011,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012
2 Laub Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History 1992: 82

3 Hassan A House next Door to Trauma 2003: ch2
4 Lyotard in ed. Friedlander Probing the Limits of Representation 1992: 5

registration.”5 He has called the Holocaust “an event without a witness”.6 Even if memories survive intact they are not easy to share. After liberation, a whole new set of challenges were faced by survivors who had no homes, no family, no communities to return to. Blocking out the past may have been the only way to build a normal life, to get a job, a marriage, start a new life in a new culture with often a new language to learn. Any attempt to analyse their time in the camps at this stage may have been self-sabotage. As Appelfeld puts it :“One does not look directly into the sun.”7

Filmmaker Luke Holland notes that the Holocaust is “denying the laws of memory… as it recedes in time it seems to get bigger in the cultural landscape.”8 Those survivors that do choose to talk about the camps, often after a 30 year silence, are now in high demand to speak at schools, universities and prisons. Audiences have certain expectations of these talks and survivors are adept at responding to these. In making the documentary that accompanies this thesis, about the present day lives of Holocaust survivors, it was necessary to identify ways of getting behind the performed testimonies that survivors believe are acceptable and palatable to an audience. After the Holocaust9 was commissioned by Channel 4, thus it also had to meet the demands of a commercial broadcaster, which include the ill-fitting qualities of catharsis and entertainment value, even in the history department.

There are already thousands of hours of recorded testimony on video, in both the Shoah foundation archive, funded by Spielberg, and the Fortunoff archive at Yale, founded by Langer, Hartmann and Laub. How to make such testimonies accessible to a wide audience is an ongoing

5 Laub 1992: 57
6 Laub in Caruth Trauma: Explorations in Memory 1995: 5
7 Appelfeld in Lang Holocaust Representation:Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics 2000:27

8 Luke Holland spoke about his project documenting perpetrators at the International Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies:Truth and Witness,Wiener Library, London, 30th April 2012. See also Peter Novick for analysis of this phenomenon The Holocaust in American Life 1999: 2

9 Asquith 2012 After the Holocaust, film, 47 mins, Channel 4

problematic which is at the centre of this thesis. Lawrence Langer’s work is indispensable in thinking through the thorny issues which surround testimony and performance.The many styles and qualities of the testimonies recorded have been insightfully interpreted in Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies:The Ruins of Memory. In the first pages he notes that “several currents flow at differing depths in Holocaust testimonies, and our understanding of the event depends very much on the source and destination of the current we pursue.”10 Documentary has an advantage over written testimony in that it is possible to record silences and behaviours that are not part of the survivors’ performance. But there are ethical limits and moral challenges in representing the Holocaust and a careful path must be navigated through these.

The first chapter of this dissertation investigates testimony and the way it is performed by survivors according to audiences expectations. It investigates how that performance impacts on their identity, and which behaviours in the present can be seen as an ongoing surfacing and seeping through of the camp experience. How do Holocaust survivors apply moral hindsight to their experiences and hide their “unheroic memory”11 from audiences unwilling to hear it? How do they avoid the nihilism of “humiliated memory”12- the camps as evidence for a total lack of faith in humanity, which is too difficult for an audience to absorb? How do they use their imaginations and learnt literary and film techniques to tell their stories more effectively, without disturbing a wasps nest of revisionists? And what is the best way to listen to testimony, in order to hear the fullest truth? In order to engage with these questions this thesis includes a commentary upon my own role as documentary film maker.The first chapter details the process of choosing the participants for the documentary After the Holocaust, and the challenges involved in listening to, and recording their testimonies.

10 Langer Holocaust Testimonies:The Ruins of Memory 1991: xi

11 Langer 1991: 162
12 Langer 1991: 77

The second chapter investigates the ethical challenges of representation of the Holocaust in documentary, with particular focus on Lanzmann’s Shoah, the seminal documentary at the epicentre of the debate. It investigates the dilemmas posed by archive footage, aestheticisation, the use of humour and the demands for ‘watchability’ and catharsis of a commercial broadcaster. Exploring ideas of unspeakability and sacrality around the Holocaust the second chapter looks at the relationship of documentary and photography to truth. Can subjectivity be embraced in Holocaust representation? How does Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah escape the limits of representation? And how do survivors themselves wish to be represented? Both theories on the limits of representation and my own documentary practise inform the conclusions drawn.

The third and final chapter analyses my own practice with reference to the work in the first two chapters.The finished documentary After the Holocaust is submitted alongside this dissertation. The film is 47 minutes long and features three survivors of Auschwitz and Belsen. All aspects of its production were guided by this research, which enriched the film, which in turn informs this dissertation.The third chapter investigates the practical application of theories on testimony, trauma, representation, truth and transmission - how do these impact on the filmmaking? How successfully does the film negotiate the limits and challenges of representing the Holocaust? How effective is it at transmitting the experiences of survivors? And what can recordings of their unconscious behaviour - or unperformed testimony - reveal about the camp experience that performed testimonies can’t?

This dissertation incorporates my own critical practise in terms of documentary making, as well as an engagement with relevant theoretical material on Holocaust memory and representation.The incorporation of that material is not designed as a ‘reflective’ project, rather the thesis seeks to present an argument in which both theoretical work and the experience of

filming Holocaust survivors allow for an interrogation of key questions around the limits of representation and the ethics and means of the most effective transmission of Holocaust testimony. After the Holocaust was made in between and during the theoretical work, to the point that the two modes of investigation became interdependent and each demanded much of and greatly informed the other.This interplay has resulted in a dissertation which aims to use the film both as a piece of critical practise, investigating and experiencing testimony directly, and also as a film text to be contextualised, positioned and analysed within the wider genre of Holocaust documentary.

Chapter One - Testimony and Performance

The first and arguably most important decision to make in any Holocaust documentary is who to film. There are many survivors who still do not talk about what they experienced. It is arguable that this group should be represented by the documentary as their silence transmits its own story. But, in the recording of many thousands of hours of testimony for the Shoah foundation and the Fortunoff archive at Yale, there has been a significant amount of retraumatisation of survivors. Kraft found that “all of the returning survivors say that remembering at length was deeply distressing and that they were surprised at the strength and endurance of the effects.”13Thus the filmmaker has a particular set of ethical questions to consider in both who and how to interview.The survivors chosen for After the Holocaust, after investigation of the risks and consideration of the time pressures of television, were all confident talking about the Holocaust. This didn’t mean there was no risk of psychic disturbance. As Kraft points out, the experience can get closer, harder, more painful as survivors get older: the memory is like a “tuning fork” that “vibrates at a precise frequency, causing a core emotional memory to resonate” and “threaten their current self-concept.”14 Choosing to work with survivors who had well-rehearsed stories to fall back on was something that could be done to minimise this risk.

Freddie Knoller is 91 and lives in Totteridge with his wife Freda. He told his wife and two daughters nothing about his life in the camps for 30 years. Now he is a self-confessed Holocaust obsessive, meticulously documenting his own desperate journey through Europe as he tried to escape the Nazis, his betrayal by a lover while hiding in the hills with the French resistance and the eighteen months he spent in Auschwitz and Belsen. Freddie attends the Holocaust Survivors Centre in Hendon, where he is chair of the Camp and Ghetto Survivors committee. He is

13 Kraft Archival Memory 2006:319 14 Kraft 2006: 321

energetic and buoyant, and puts his survival down to this irrepressible optimistic nature.“I was determined to survive, I had to survive, and I did survive.This was my attitude. I’m pretty sure this optimism saved my life. Because I saw so many people who gave up, and they didn’t last long… they just couldn’t go on.”15 His family have received little sympathy from him for their ordinary suffering of modern life - a car accident, a redundancy, a divorce.They suspect his optimism is sometimes “an act”16 but Freddie refutes this charge.

Gena Turgel is 89 and lives in Stanmore, at the far northern end of the Jubilee line. She has a dignified manner and is always beautifully turned out, with freshly blow-dried hair and long painted nails. Her appearance is in itself significant. In the camps, looking fit and healthy could make the difference between being selected to live or die. She says “the stench of Belsen followed me” for years after liberation and that she had to “use perfume to try and get rid of that”17. Gena has a fear of being vulnerable, and pushes herself hard to be as perfect as possible in everything she does. When we first met a three course meal was served by her housekeeper in the dining room. Gena can no longer walk without a zimmer frame, as she is waiting for a knee replacement operation, a prospect that fills her with dread. In Belsen she was given the comparatively privileged, but unenviable position of nurse in the Wehrmacht hospital, and now hospitals, and her own helplessness, terrify her. Gena believes God saved her life.When asked why God would allow so many others to be randomly slaughtered she replies “Who are we to judge God? We are not worthy.”18

Zigi Shipper is 82 and lives with his wife in Bushey, where they are surrounded by their two daughters and six grown-up grandchildren. Zigi is extremely charming and funny, and claims to have

15 Freddie Knoller at home, roll 6, 11th Nov 2011,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012 16 Freda Knoller in a restaurant, roll 22, 9th Dec 2011, ibid
17 Gena Turgel at home, roll 51, 28th Mar 2012, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012 18 Gena Turgel at home, roll 8, 16th Nov 2011, ibid

never stopped joking, even in the worst times. “Well it was no use moping - you’re not going to get any bread so you might as well get on with it… my joking got me in trouble but I didn’t care.”19 Zigi got his first job at the age of 10, in the metal factory in the Lodz ghetto. Seventy-two years later he is still refusing to retire, and runs his own stationery business, delivering the orders himself in his van. Zigi has many friends who are also survivors and they know how to enjoy life, throwing parties for each other and eating out. His wife says he has been “dreadful”20 to live with though, particularly when he was younger and had problems with drink and gambling. Zigi does not display the optimism of Freddie or the faith in God of Gena. His attitude to his own survival is a harder one for a survivor to live with and possibly for an audience too, who prefer heroic stories, but it rings the truest:“We were lucky, that’s all. Nothing saved us but pure, pure luck.”21

When looking for survivors to film, great importance had to be placed on their ability to handle the attention and to accept the limitations of the medium.There were around 50 survivors found during research who were willing to take part and if it wasn’t for time constraints there may have been many more. Survivors feel an urgency in their mission; that time is running out for the world to hear their stories. The youngest survivors of the camps are now in their 80s. There is intense rivalry between many of them about who suffered the most.A hierarchy has emerged whereby even the number on your arm can be used as evidence for how much you suffered; those with lower numbers were in the camps for longer.22 The final choice of the three survivors described here was settled because their experiences differed, yet were comparably horrendous. Their attitudes to the fact of their survival were completely different and this affected the way they performed their testimonies.

19 Zigi Shipper in his garden, roll 7, 11th Nov 2011, ibid
20 Jeanette Shipper at home, roll 23, 15th Dec 2011, ibid
21 Zigi Shipper on train journey, roll 9, 18th Nov 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012
22 Hassan, the manager of the Holocaust Survivors centre, on “hierarchies of suffering” 2003: 161

Performed Testimony

Holocaust survivors are as prone to performing the role society gives them as anyone else. Weedon writes:“As individuals inserted within specific discourses, we repeatedly perform modes of subjectivity and identity until these are experienced as second nature”.23 Zigi, Gena, and Freddie are all used to giving talks on their experiences. This creates something of a barrier to getting to know them, as they give only a rehearsed version that is the same every time they perform it. While this made them confident participants in the project it also presented the challenge of getting “under the skin of memory”,24 as Delbo describes it. Itzhak Zuckerman says in Lanzmann’s seminal testimonial film Shoah: “If you could lick my heart it would poison you.”25 This one remark illuminates the challenges of giving and hearing testimony. First of all, as the heart cannot be seen, Zuckerman suggests that the truth of the Holocaust is hidden inside the survivor. His message is that hearing the full horror would poison the listener.The comment points to the impossibility of comprehension in relation to the experience of survivors, but it also demands the audience engage with this poisonous horror.According to Langer, recording this testimony is “an unfashionable challenge, requiring risks from all participants…We enter the juncture between venom and antidote where one goes on living in spite of the toxin.”26 Those who record testimony have particular imperatives, the biggest challenge facing being installation of confidence in the survivor that the unbearable is welcome.

Holocaust survivors are acutely aware of their audiences. Their silence until the 1980s was partly due to a wish to forget and ‘move on’ and partly due to the knowledge that no-one was

23 Weedon on Butler’s theory of performativity Identity and Culture 2004: 7

24 Delbo in Langer 1991: 6
25 Zuckerman in Shoah, Langer 1991: 37
26 Langer 1991:38

ready or willing to hear the truth. Gena Turgel illustrates the lack of an audience with the following anecdote: “I tried to tell a lady I knew once how I suffered, how I was starving… she responded by telling me “You’re not the only one who suffered you know - we also couldn’t get oranges.”27 A distinct lack of perspective prevents normal people from hearing the testimony correctly. As Langer writes :“It is virtually useless, as we soon discover, to approach the experience from the reservoir of normal values.”28 There is also huge difficulty in believing the horror. As Zigi Shipper says “Sometimes I don’t even believe it myself. Did this really happen?…There are so many things I cannot understand. If I live a thousand years I’ll never understand how someone can kill babies, and then in the evening have dinner with his wife and children and listen to music?”29 In order to understand what life meant in the camps we have to suspend first our disbelief that such things can happen, and then our entire understanding of the human being as a moral agent. Langer writes: “Only a collaborative effort can validate the testimony, a transvaluation requiring us to assent to the ‘normality’ of piles of corpses destined for the crematorium.”30 Listeners must be willing to adjust their usual frame of reference for what is normal or believable.

Most audiences want some catharsis in the testimony.As Langer notes:“The interviewer, as surrogate for a larger audience, instinctively clings to “optimism” as a shield against a truth that is “harsh and impossible to really accept,” one espousing “a complete lack of faith in human beings.”31 Thereby the Holocaust survivor colludes with the interviewer to give the audience what they want.This can be a happy ending - a liberation story or a wedding, in Gena’s case to one of the British soldiers that liberated Belsen. Or it can be a moral lesson: “Do not hate!”32 is Zigi’s

27 Gena Turgel at home, roll 8, 16th Nov 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

28 Langer 1991: 20
29 Zigi Shipper on a train journey, roll 9, 18th Nov 2011, ibid
30 Langer 1991: 22

31 Langer 1991: 60
32 Zigi Shipper, Watford Grammar School, roll 3, 4th Nov 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

favourite. Or it can be a heroic story, such as Freddie’s, full of wit and resistance. The testimony is tailored to the audience. During filming for After the Holocaust, a Rabbi persuaded Freddie to include the idea that God helped him to feel optimistic even though Freddie had said he never thought of God in the camps: “because optimism is related to belief in God… and to include that is inspirational to people.”33 An audience of Jewish postgraduates in Oxford gets a slightly different version to a group of teenage girls in a London grammar school and a Lesbian and Gay group in a progressive synagogue.

The commissioning editor in the history department at Channel 4 would consider it her job to be aware of the expectations of the audience for this documentary. The request made by her was that the film should not be “too depressing… make it cheerful, otherwise people will switch it off.”34 The job of the commissioning editor is, after all, primarily to gain as large an audience as possible for their programmes, thereby winning as much advertising revenue as possible for the channel overall. When commercial pressures such as this influence the representation of survivors of the worst atrocities in memory, there are uncomfortable compromises and difficult moral ground to navigate.

Interestingly though, the attitude of survivors to the way they should be represented is remarkably similar to that of the commissioning editor.They do not wish to be sacralised, held on a pedestal, feared, or avoided in case they are too upsetting. Freddie Knoller proudly read from a schoolboys letter to him:“You were not the tired, sad old man I was expecting!”35 What survivors want is to make sure no-one forgets, and if that means presenting the events in a way that people will want to hear them, then that is what they will do. Humour is used in a surprising way that

33 Rabbi at Oxford Chabat Society, roll 13, 22nd Nov 2011, ibid
34 Channel 4 History commissioner 7th Oct 2011
35 Freddie Knoller reads letter from schoolboy, roll 13, 22nd Nov 2011, After the Holocaust 2012

grabs the attention of an audience, particularly a young one. Cracking jokes about the Holocaust is the last thing teenagers expect from a survivor and therefore it is incredibly effective. Rather than make the Holocaust light or palatable, it makes it real and accessible. Freddie Knoller manages to begin his testimony to a room full of teenage boys, by making them all laugh at the fact that the reason he was deported to Auschwitz was that his “moody” girlfriend betrayed him to the Nazis.36 Gena Turgel laughs at her own food obsession, teasingly interrogating everyone around her about how many sandwiches they have had: “Come on, eat now! You look underfed!”37 Zigi Shipper is king of the one-liners:“That was no holiday camp!”38 he says chuckling to himself. Care must be taken though, that this humour remains the property of the survivors. It doesn’t give permission to the listeners or the audience to make such jokes.What Holocaust survivors do give us is permission to laugh, which actually makes us more receptive to their message.As Aaron Kerner writes “To deny humour is to deny yet another aspect of humanity.”39 Humour is used as a tool in their survival, assisting them in taking back some control of their memories, owning them, integrating them with their present day lives and getting their story told.And the bigger the audience, to their minds, the better.

Unperformed Testimony

Charlotte Delbo makes a distinction between the two types of memories she had as a survivor of Auschwitz: memoir profonde and memoir ordinaire. Common memory (memoir ordinaire) is used in testimony to give a version of events “from the vantage point of today, of what it must have been like then.”40 It is a functional memory that mediates between the experience and today’s audience. Deep memory (memoir profonde) however, is memory that is not within the

36 Freddie Knoller, roll 40, Jan 2012,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

37 Gena Turgel at home, roll 8, 16th Nov 2011, ibid
38 Zigi Shipper in his garden, roll 7, 11th Nov 2011, ibid
39 Kerner 2011: 80

40 Delbo in Langer 1991:5

control of the survivor. It is not performed, but deeply felt and can be triggered unexpectedly at any moment, when something in daily life transports the former victim back to how they felt in the camp, via what Yaeger calls a “demonic portal”.41 As Langer observes in the Fortunoff video archive, “videotaped testimony includes gesture… which cannot be duplicated on the printed page.”42 Gesture is often the expression of deep memory, and includes stumbling on words, physical symptoms like sweating, shivers, a faraway look, tears.These are often followed by an apology as the survivor pulls themselves back to the present in order to continue. Gena Turgel has said at these moments “Sorry - I can’t talk…” and “…no-one can believe…”. She says “now and then it comes to the surface…”43 as if we only need fish a little deeper to find these memories which are always there. Freddie stumbles and goes quiet - a rare occurrence - when he talks about the death of his parents, an unrehearsed part of his story.44 Zigi says he is only sad when he is alone45, so thick is the “skin”46 of his memory. His solution is to try not to be alone, ever. Every moment is filled with the chatter of words as if to fend off the threat of deep memories.

In documentaries about the Holocaust survivors are often allowed to add detail and emotional colour to the subject, but never to be the subject.Their life stories and the ways they impact on their testimony aren’t confronted. Because of this, behaviours and gestures which could illuminate so well what it meant to be in a camp, are ignored. Behaviour can transmit unspeakable truth, the traumatic space in which the actual witness faints and falls into a coma, as happened to K Zetnik, the Holocaust survivor at the Eichmann trial.The significance of his fainting and therefore silence may have been lost on most, but for the poet Haim Gouri: “In fainting, he in fact said it

41 Yaeger Testimony Without Intimacy 2006: 410
42 Langer 1991: 41
43 Gena Turgel at home, roll 37, 18th Jan 2012, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

44 Freddie Knoller in his office, roll 27, 22nd Dec 2012 ibid
45 Zigi Shipper on train, roll 9, 18th Nov 2011, ibid
46 see Delbo on the “skin of memory” p.20 of this dissertation

all”47. Despite Hannah Arendt’s frustration at “failed” witnesses such as this, in fact the fainting is an embodiment of his experience and transmits “another kind of knowledge, one that exceeds the facts of his persecution.”48 As Caruth has written:“The traumatised, we might say, carry an impossible history within them.”49 Their history is “not a possessed knowledge, but itself possesses at will, the one it inhabits”50.The facts are not the only kind of truth about the Holocaust.The traumatised survivor is well positioned to testify to “a different form of truth altogether"51 writes Laub; that which tells us about the meaning of the event. When a survivor panics because their lunch is late52, they communicate so much more about the hunger they felt in Auschwitz, than when they attempt to describe it verbally - an exercise which usually fails due to the inadequacy of available language and their disbelief that anyone can ever understand what it was like. Words like “cold” and “hungry” have a double meaning for survivors. Or “a dual thrust”53 as Langer puts it. One meaning resides in common memory and the other resides in deep memory, where the cold and hunger of Auschwitz that no-one can understand, are hiding.

Charlotte Delbo writes of the skin of memory:“The skin is tough. Sometimes, however it bursts and gives back it’s contents. In a dream, the will is powerless.”54 Dreams, or nightmares, are an unconscious expression of our true thoughts and feelings, but behaviour while awake can also be unconscious. Freud describes the extraordinary way that events experienced in the distant past can still continue to operate so intensely;“that unconscious memories were not deactivated or laid

47 Hirsch/Spitzer in Memory: Histories,Theories, Debates 2010: 394

48 Hirsch/Spitzer 2010: 394
49 Caruth 1995: 5
50 Caruth 1995: 6

51 LaubinFelman/LaubTestimony:CrisesofWitnessing1992:60
52 Freddie Knoller at home, roll 27, 22nd Dec 2011,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

53 Langer 1991:41
54 Delbo in Langer 1991: 6

to rest, by the usual process of forgetting.”55 but that they “persist for a long time with astonishing freshness and with the whole of their affective colouring.”56 All three of the survivors filmed for After the Holocaust were obsessed with food, the single most enduring legacy of the starvation they experienced in the camps. It became clear that eating with them was as important as listening to their stories; that the food that was constantly being prepared, recycled, squirrelled away and enjoyed in abundance, was a resounding piece of testimony itself.Their behaviour around food spoke volumes about hunger and the desperate fear of not having enough food to survive. A hugely generous and ever-present platter of smoked salmon sandwiches, never allowed to run out, transmitted the experience in a way that words could not. Other traits which are common amongst survivors are nightmares, gallows humour, fear of hospitals, dislike of bureaucracy, mistrust of authority and uniforms, fearful parenting, anxious saving of money, refusal to retire, smart appearance,“relentless, driven productivity.”57 All these behaviours are linked by survivors to their loss of control in the camps, of their total loss of agency, dignity and humanity. The second generation author Anne Karpf describes her parents as “mended figurines liable to rebreak.”58 Gena’s daughter says her mother instilled fear into her as a child.59 Mistrustful and overprotective behaviour is not surprising. Laub writes: “Around and against this woundedness survivors keep amassing fortunes, keep erecting castles.”60 The Holocaust is ever present in their daily lives and recording the ways in which it plays out in the present provides an unusual and intimate form of testimony.

55 Kennedy in Radstone Schwartz MHTD 2010: 182

56 Freud qu. in Kennedy ibid 2010: 182
57 Laub 1991: 73
58 Karpf The War After 2009:15

59 Gena’s daughter, roll 38, 18th Jan 2012, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

60 Laub 1991: 73

Listeners

Dori Laub argues that “the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening he comes to partially experience trauma in himself.”61 This did not appear to be the case in the 6 month filming period for After the Holocaust. Many of the episodes the survivors described were disturbing. But as a listener, it was important not to adopt their trauma. Elie Wiesel has said “We need to go beyond mingling our tears with theirs.”62 As Judith Hassan, the manager of the Holocaust Survivors Centre in Hendon puts it, it is better to construct yourself “a house next door to trauma.”63 Another pitfall of listening is the opposite - avoidance of the trauma. Danieli warns of a “conspiracy of silence”64 between speaker and listener, as Felman puts it “the kind of empathic and benevolent alliance through which interviewer and interviewee implicitly concur, and work together, for the mutual comfort of an avoidance of the truth.”65 Just as the appropriating of trauma as one’s own is unhelpful, conspiring to avoid the most uncomfortable stories does survivors a grave disservice.Without a certain level of detachment as listeners, we would fail to record the deep memories of survivors. As Yaeger states,“the failure to try for entanglement, proximity or painful intimacy with the Shoah’s obscenities… would mean that all these moments would be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”66 The work of After the Holocaust was to encourage the survivors to feel able to tell their most anguished stories and explore the way they had integrated this dark knowledge into their normal present lives, without adopting their trauma as it’s own, or avoiding the more uncomfortable deep memories.

61 Laub 1991: 57
62 Wiesel 1990:172
63 Hassan 2003: title
64 Danieli in Hassan 2003: ch2

65 Felman 1992: 219
66 Yaeger 2006: 422

There is also the difficulty of interviewers using their own value system to interpret events witnessed by survivors. As Langer describes, Hanna F in her Fortunoff testimony67 describes jumping from a truck bound for the camp, a dangerous decision that saved her life. She says it was “stupidity”“ that made her jump, perhaps alluding to the idea that her survival was random and down to luck. But her interviewer insists it was courage that saved her. When she tries to deny this the interviewer won’t listen; their need of catharsis, a meaning, a heroic ending, is too great. Langer writes:“Developing suitable accolades is neither a useful nor accurate way of responding.. such accolades do not honor the painful complexities of the victims narratives.”68 During the filming of After the Holocaust there were moments of extreme anguish being related and it is challenging for interviewers to resist the urge to re-narrativise those stories which do not provide neat lessons or palatable conclusions.This emerged while Freddie was recovering from relating a very difficult memory. I had asked him to tell me about what had happened to his parents. His demeanor changed, he was stuttering on the words, which were not rehearsed. I had to allow him to be in pain in order to tell me that they had been deported three months before the end of the war, and immediately gassed at Birkenau. But once he had told me I immediately had the desire to try and find something positive for both of us to focus on. I told him his parents would be thrilled to know how long he had lived.Taking me up on this escape route, Freddie responded, back in his previous buoyant manner, that he moreover intended to continue living for very many more years… “If Moses lived to 120, why can’t I?!”69 It is difficult to determine how much our mutual desire to return to the present influenced this, and how much we were acting in the interests of the future audience. But perhaps those two things tend to be compatible. It is not only the audience that can only hear so much, but also the survivor, who despite having access to horror, doesn’t necessarily wish to revisit it for long, any more than they wish to upset the listener.This

67 Langer 1991: 64
68 Langer 1991: 2
69 Freddie Knoller in his office, roll 27, 22nd Dec 2011,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

must be carefully balanced with resisting any happy endings, or neat meaning-making. For Langer, “the pretense that from the wreckage of mass murder we can salvage a tribute to the victory of the human spirit is a version of Holocaust reality more necessary than true.”70 There is no catharsis connected with the Holocaust, and it should not be imposed.

One of the ambitions of recording this kind of testimony is to put a stop to the sacralising of Holocaust survivors and learn to admire and accept them as ordinary men and women. Langer writes: “Expecting to encounter heroes and heroines, we meet only decent men and women, constrained by circumstances.”71 Browning also argues that “persecution, enslavement, starvation and mass murder do not make ordinary people into saints and heroic martyrs.”72 The survivor Jean Amery agrees with him, insisting that “we did not become wiser in Auschwitz”73. For Amery wisdom was of no use in surviving the camps, and neither was kindness.The conditions created a moral vacuum. Of the survivors I filmed, Zigi Shipper was most willing to articulate this lack of moral space. He said “Look if I had been in a position to… I don’t know what I would have done…. but I wasn’t given the opportunity. You would do anything to stay alive.”74 Stories of stealing another starving person’s bread, or taking the belongings of the just-dead, are unpopular. Survivors often won’t risk telling them.75 Langer describes how instead they fit their stories into a moral framework of heroic and unheroic “that they know does not apply”.76 Other survivors, having deeply buried their own guilty memories, and invested much energy in protecting their families from their own anguish, can be their harshest critics. Zigi risks telling me that he had terrible

70 Langer 1991: 165
71 Langer 1991: 25
72 Browning in Langer Hearing the Holocaust 2006: 302
73 Amery 1980: 19
74 Zigi Shipper at home, roll 23, 15th Dec 2011,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

75 Langer calls this the “Buried Self ” 1991: 1
76 Langer 1991: 189

thoughts while in the cattle trucks; that he was “hoping people would die so that I’d have more room to sit down…this is the one thing that has bothered me for all these years…We were not human any more.We were animals.We became selfish.We didn’t care about anyone else…that’s what they made us…”77 Langer identifies here a “crucial challenge”: “To understand and to sympathise with unheroic gestures… withholding endorsement or blame but finding instead an admissible frame for them in the moral discourse of our culture”78. Holocaust survivors have been de-humanised once already, their re-humanisation is not achieved by clinging to concepts of heroism which do not acknowledge the reality of the camps and which thus negate the horror of their experience.

Imre Kertesz has observed that “A Holocaust conformism has arisen, along with a Holocaust sentimentalism, a Holocaust canon, and a system of Holocaust taboos together with the ceremonial discourse that goes with it.”79 But survivor testimony is not respectful of taboo.As argued above, humour is actually used as a tool in their survival, assisting them in taking back some control of their memories, owning them, and integrating them with their present day lives. As Kushner writes, testimony needs to be “problematised”.80 It is not a simple remembering. Survivors forget things; they elaborate; they romanticise and use literary and filmic tricks to add impact to their stories; they tailor their testimony to different audiences; they miss out bits that are either too painful to tell, or to hard to understand; they are too kind to traumatise the listener with the full horror they experienced. But if it is requested, and the space provided to relate that trauma, some survivors are willing and able to talk about the moral grey areas. Primo Levi called the moral vaccum in the camps the“Grey Zone”. His notion describes the total lack of morality in the camps, the creation by the Nazis of a place in which good and evil were futile nonexistent

77 Zigi Shipper in his garden, roll 7, 11th Nov 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

78 Langer 1991: 27
79 Kertesz in Kerner Film and the Holocaust 2011: 2
80 Kushner Holocaust Testimony, Ethics and the Problem of Representation 2006: 281

concepts. Levi describes “a network of human relationships inside the Lagers that was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors.”81 Instead the world experienced by survivors in their teens and early adulthood was an indecipherable one in which “the enemy was all around but also inside”82.

On liberation there was no quick access to the morality they had lived without, rather there was a long gruelling journey towards normality and ordinariness. Survivors now live in this ordinariness with ambivalence and have not necessarily shed what Borowski calls the “concentration camp mentality”83.The loss of their families and communities, their survivor guilt, the difficulty of trusting others and the fact that they can’t always remember clearly add to their instability as witnesses, and some of them elaborate on the truth for want of a stable or heroic story. Zigi accepts with exasperation the fact that survivors make things up sometimes. He says they are so desperate to get the message across that they amplify it:“Why do we have to tell lies? We went through so much, if we just tell our story that’s all…so many bad things happened, you don’t have to invent stories. Just tell your story, tell what happened to you, finished.That’s what, that’s what I do,”84 These complexities, inconsistencies and confusing human behaviours are part of, and should be included in any record of their testimony. Yaeger says it is important for scholars not to try “to cosset and carry”85 the testimony. It is wasted on those who sacralise it and shy away from confronting survivors. The discomfort and untidiness is an important part of the testimony and as Kushner writes “to do it justice may require working with smaller rather than larger numbers of individuals, but enabling, through the greater self-reflectivity of those collecting

81 Levi The Drowned and the Saved 1988: 37
82 Levi 1998: 37
83 Borowski This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen 1976: 99
84 Zigi Shipper in pub, roll 18, 1st Dec 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012 85 Yaeger 2006: 401

and utilising the material, the richness of testimony, including it’s contradictions and mythologies, to come to the fore.”86

This chapter has investigated the challenges in hearing and recording both performed and unperformed Holocaust testimonies.The facts as reported by a traumatised survivor in their eighties or nineties may be inconsistent or shaky, but this fragility is itself testimony to their trauma.As Zizek puts it:“the witness able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would disqualify himself by virtue of that clarity.”87 The choice of which survivors should be part of After the Holocaust was made based on the different attitudes they presented on why and how they survived, and their willingness to be filmed “off duty” from their role as Holocaust survivor. Gena Turgel, Zigi Shipper and Freddie Knoller allowed the camera to witness varying forms of unperformed testimony, the shadows in the present which testify to their early life in the camps. Survivors have information more important than facts about dates and statistics to impart.There is a huge resource of information in their behaviour - the unmediated, unperformed, inadvertent, unselfconscious behaviour that comes from deep memory:“the mutilated music of their lives”88. Hearing it properly requires unflinching attention to disturbing information and the adoption of an unfamiliar frame of reference which does not expect catharsis or heroism, or allow the imposition of any false meanings.A respectful but pragmatic approach is required from the listener, whereby Holocaust survivors are allowed to be fallible. If there are “several currents flowing at different depths”89 in Holocaust testimony, After the Holocaust aims to pursue that current which flows beneath the “skin of memory”90 representing the emotional legacy of the Holocaust and the shadows it still casts in the present.

86 Kushner 2006: 291
87 Zizek Violence: Six Sideways Reflections 2009: 4
88 Sachs in Langer 1991: 38
89 Langer Holocaust Testimonies:The Ruins of Memory 1991: xi

90 Delbo in Langer 1991: 6

Chapter Two - The Challenges of Representation

Making a documentary about the Holocaust raises ethical questions about the limits of representation and the nature of truth and history, and whether something as unimaginable can or should be represented for the entertainment of others. Most documentaries are commissioned by television channels, and they are therefore obliged to be entertaining, regardless of whether they help fulfill the ‘public service’91 remit or not. Representing the Holocaust is difficult whether in art, literature, theatre or poetry, let alone television, which is considered low art. Baudrillard believes that any representation of the Holocaust on TV will only lead to “a tactile thrill, and a posthumous emotion, a deterrent thrill as well”, which will make its audience “spill into forgetting with a kind of good aesthetic conscience of the catastrophe.”92 A television programme can only exist by “capturing the artificial heat of a dead event to warm the dead body of the social”93. In other words all television representations will trivialise the holocaust, pampering the audience with a palatable version that allows them to forget, and exploiting the victims for profit.

But, as I will go on to investigate in this chapter, there is a powerful desire for stories from the Holocaust, which seems to have become “an irresistible, darkly compelling magnet.”94 for audiences all over the world. As Paul Ricouer puts it:“We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated.This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost.The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.”95 As I have described in chapter one, survivors themselves

91 Channel 4 has a public service remit defined in the 2003 Communications Act: "the public service remit for Channel 4 is the provision of a broad range of high quality and diverse programming”

92 Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation 1995: 50
93 Baudrillard 1995: 50
94 Hoffman After Such Knowledge 2005: 160
95 Ricouer Time and Narrative 1988 in Henderson Remembering the Body p.1

generally agree that their primary concern is that stories of the Holocaust find a large audience, so that it isn’t forgotten. As one of the survivors I met during filming, Harry Fox, says:“We’ve been speaking to schools for a number of years, long before Schindler’s List. But no matter how much hard work we did, it didn’t mean very much. Schindler’s List put us on the map.Whether we like the film or we don’t like it is not important at all, the fact is that it depicts what happened… therefore when we go into schools now there is more credence to our memories.”96

Although Schindler’s List is a feature film, and as such some of the issues of representation are different to documentary, the pressure to be populist is comparable, and some of the ethical challenges of mediating Holocaust stories are relevant. Somewhat surprisingly, the privileging of accessibility is applied by survivors to all mediums.The documentary-maker Rex Bloomstein found this wish for maximum publicity amongst survivors while making his documentary about tourists at Mauthausen ‘KZ’97 , and that they applied “none of the sacrality that historians and academics would apply.”98 In the 60s the NBC mini-series Holocaust brought the atrocities to an enormous television audience for the first time, and partly impelled the establishment of the Fortunoff archive in 197999, despite the protestations of some. Elie Wiesel strongly objected to the turning of the Holocaust into “a soap opera…Whatever the intention, the result is shocking. Contrived situations, sentimental episodes, implausible coincidences: if they make you cry they make you cry for the wrong reasons.”100

Documentary is not exempt from the contrived, the sentimental, the implausible neatness associated with drama, despite the claims of some documentary makers that they are just “a fly on

96 Fox quoted in Haggith Newman eds. Holocaust and the Moving image 2005: 249

97 KZ by Rex Bloomstein 98 mins Rex Entertainment 2005
98 Bloomstein in his lecture at the London Jewish Cultural Centre 24th Nov 2011

99 Cesarani in Haggith Newman eds. 2005: xxii

100 Wiesel in Haggith Newman eds 2005: 8

thewall”andhavenoeffectonwhattheyarefilming.101 Thereisapuritanicalmovementwithin documentary that commends a passive approach whereby the filmmaker must “never talk to the subject, never ask someone to repeat an action, never intervene, never add music.”102 But documentary is not just a mirror to the world; it applies some of the same techniques as fiction. Both the filming and the editing impose a high level of mediation on the material, and the use of dramatic pauses, music and juxtaposition can change the mood and the meaning dramatically, often without the viewer realising they are being manipulated. Objectivity cannot be claimed by a documentary maker, writes Barnouw,“the claim to be objective renounces an interpretative role… the documentarist makes endless choices, selects topics, people, vistas, angles, lens, juxtapositions, sounds, words. Each selection is an expression of his point of view.”103 There is no documentary in which the director has no affect or influence on what she is filming.The events are interpreted and mediated according to the positionality of the filmmaker. In documentary making there is no definitive truth, rather there are many subjective true stories.As the documentary maker Errol Morris puts it:“There is no reason why documentaries can’t be as personal as fiction filmmaking and bear the imprint of those who made them.Truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by anything.”104 Beyond the subjective and personal imprints on documentary there is also the application of imagination. Documentaries are imagined realities; what John Grierson calls “the creative treatment of reality”105.This creativity is not only unavoidable, but can further be used to tell an accessible and reflexive version of the truth. Jack Ruby argues that “the acknowledged author of a film, the documentarian, assumes responsibility for whatever meaning exists in the image, and therefore is obligated to discover ways to make people aware of point of view, ideology, author biography, and anything else deemed relevant to an understanding of the

101 see Bruzzi New Documentary: A Critical Introduction 2000: 131
102 movement described by Holland The Television Handbook 2000: 157
103 Barnouw in Bruzzi 2000: 4
104 Morris in Bruzzi 200: 5
105 Grierson in Plantinga Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film 1997:10

film, that is, to become reflexive.”106 Without this reflexiveness it can be argued, the meaning of the filmed images is not transmitted, but ideas are allowed to resonate randomly with whatever context each unique viewer brings to the film.This chapter explores whether it is possible to ethically tell survivors’ stories from the Holocaust, incorporating the positionality and creativity of the filmmaker, for a wide television audience. Key to this approach is the recognition of the paradox described by Franklin in which “confronting the Holocaust is impossible, yet the Holocaust requires us to confront it.”107After the Holocaust attempts to creatively represent Holocaust survivors while avoiding both the sacrality that Bloomstein levels at historians and academics108 and the neatness and catharsis favoured by a commercial broadcaster. This chapter investigates how the limits on Holocaust representation are defined, and with particular attention to Lanzmann’s epic film Shoah, how those limits might be escaped.

The Limits of Representation

How do we bring a large audience to the Holocaust without using it’s horror as a form of entertainment? In an update to his famous comment on the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno clarified:“The so called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it.The morality that forbids art to forget this for a second slides off into the abyss of it’s opposite… By this alone an injustice is done the victims, yet no art that avoided the victims could stand up to the demands of justice.”109 Taking responsibility for the response of an audience to a Holocaust representation is probably an unrealistic ambition.The response cannot be determined or controlled by the filmmaker.Adorno recognises a paradox here, that in order to

106 Ruby Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside 1991: 50
107 Franklin A Thousand Darknesses 2010: 6
108 as above Bloomstein in his lecture at the London Jewish Cultural Centre 24th Nov 2011

109 Adorno Can One Live After Auschwitz? 2003: 252

do justice to victims’ stories, in order to respectfully give them a platform, all representations risk the survivors’ dignity being degraded by the possibility that an audience might enjoy some aspect of their pain. But survivors cannot be ignored at the risk of an inappropriate response.The risk has to be accepted, but it can be measured to a point. After the Holocaust embraces one of the riskier modes of transmission - that of survivor humour. In order to take this risk an engagement with the limits of representation and their provenance is required.

Defining the limits of representation has proved a daunting task for scholars. Lang has stated that to argue on grounds of taste is morally dubious110 and that “art – low at least as often and effectively as high – is capable of reaching audiences that other means of expression cannot.” So, he argues, perhaps there is an argument for no limits at all, in the interests of awareness, “except in extreme cases like concentration camp pornography.”111 Friedlander has appealed for at the very least veracity:“this record should not be distorted or banalised by grossly inadequate representations. Some claim to “truth” appears particularly imperative.”112 Perry Anderson suggests that certain absolute limits are set by the evidence113, which rules out denial for a start, and secondly that there is some interior limitation - the nature of the subject - that precludes certain genres, like romance or comedy. As Friedlander says “the intractable criterion seems to be a kind of uneasiness.”114 There are no firm definitions, but he explains, the common denominator in “adequate” representations is “the exclusion of straight documentary realism, but the use of some sort of allusive or distanced realism. Reality is there in it’s starkness, but perceived through a filter: that of memory (distance in time), that of spatial displacement, that of some sort of narrative

110 Lang Holocaust Representations:ArtWithin the Limits of History & Ethics 2000:7 111 Lang 2000: 7
112 Friedlander Probing the Limits of Representation 1992: 3
113 Anderson in Friedlander 1992: 54

114 Friedlander 1992: 3

margin which leaves the unsayable said.”115 This is helpful, in that it recognises the importance of the imprecise nature of memory and also the ability of traumatic silence to transmit. Unspeakability is perhaps not a reason to prohibit representation, but rather it is itself the thing that must be represented.

Holocaust representations have been hampered to date by what LaCapra has termed a “displaced secular religiosity”, a sacred and unchallengable alibi for not facing up to the past. As Agamben has described, silence has the effect of “glorifying”, as if the event is God116, in what Nancy calls an “idolatrous mysticism of the ineffable”117. If we don’t tell stories of the Holocaust at all, for fear of getting it wrong, we may be helping to perpetuate the lies that created it. As Gillian Rose puts it “to argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human.”118 Views of ‘ineffability’ are in danger of sacralising the historical record and turning the subject into a taboo. Zizek describes the “depoliticisation of the
holocaust… its elevation into the properly sublime Evil”, wherby “any attempt to locate it in its context, to politicise it, equals an anti-Semitic negation of its uniqueness.”119 These various approaches all underline the complicated ethics of representing the Holocaust, it’s so-called unspeakability and its use in certain political discourses. Claude Lanzmann’s seminal documentary Shoah is a key text in this debate, partly due to the intensity of Lanzmann’s own views on which representations are transgressive, but also because Shoah takes a unique approach to testimony.

115 Friedlander 1992: 17
116 Agamben in Saxton Haunted Images 2008: 9

117 Nancy in Saxton 2008: 10
118 Rose in Saxton 2008: viii
119 Zizek 2000: 6-29

Both this dissertation and After the Holocaust owe much to an engagement with Shoah’s successful representation of the unspeakable.

How Shoah escapes the Limits

Lanzmann’s Shoah succeeds in recording unperformed testimony and the unspeakability of the Holocaust. The unforgettable scene in which the barber Abraham Bomba is filmed in a present-day barbers shop is an excellent example of embodiment and unperformed testimony.We can see him mentally travel back in time and re-live the experience of lying to the women who were about to be murdered, while he cut off their hair. When he stutters into silence, with the scissors in his hand, he transmits the agony more painfully than at almost any other moment in the film. His memories are unspeakable in this moment. He begs to stop the interview. But Lanzmann says “You must go on.You have to….We have to do it.You know it.”120 Bomba is given time to compose himself, all of which silence is left in the film, rightly, as it is possibly the most important testimonial footage.The answer he finally gives is far less memorable than the moment of unspeakability. Hirsch writes:“There are a few uncanny moments in the film, when survivor and bystander witnesses do not merely narrate the past but literally seem to be back inside it. Memory, here, gives way to what Lanzmann calls “incarnation”.”121 And this was his ultimate intention - he has said “The tears of Bomba are worth gold.”122

Although Lanzmann’s techniques are at times ruthless, and his intrusive inquisitorial questioning in the face of so much suffering even alarmed his editor, Ziva Postec, at times,123 she concluded that ultimately he was doing his contributors a service by pushing them. Lanzmann goes

120 Lanzmann, Shoah:The Complete Text 1995: 107
121 Hirsch/Spitzer in MHTD 2010: 396
122 Lanzmann at Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York in Hirsch/Spitzer MHTD 2010: 397

123 Ziva Postec, film editor www.zivapostec.com/shoah

as far as to claim that trying to understand, and presumably empathise with Holocaust survivors is off-limits: “there is an absolute obscenity in the project of understanding… there is something that is for me an intellectual scandal: the attempt to understand, historically, as if there were some sort of a genesis of death.”124 Lanzmann is skeptical of any certainty in Holocaust representations.The authoritative voice,“the voice of God” in voice-over is a technique that is problematic in all documentary, beyond Holocaust representations, as tonally it claims authoritative and objective truth, where in fact there is only the filmmakers version of events portrayed.As Bruzzi argues, documentary is a “negotiation between reality on one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other.”125 There is no definitive truth - only many subjective stories. Lanzmann includes his voice within the film, but as an inquisitor rather than as an authority.

The contributors to Shoah understand that what Lanzmann is doing is a painful but necessary procedure, as the Polish spy Jan Karski says in Shoah: “For 35 years I don’t go back in my memory” but “I understand your role. I am here.”126 Many of his contributors have purposely not returned to their memories of the camps, so it is not only the hire of a locomotive or a barber’s salon that Lanzmann has constructed, but the very talking itself. He insists his film is not a documentary, but prefers to call it a “fiction of the real”127 in which the scenes are “practically always constructed… always staged”.128 He avoids manipulating his audience by making his process transparent and part of the story.Although artifice and subterfuge are present, they are inherent in the film.When Lanzmann promises Suchomel the Nazi that he won’t use his name129, he includes the lie in the scene, so we are never in any doubt what his intentions are. All the constructions

124 Lanzmann quoted in Haggith Newman eds, 2005: 125

125 Bruzzi 2000: 4
126 Karsky in Lanzman, Shoah:The Complete Text 1995: 161

127 Lanzmann, in Saxton 2008: 34

128 Lanzmann ibid: 35

129 Lanzmann 1995: 45

and persuasions and subjectivity are made part of the story, as well as the reluctance and hesitation of many to take part. Lanzmann sticks rigidly to the factual details, and allows the emotion to interrupt them. But it is important to note that he also chose to edit out certain things which he considered too painful for an audience to bear, such as part of Srebnik’s testimony.“The degree of horror was so high that this would have destroyed my purpose. My purpose was the transmission.”130 The most extreme horrific testimony can numb and prevent effective transmission.

As much as the form of Shoah is to be admired, and it’s power is undeniable, it is not necessary to rigidly follow the rules Lanzmann has imposed on filmmakers. Raye Farr writes: “For all the ethical and aesthetic principles underpinning Lanzmann’s approach, it is highly questionable whether a single normative formula could be maintained in the face of so complex and idiosyncratic a historical phenomenon as the Holocaust, not to mention its legacies: survivors and their memories, survivors children and their own psychic scars, the guilt of survivorship, the immeasurable void left by those who perished.”131 Thus the sacrality and taboo applied to the Holocaust and it’s survivors is unhelpful; it is vital to explore the psychological legacy, including Langer’s unheroic memories132 of the catastrophe.Taking responsibility for constructing ethical narratives that embrace the subjective is more important than false claims of ineffability.Allowing many stories to be told is more helpful than the stating of a ‘single unique truth’. As Langer writes: “Each testimony is true, even when the testimonies contradict one another.”133 The greatest achievement of Shoah is that it makes space for survivors to be fallible - their breakdowns and battles with their own inability to speak provide the greatest moments of truth in the film. Farr writes:“If Shoah is a film about testimony, it is equally a film about silence, about the loss of a

130 Lanzmann Yale Seminar 1990: 93
131 Farr in Haggith Neman eds. 2005: 163
132 Langer Holocaust Testimonies:The Ruins of Memory 1991: 162

133 Langer 1993: 21

voice, about that to which we can never bear adequate witness.” Shoah privileges the survivors of the Holocaust over the material evidence or facts.As Frederic Raphael writes:“The film holds tight to real people rather than the statistics.”134 Furthermore Lanzmann deliberately refuses to offer evidence to corroborate their testimony. His rejection of archive film from the camps is key to understanding how Shoah escapes the limits of representation.

The Use of Archive

The archive footage so beloved of history documentary is the subject of a fierce debate, publicly figure-headed by Lanzmann and Jean Luc Godard. Godard has used the few known archive images of the Holocaust, bizarrely intercut with Charlie Chaplin, in his own epic film Histoire(s) du Cinema.135 Lanzmann vehemently disapproves of this use:“I call these images without imagination. They are just images.They have no force.”136 Lanzmann’s position is intractable - he believes in a total prohibition on archive images, particularly in the light of there being no footage at all of actual exterminations - he claims that even if he came across such footage he wouldn’t have used it:“I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible. You cannot look at this.”137 Lanzmann’s rejection of the archive is partly due to their lack of representation of the most common experience of the Holocaust - death. But he is also expressing a general theory for documentary - that until a representation is mediated it may have no meaning, force or even visibility, furthermore that an image without meaning can be a dangerous object, better destroyed in Lanzmann’s view, than seen in it’s unmediated form.

134 Raphael Claude Lanzmann’s Liberated Memories TLS July 2009

135 Godard Historie(s) du Cinema, France 1988-98
136 Lanzmann in Saxton Haunted Images 2008: 29
137 Lanzmann ibid: 29

Photography has long had an uneasy relationship with the truth. The camera captures misleading and unrepresentative moments in life; photographs are not just a window to reality, but are necessarily mediated by the photographer. 138 Complicating Lanzmann’s position, archive footage from the Holocaust is not free of the initial mediation and interpretation by the camera operator that shot it.Aaron Kerner writes: “These representational forms are already constructs; there is no clear window onto the past.”139 The reason it was being shot affected the framing and choice of subject - the footage from Belsen is all filmed on liberation by British soldiers who were traumatised and angry at what they saw.140 This footage is a kind of evidence, but it is only useful in showing what a British soldier camera operator wanted to show us in 1945. Other footage, for example at Theresienstadt, was filmed by the Nazis themselves, for propaganda purposes, to show how well they treated their prisoners. There are just a few damaged frames that show actual exterminations. In fact Haggith writes, there were actually no films at all taken inside the camps while they were functioning in their usual way, even though we have the impression that is what we have seen. “This misleading impression has been fostered by filmmakers (even including Alain Resnais)141 who have succumbed to the temptation to use liberation footage to illustrate accounts of the prisoners existence.”142 There are no archive images at all from Treblinka, for example, where it is estimated a million people died on their immediate arrival in the extermination camp. For this reason, and also because there are very few survivors143 of the camp, there are very few stories told about it.There is no footage at all from inside the gas chambers. Exploiting footage regardless of it’s source and original purpose is uncomfortable, and the footage of piles of corpses shot at the liberation of Belsen does not describe the experience of survivors, as Liebman explains

138 Ellis Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation 2012: 126

139 Kerner 2011: 6
140 Haggith Holocaust and the Moving Image 2005:6
141 Resnais Nuit et Brouillard 1955

142 Haggith 2005:6
143 Laurence Rees estimates 60 survivors of Treblinka, in Haggith Newman eds. 2005: 151

“ “the pictorial reproduction of the awful circumstances in which the Jews met death is not essential for - indeed, is a hindrance to - anamnesis, the calling to mind of the process of their death.”144

Godard has argued that those archive images that do exist have “a redemptive power”145, as they bear witness and supply concrete evidence for the suffering of victims. And Kerner, despite his concern that the images become “fetish objects” , admits that they “cut through the politics of representation and , through the crafting of narrative and pack an emotional punch like nothing else.”146 Elie Wiesel has wrestled with his own mistrust of the quick-hit power of archive images: “The image perhaps? Can it be more accessible, more malleable, more expressive than the word? More true as well? Can I admit it? I am as wary of one as of the other…”147 But images are created in many ways, even in documentary, and verbal testimony, also created, is capable of firing the imagination of the audience in perhaps an even more vivid way. Peter Morley, the director of Kitty: Return to Auschwitz148 writes:“I was intrigued by a few telephone calls from viewers who wondered where I had found that old black-and-white footage I used in the film. In fact I deliberately did not use one frame of archive film.The word-pictures Kitty painted in peoples minds were far more graphic than old newsreel film.”149

Although archive undoubtedly plays an important role as historical evidence, Lanzmann is correct about it’s lack of “force” in that it fails to reach it’s audience in the way it should.The response to archive images of piles of corpses is one of horror, disbelief, numbing, and

144 Liebman in Kerner 2011: 208
145 Godard in Saxton 2008: 6
146 Kerner 2011:193
147 Wiesel in Haggith Newman eds 2005: 9

148 Morley Kitty: Return to Auschwitz YTV 1978

149 Morley in Haggith Newman eds. 2005: 159

incomprehension. Graphic images and distressing stories can be impossible to absorb, ultimately leading to their rejection by the viewer.As Hartman says:“what is presented becomes an offense, an aggression, and may arouse such strong defenses that – in a profound way – we do not believe that what we are made to feel and see is part of reality.”150 In other words, the images lack Laub’s “different form of truth” – they lack meaning, what the Holocaust meant in human terms. Mira Hammermesh describes its limitations:“The unblinking eye of the camera faithfully records the skeletal men and women wearing bizarre striped ‘pyjamas’, moving like zombies amongst heaps of deadbodies,butitcannotcapturethethoughts,dreams,prayersofthevictims.”151 Althoughit cannot be argued that the images of piles of bodies are not authentic, they are not representative of the Holocaust experience, whereas Lanzmann’s slow pan down the tracks to Auschwitz is evocative and experiential - it puts us briefly in the shoes of the victim. Some images ( and stories) are so horrifying that they are counter-productive in transmitting the camp experience. The images present the survivors as victims, and the skeletal naked dead bodies appear less than human.This has the effect on the audience of distancing their experience from the ‘normal’ and turning them into the ‘other’, someone we cannot relate to. Naomi Mandel has described a “self- congratulatory morality” by which “contemporary culture maintains its position as safely distant, conceptually and ethically, from this ‘unspeakable’ event.”152 She therefore prefers to speak of the Holocaust “in the present tense, rather than consigning it to the safety of the distant past.”153
Shoah is resolutely set in the present.

By representing the survivors, and perpetrators in a reflexive and interactive mode, by embracing his own imagination and creativity, by recording moments of unperformed testimony and by admitting his own subjectivity within the film Lanzmann succeeds in making a documentary

150 Hartman in Friedlander Probing the Limits 1992: 331

151 Hammermesh in Haggith Newman 2005: 177
152 Mandel in Kerner 2011: 6
153 Mandel ibid: 6

that escapes the limits of representation. His rejection of archive is effective, keeping the audience to Shoah fully engaged with the presentness of the camps. As a result of this engagement, After the Holocaust is also deliberately ‘set’ in the present day, where unspeakability transmits the past best. Rather than viewed through a long zoom lens, history is seen as a player in the everyday, still informing and affecting the lives of it’s survivors 67 years after liberation.The film is less a history of the Holocaust, and more a document of the shadows that it casts in the present.This approach escapes the transgressive authoritative voice that Lanzmann refutes, and stays away from the unimaginable statistics and numbing images, so that as in Shoah, the survivors are re-humanised.

ChapterThree- Mediation and Transmission

In the research period of After the Holocaust one Holocaust educationalist stated that she believed it may not be until all the survivors have gone that the world will really be able to discover the ugly truth of life in the camps.154 As established in chapter one, many survivors are unable to talk about the unheroic things they may have had to do in order to survive.Their most painful secrets are those buried deepest, and even those survivors that talk about their experiences often only tell a rehearsed version of events rendered relatively acceptable to the ears of those that weren’t there. But, despite accepting the challenge of the commissioning editor to keep the film “cheerful”, After the Holocaust strove to avoid the heroism and cathartic stories that have been much privileged by many documentaries on the Holocaust.155 Some survivors are willing to confront, with considerable honesty and courage, the uncomfortable memories they have, and the psychological legacies that still play out in their present. Hirsch and Spitzer recommend “a foregrounding of embodiment, affect and silence”156 for more successful transmission. But many survivors are unaware that they embody their trauma.The making of After the Holocaust demanded much time around and outside filming in order to build relationships of understanding and trust. In this way survivors were given the best opportunity to be frank about their pasts and to explore the roots of their present relationships and attitudes.A large reduction in the numbers of survivors to be filmed was requested, in order to accommodate this time-consuming approach.There were a large number of survivors willing, even eager, to take part, and the producers had intended to film up to ten survivors, but it would have been impossible to establish meaningful relationships with so many, so just three were eventually chosen.

154 Anon, meeting at The Anne Frank Trust, London, 20th October 2011

155 eg Heroes of the Holocaust, History Channel series, 2008
156 Hirsch Spitzer in MHTD 2010: 167

Filming

Chapter one of this dissertation established that there are two types of testimony by Holocaust survivors - the performed and the unperformed - and After the Holocaust set out to record both types.There was a discrepancy at the start between the ambitions of the film and what the survivors wanted it to be.The film was designed to document their ordinary lives, their personalities, their homes, their relationships, their daily tasks.The survivors were keen that it document their rehearsed testimony in detail, in chronological order, what they saw as the facts of what happened to them. It was explained that dates and places were intended to take a back seat and that the film would remain in the present as much as possible. Filming requests were put to their friends and family, and efforts made to record them in conversation, on the phone, cooking a meal etc. Documentary makers must beware of the danger that the film imagined by the filmed might be a different beast to that imagined by the filmer157. Holocaust documentaries are usually anticipated to fit the mould of history programmes, with an authoritative voice-over, archive footage, and studio recorded interviews. It is not usual to film scenes of ordinary suburban life for a history commission. But after discussion the survivors understood that After the Holocaust demanded something different, and were impressively relaxed about it.They could reasonably have feared the construction of situations within their lives merely for the amusement of the audience, as is common practice in the ‘factual’ programming that has become popular in the last decade.158 But they expressed no such concerns; instead they said they were delighted that the legacy of the Holocaust in the present was going to be recognised.

After the Holocaust was filmed on a one-to-one basis, meeting once or twice a week with survivors to record their lives. Good natured arguments took place about how many sandwiches

157 see John Ellis for his introduction of this term Ellis 2012: 298

158 eg Wife Swap, Supernanny, Seven Dwarves - all involve constructed situations within the real lives of particpants - Channel 4 2008 - 2010

had been eaten, the cello was played, whiskey was consumed, family rows took place and everyone celebrated Hannukah with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In each filming day, something of the Holocaust was present. Langer has said that videotaped testimony may be the best way to an “unmediated truth”159 about the Holocaust. Filming observationally, rather than in the conventional interview setting, this theory could be pushed to it’s limits.The survivors’ trauma was repeatedly showing itself in the present - in obsessions with food, tension in a marriage, in over- protectiveness,ingallowshumour,andevenintheiroptimism.160 Whenthishappened,there would be an interaction with the survivor, requiring them to reflect on it, in an attempt to trace the behaviour back to their teenage years in the camps and ghettos.They responded, sometimes in agreement with the links made, sometimes refuting the connection.Thus the role of the documentary maker was key in shaping the nature of the stories told and the manner in which they were told. Here one of Barnouw’s “endless choices”161 was made, and After the Holocaust shifted from being purely observational documentary, which has been called “fly on the wall”,162 into another of Bill Nichol’s helpful categories: the interactive documentary.163 The documentary maker has a clear choice to make - whether to hide behind the camera, or not. Much documentary exists without a distinctive author - just as historians avoid the use of the first person. Barthes calls this “the so called ‘objective’ mode of historical discourse, in which the the historian never appears himself….What really happens is the author discards the human persona”.164 But as digital-savvy audiences become more sensitive to the making of documentary, subjectivity is making a more purposeful appearance. Michael Renov describes all documentary as ”…a dialectical play of subject and object.Although the documentary tradition has tended to repress the emphasis on the

159 Langer in Hirsch/Spitzer in MHTD 2010: 397
160 see chapter one, p.14 for more detail on what I have termed “unperformed testimony”

161 as in my introduction Barnouw in Bruzzi 2000: 4
162 see Bruzzi 2000: 131
163 Nichols in Kerner 2011: 179
164 Barthes in Young 1990: 149

subjectivity of the maker in favour of the world on the other side of the lens, the non-fiction film is always the result of an encounter between the two.“165 Where Barthes took the photograph as a “relic of pastness”, Renov points out that even before that it is a physical expression of a perceiving self in which “subject trumps object”. For Renov the documentary is an encounter between the subjectivity of the maker - “the seer” and the objecthood of the world “the seen”166, not so much a mirror image but more a dialogue. In this paradigm there is no such thing as objectivity.The documentary maker Jean Chamoun emphatically agrees, saying “I am against objectivity. No person can be objective.This is a hypocritical word that should be banned. Human beings have feelings that they express; they are part of society; they think. Each one of us has a stance; this is social individuality. you are not made of stone or steel. “167 When the filmmaker is present in the film, the audience has a better sense of the way in which the sequences they see are being mediated. When during filming for After the Holocaust Gena became agitated about whether there were enough sandwiches, her anxiety about food emerged in a way she would not normally discuss as part of her ‘performed testimony’, and was emphasised by the resulting interaction.168 The perspective of the filmmaker, in this moment having no urgent desire to eat, became a revealing part of the form of the film, embracing the encounter, rather than making a pretense of the objective, and eschewing the authority of the invisible filmmaker in order to allow a more nuanced story to emerge.

The three survivors in After the Holocaust regularly gave their performed testimonies in schools, on a mission to transmit their experience as widely as possible to young people.A number of these talks were recorded for the film, and many close up shots taken of the listeners in the audience.This way the eventual television audience to the film might consider their own response to the performed testimony. How should they react? For Ellis, the millions of viewers of modern

165 Renov in Pearce ed. Truth or Dare 2007: 13
166 Renov in Pearce ed. Truth or Dare 2007: 14
167 Chamoun in Khatib, Pearce ed.Truth or Dare 2007: 52
168 see my descriptions of performed and unperformed testimony in chapter one

media are positioned as witnesses nightly to “authentic emotions” on the television, but it isn’t clear what is expected of them in terms of a response.169 The strength of the testimony that survivors give to school groups is that it feels so much more personal than the news.A small audience feel a greater responsibility to respond actively to the privileged information they hear. By including the close-up shots of the way listeners in the room responded to the performed testimony, it was hoped that After the Holocaust could harness some of this powerful transmission.

The unperformed testimony was more difficult to record and required far more time and patience. It required regular visits to each survivor, and much time spent talking and sharing in their lives while the camera stayed in it’s bag.The camera itself was relatively small and sound relied on unobtrusive radio mics; there were no lights, no tripod, no crew. The style chosen by documentary makers helps to inform the audience, and the form dictates the content to a degree.The relaxed set up allowed survivors to be as intimate as possible and hopefully to get used to filming to the degree that they would no longer ‘perform’ their roles.The aim was to record silences and behaviours which would vividly transmit the emotional experience of the Holocaust. Gradually more and more over many days and weeks filming with each survivor, this aim was realised. Some days seemingly ordinary moments contained extraordinary meaning. One November afternoon Zigi paused during a piece of performed testimony in his garden, to pick up an apple that had blown over from the apple tree next door. He cleaned it with his fingers and inspected it’s quality. He said he hoped his wife would cook it in a pie. He clearly placed an unusually high value on the apple.Then a remarkable thing happened. His treasuring of this find caused him to jump back in time mentally to 1944, when he noted that such a discovery would have meant “everyone would have jumped on me just to get that apple!” The unexpected find of an apple had pierced “the skin of memory” as Charlotte Delbo put it, allowing a powerful moment of unperformed testimony to be recorded. Many hours had been filmed with Zigi that day, but this was undoubtedly the

169 Ellis 2012: 298

sequence that would best transmit the story.The passion induced in Zigi by the apple in that moment was worth more than many hours of performed testimony. It became the first scene in the film for this reason, and tells the audience that they are going to be allowed to witness unperformed moments in which the shadows of the Holocaust are revealed.The commentary introducing the scene contrasts Zigi’s ordinary suburban British garden with the terrible facts of his past.The intention was to give the sense that people who have survived extraordinary things are living next door and leading ordinary lives.The apple is the “punctum”170, the definition Barthes gave to “that which pierces” the viewer of a photograph. The apple jumps out and contains the meaning of the scene. It stands for the experience of hunger and it demonstrates the deep split between Zigi’s present self and his Auschwitz self.As he inspected the apple his deep memory surfaced and he re-experienced his past directly through it. 171

Gena’s relationship with her daughter was demonstrating transference of the trauma to the second generation, although Gena wasn’t aware of it. It required a long wait for the right moment to record this unperformed testimony. Eventually her daughter Hilary reflected on camera that she didn’t want to hear about her mother’s experiences any more, that she felt it was time to move on.This enabled a question about what affect she felt the Holocaust had had in her own life and she started to describe, in front of Gena, the parenting that she felt was a legacy of the camps. Gena responded with irritation to this, struggling to defend her parenting, and to disassociate it from the Holocaust, Hilary said her mother would constantly overfeed her, so that she was always overweight. Gena responded by complaining that Hilary was fussy and a terrible eater. Gena said all parents were overprotective, especially of their daughters. Hilary said she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere and felt suffocated. Gena said she was fearful of what could happen to Hilary. Hilary said she was made to be scared of everything.The stark differences in their interpretations of the same

170 Barthes Camera Lucida 1981: 25
171 Zigi Shipper at home, roll 7, 11th Nov 2011,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

relationship reveal the deep ravine across which Holocaust survivors must communicate. Only they carry the terrible knowledge of what cruelty human beings are capable of, and they can never fully communicate it to those that haven’t lived in the camps.This was a constructed scene in some ways as the conversation may never have happened without the intervention of the filmmaker. But it reveals the interior lives of survivors and the psychological legacies of the Holocaust as they are passed down the generations, a phenomenon much discussed by academics172 , but rarely recognised by survivors themselves.The second generation can give us access to these legacies.173

Towards the end of the 6 month filming period, a filming trip was arranged at Auschwitz Birkenau with Freddie Knoller and his wife, who were attending the annual March of the Living.The executive producer on After the Holocaust was particularly keen on having an emotional end sequence with Freddie, in the place where his parents were murdered.The March of the Living attracted up to 10,000 young people largely from Israel, USA and Britain, who took an educational tour of Poland and the camps, ending with a march from Auschwitz to Birkenau where a glossy service was held for the dead, attended by Israel’s Chief Rabbi, leading cantors and Jewish musicians and a number of veteran liberating soldiers and survivors of the camps, who lit candles and led prayers for the dead. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recorded a video message for the ceremony, which celebrated the strength of Israel and extolled a robust defence of it’s land and borders. Freddie wore the Israeli flag coloured jacket and cap handed out to VIPs and wrote a memorial message for his parents on one of the thousands of balsa-wood sticks provided. He was as pragmatic and energetic as ever in his approach to the memorial, enjoying the attention of young Israeli women and the opportunity to show off his physical fitness on the long march. He took a moment to sigh deeply and think of his parents just before boarding a coach back to Krakow. But the material filmed at Birkenau was so full of flags that it felt more like a political rally than a

172 see Schwab, Hirsch on postmemory, Hoffman
173 Gena Turgel and daughter Hilary, roll 38, 18th Jan 2012,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

memorial.174 The Holocaust and it’s survivors are regularly manoeuvred by politicians who wish to harness the power and shock of the camps for their political ends.175 Halbwachs theory that collective memory is something that functions according to the requirements of the present is useful here. Peter Novick shows how the “black and white moral simplicity of the Holocaust”176 has been employed and guarded according to current concerns, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being just one of many. The inclusion of the March of the Living material in After the Holocaust might only have given a voice to this misuse. One option was to make what appeared to be a disturbing exploitation of survivors the explicit message of the scene. However it was beyond the scope of the film and indeed this dissertation to engage with the politics of the contemporary Israeli state and the scene was cut. 177

In the final filming day another form of performed testimony was recorded for the film, with the help of a camera operator and sound recordist, a backdrop and lights set up in the living room of each survivor.This was a type of performance by the filmmaker, signaling to the filmed person that the end of filming was near, and that this was their final chance to transmit the important stories and meanings that they had.The framing was designed to be tight on the face of the survivor, the backdrop neutral, and a direct down-the-lens eyeline was acheived by the use of a mirrorbox.178The introduction of the crew and their equipment lent an air of formality and importance to the day, which had an impact on the survivors’ performances. Gena Turgel became more emotional than she had previously, partly due to the anxiety induced by the lights, but also because of the expectations she anticipated in the audience.179 There is great emphasis placed on

174 Freddie Knoller at Auschwitz, roll 48, 17th April 2012, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

175 Novick The Holocaust in American Life 1999:3

176 Novick 1999:10

177 for a controversial documentary on the Israeli state and the Holocaust seeYoav Shamir’s 2009 film Defamation

178 a mirrorbox is a type of periscope which allows the interviewer to sit side-on and address the reflection of the interviewee, while their eyes are recorded gazing directly into the camera.

179 GenaTurgel interview Roll 50,April 2012,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

tears in television.As John Ellis writes:“The question of the framing of sincerity is crucial for an understanding of documentary. Contemporary viewers seem to value above all else the moment when the ‘real’ person peeps through in factual footage.”180 Tears are seen by an audience as a moment of truth and revelation; by the industry as a badge of good filmmaking. Gena was fully aware of the power of her tears, and fully aware of how they would be received by a TV crew and the eventual audience. She may not have been able to turn on the emotion as if by a light switch, but she knew what stories were likely to make her emotional. Zigi, faced with the crew, became statesmanlike, in the way his audiences have often encouraged him to be, demanding to know why, in 2012, there are still starving children in the world?181 Freddie used the crew interview to pin down some facts which he feared might be forgotten after he is gone. Exactly how long was he on the train? Exactly what did he eat each day at Auschwitz and at what time? Exactly how many weeks before the end of the war were his parents gassed at Birkenau? Freddie was making use of the formality of the interview day to make a solid historical record of what happened to him.182
All these responses to the formal interview were about prioritising meaning - Gena prioritised the emotional power of her story, Zigi the humanitarian lessons he could offer, and Freddie held tight to the precise historical detail.The filmmaking process allowed each survivor to transmit the meaning they desired. But by juxtaposition in the edit, the fact that they were drawing very different meanings from the same experience also became part of the story. In this way the documentary filmmaker is adding their own layer of meaning to the raw material, a subjective truth which is told by way of artifice.

180 Ellis Documentary:Witness and Self-revelation 2012: 1328
181 Zigi Shipper, roll 54,April 2012,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012
182 Freddie Knoller, roll 52 April 2012,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

Truth and Artifice

Style is an unwanted element in Holocaust representations. It is considered art, and any ‘prettifying’183 or aestheticising is questionable.Wsychogrod writes “Art takes the sting out of suffering… any attempt to transform the Holocaust into art demeans the Holocaust and must result in poor art.”184 Documentary makers can try to rid their narratives of style in order to appear authentic and achieve verisimilitude, but this in itself is a construction. In fact style, in framing, in editing, in music, in commentary is what gives an audience the best possible access to the meaning that the storyteller is trying to impart. Michael Renov defends this construction clearly:“The formal construction of a work is far from an add-on or surface feature that the ‘prettifying’ label would suggest (aesthetics as icing on the cake). Rather the formal domain is about the work of construction, the play of the signifier, the vehicle of meaning for every instance of human communication.The formal regime is the very portal of sense-making, it determines the viewer’s access to the expression of ideas, it’s power to move and transform an audience."185 In other words, style, aesthetics or “icing” are what helps us to get our meaning across.Without it, the facts and the feelings, the subjective versions of truth that survivors offer, may not transmit to an audience as effectively and might even be misconstrued. Zizek writes: “Adorno’s famous saying, it seems, needs correction: it is not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz, but rather prose. Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds.”186 Rather than aim for verisimilitude better to allow poetry - in the form of editing, music, close-ups, cutaways, voice-over and silences - wherever it helps with transmission.The documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog has said that film without artifice is “superficial truth, the

183 Winston Claiming the Real qu. in Renov, Pearce ed. Truth or Dare 2007: 17 184 Wsychogrod, Michael, in Franklin A Thousand Darknesses: 2010:6
185 Renov in Pearce ed. Truth or Dare 2007: 17
186 Zizek Violence 2009: 4

truth of accountants”187, he writes:“there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation.” In After the Holocaust the use of imagination is largely invisible, but it exists in every frame.When Zigi was filmed travelling in the first class carriage of a train, he was not performing a scene constructed in the imagination of the filmmaker, as it was always his plan to travel that day. But the choice of filming day, the framing of the shot, the questions he was asked on his journey, and later the use of music and dramatic editing - all are acts of imagination and stylisation.Without the imposition of imagination Zigi may have completed a crossword and had a cup of coffee on his journey, rather than reflecting on the terrible journey he made to Auschwitz in the cattle trucks and wondering at what his 14 year old self would think if he could see the 82 year old in a first class seat.This way artifice allowed for a little poetic truth to emerge.

Mediating the survivors versions of of what happened to them presented moral and emotional challenges.Wherever possible in the making of After the Holocaust dates, places and names were checked in relation to the testimonies given. Research was done on the routes of marches and deportations and the archive images were consulted to try and corroborate the survivors stories. In addition their stories were compared with other survivors’ accounts of the same camp at the same time.The mistakes they occasionally made could be easily avoided or corrected in voice over. But the real challenge lay in believing the stories that could not be verified.The Holocaust is full of stories which are unbelievable.There is no doubt the unbelievable happened and therefore it is likely the majority of these stories are true. But the testimony stakes have been raised and some Holocaust survivors feel they need to tell ever more unbelievable stories to be heard. As Zigi Shipper bemoans (see chapter one) there is a tendency to exaggerate to get attention, where exaggeration should be totally unnecessary. Conversely, just because a story sounds tenuous and unlikely doesn’t mean it isn’t true.There was one story related for the

187 Herzog qu. by Austin in Rethinking Documentary 2010: 62

film which demanded analysis.The story, told by Gena Turgel, was so filmic in it’s scale, and specifically so reminiscent of a particular scene in Schindler’s List, that it invited disbelief. After much deliberation on the uncomfortable ethics of dismissing the story without confronting Gena about it, it was reasoned that on one hand if the story was true, then the fact that it coincidentally echoed a scene in Schindler’s List was good enough reason to exclude it, and on the other hand if it was a fabrication, or even a subconscious adoption of the filmed scene as one of her own memories, it would be diplomatic to ignore it.188 Thus the story was excluded.

The final cut of the film was constructed from three forms of material - interactive observational filming being by far the largest. Secondly there were the more formal interviews with the three survivors, filmed by a small crew with lights in their living rooms, and thirdly there were still archive photographs in the first half of the film. After much debate amongst those involved in the edit - the commissioner, the executive producer, the editor and myself- the director, the idea that archive images packed the most powerful emotional punch triumphed over the idea that they were of dubious worth in a film set in the present. Because the images were still photographs it was hoped they felt like a memory, a glimpse of the past, rather than a direct representation of reality, which moving footage could be interpreted as.The images jarred deliberately with the moving colour footage of the present.As Insdorf writes:“the very stillness of Holocaust photographs represents the death of its subjects… Given the degree to which these still frames can be manipulated by filmic technique, directors must be wary of overdramatising, and not allowing the testimony to speak for itself.”189 She acknowledges the power of these images to affect an audience, noting that Roman Polanski said he was more affected by watching Le Temps du Ghetto190 than by actually living in the ghetto himself;“Even for those of us fortunate enough not to have

188 Gena Turgel, roll 12, 22nd Nov 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

189 Insdorf Indelible Shadows 1989: 200
190 LeTempsduGhetto(TheTimeoftheGhetto)Dir:FredericRossif

lived them, images remain indelible shadows.”191 In After the Holocaust the still photographs were intended to do three things: to provide the viewer with information, to symbolise the presentness of memory, and to serve as a dramatic contrast to the ordinariness of their suburban British present.

The music, another element of filmmaking under suspicion of over-aestheticising, was specially commissioned cello and piano, inspired by Freddie’s cello, and recorded to fit specific scenes in the film where it was designed to compliment and increases the powerful transmission of the testimony. Narration was kept to a minimum and recorded in the same voice that could be heard from behind the camera, embracing it’s subjectivity and eschewing an authoritative tone.The film was cut around three advert breaks, the current shape of every one-hour slot on Channel 4. The length allowed was 46 minutes and 30 seconds, a length that has diminished by an average of 30 seconds each year since 2000, squeezing the space for depth of argument and detail. 192 The perceived necessity to hook the audience at the end of each part, and recap after each ad break and further prevents subtlety.The music and commentary are expected to be employed as an effective and speedy mood-changer, driving the film forward and leaving little to the imagination of the TV audience. Making After the Holocaust required many small compromises of this kind.

At the rough cut stage, 5 weeks into the edit, the commissioning editor had her first viewing of the film. It was much admired, for its originality and intimacy, and it’s “delicate balance of humour and horror”193 but criticised for it’s lack of “gravitas” and “catharsis”.This caused disharmony.The film was intended to leave the viewer with a sense of unfinished business - the knowledge that the Holocaust was still playing out in the lives of survivors. Catharsis would have required making their stories sensical or palatable, or to create false meanings or a sense of

191 Insdorf 1989: 241
192 see Darlow in Haggith Newman eds. 2005: 141

193 Commissioning Editor for History, C4, May 2012

fairness or reason where there was none. Of course survivors themselves are prone to this, as discussed in Chapter one, and Gena’s marriage to one of the British soldiers that liberated Belsen provides her with a ‘happy ending’ when telling her story.To censor this natural good fortune would be pointless, but After the Holocaust ends on a different note. Freddie speaks of his fear that the Holocaust will be forgotten when the survivors are all gone194, and Zigi finishes up with a reflection on the impossibility of anyone really understanding his testimony, as well as a celebration of how lucky he feels to have survived; as for him his survival was about nothing more than luck195.

Audiences

The first audience for After the Holocaust was the survivors that were in the film, and some of their families.They each had a private viewing at home before the film was fine cut, in order that they had a chance to influence the cut.196 The survivors had a range of different responses to the film. Gena Turgel was frustrated by the short length of the film and it’s inability therefore to tell all the details of her story:“this was just a fragment….not even a fragment of what happened.”197 She also complained that Freddie and Zigi had not suffered like she did and should not have been given equal weight in the film. She was concerned by the inclusion of her friend’s rude joke filmed at the charity lunch she held at her house.The joke went like this: “Why do Jewish men all have circumcisions? Because a Jewish woman wouldn’t touch anything without 20% off!”198 After discussion she agreed that people should see the real her, sense of humour included. Gena wanted the title of the film to be Through the Tunnel and into the Light.

194 Freddie Knoller, roll 52,April 2012,Asquith After the Holocaust 2012 195 Zigi Shipper, roll 54,April 2012 ibid

196 Channel 4 does not allow any editorial control to contributors, but an informal trust allows them some influence at the director’s discretion

197 Gena viewed the film at her home on 26th April 2012 and again with 20 friends on 14th May

198 Gena’s friend, roll 16, Nov 2011, Asquith After the Holocaust 2012

Freddie was delighted with the film, as were his wife and daughters.199 They too wished it could have been much longer, but were impressed that “the real Freddie” had been recorded.They said there ought to be a film just about the second generation experience, which we have only managed to touch on in this film. Freddie was disappointed that the scene filmed with him at the March of the Living in Auschwitz had not been included, but accepted that its international political nature was out of place in the film. Freddie requested that he might use the film as part of his testimony to school groups.

Zigi watched the film a little nervously, knowing that his argument with his wife would be included.When he came to the scene he was relieved - it wasn’t quite as bad a row as he had remembered, and both sides had their argument well represented. He didn’t ask for its removal. He was angry that his wife had suggested that “all wives of Holocaust survivors have big problems”, as he felt it was very unfair to other Holocaust survivors, many of whom were his friends. But he and his wife agreed that the scene was fairly cut and raised an important issue that they had never seen represented elsewhere. 200The recovery from such experiences, particularly as a child, takes a long time, and requires much support from family and friends.This important scene recognises that fact and prevents the audience from thinking liberation was a happy ending - in fact it was a difficult beginning.

On completion the film was screened in the Channel 4 cinema for 80 people who were either filmed, or involved in the research period201. These included staff from the Holocaust Survivors Centre, the Association for Jewish Refugees, the “Boys”, Jewish Care, the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Anne Frank Trust, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the London Jewish

199 Freddie viewed the film at home with his wife and daughters on 26th April 2012

200 Zigi viewed the film with his friend Harry on the 27th April, then again with his wife and other survivors on 5th July 2012

201 This screening took place on the 21st May 2012 and was funded by the production budget.

Cultural Centre. One of the managers from the Holocaust Survivors Centre was very concerned about the working title for the film - Our Holocaust. She didn’t like it and wanted to campaign to get it changed to Ready to Talk. She agreed that the new title After the Holocaust was a great improvement. Other Holocaust workers suggested The Chosen Few and Was it God, Luck or a Favourable Wind? A number of educators asked to use the film in schools and as part of online resources.

In July the film was screened to a further 100 people, many of them survivors and their families, at the Jewish Care community centre in Golders Green.202 The survivors present each stood up to give their responses at the end. Many of their comments were brief and led on to testimony about their own experiences, which was fascinating, but disjointed.The general sense was that the film was the first one they’d seen about how they had returned to ordinary life after the Holocaust. One person said they would like to see a film focus on the few years after liberation, when they were just starting to rebuild their lives.Two survivors stated that the choice of which survivors to film was wrong.They felt they themselves should have been chosen to be in the film instead.

The response from Channel 4 was inconsistent.At the edit stage the commissioner at was impressed with the film which she said was “a privilege to commission.”203and “reinvented testimony”. However 5 months after the film was delivered to Channel 4204, it still had not been broadcast.The reason given was that the film was “hard to schedule” and it moved slot four times after it’s first pencilled date on the 1st July.This may have been due in part to the Olympic and Jubilee mood in 2012, a hegemonic imposition of a patriotic summer, that the film didn’t quite

202 Jewish Care is a charity that runs a community centre for the elderly. On site they have a nursing home and retirement flats which prioritise the admission of Holocaust survivors.The screening was organised by the charity and took place on the 5th July 2012.

203 C4 history commissioner, rough cut viewing, 26th March 2012

204 After the Holocaust was delivered to Channel 4 on 8th May 2012

service. Or it may have been a result of the film not attracting any advertisers - it is not hard to anticipate that most products would have preferred not to be associated with a film about trauma and violence that denied much catharsis.The final plan on submission of this dissertation was that the film would be broadcast some time in November 2012.This was unsettling for the survivors who appeared in the film and Channel 4 had to be pressured to bring it forward and settle on a definite date.

Conclusion

Representing the Holocaust is challenging, but the challenges must be faced.
Lang writes:“the Holocaust is speakable, that it has been, will be, and, most of all, ought to be spoken.”205 However unreliable the details reported by survivors, however hard the meanings are for audiences to understand, however distressing the word-pictures conjured up, the stories should be told and the silence and shadows - the “acid-etched traces”206- should be documented. Recording the unspeakable creates more evidence, which in a way is more reliable when it is unperformed, as it’s transmission is accidental, carries no motive and contains the possibility of transmitting how the holocaust felt. In After the Holocaust the role of documentary maker has been to give voice to the testimony, but also to identify, using the clarity of distance from the experience, those behaviours that survivors may not themselves have connected to the camps. Filming the affect, embodiment and relationships that carry the traces of the camp experience has created a document of life afterwards, with all it’s untidiness and inaccuracies embraced and accepted as an inevitable result of the trauma. Dawidowicz writes “survivor-chroniclers can seldom transcend their own suffering and bereavement…. so buffeted were they by its winds that they could not chart the storms course, measure its velocities, assess the damage it wrought.”207 By not taking on the trauma as one’s own, a distance can be acheived by the listener which provides survivors a solid platform from which to assess the damage.

After the Holocaust focused on recording not heroes, saints or martyrs, but fallible human beings: they compete for attention; they exaggerate and elaborate; they build hierarchies of suffering in their communities.Their suffering has made them tough, over-protective, anxious

205 Lang 2000: 18
206 Hoffman 2005: 40
207 Dawidowicz The Holocaust and the Historians 1983: 129

parents, who find it hard to trust. Eva Hoffman, the daughter of survivors writes “They are difficult people… no surprise in people so extravagantly more sinned against than sinning”208 And in Maus, Art Spiegelman records the comment of his girlfiend on his survivor father:“It’s amazing how hard it is to spend a whole day with him. He just radiates so much tension.”209 It was important during filming that survivors were not placed on a pedestal, where they could not be their true selves, but that they were allowed to be fallible, unreasonable, or angry. Amery offers one of the more frank accounts of the legacy of the camps from a survivor:“We did not become wiser… deeper…better, more human, more humane, and more mature ethically… we emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disorientated - and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom.”210 Zigi Shipper agrees:“When we were in the camps we were children - we didn’t know what life was.The things I did… that I never should have done.” After the Holocaust allowed all of this behaviour to inform on the camp experience, as survived by ordinary men and women.

Making a documentary for Channel 4 is a rare opportunity to create a collective memory, to allow a large audience to witness what you have witnessed. It is an act of show and tell, with a hegemonic relationship to the audience.The subject of the film offers their testimony and their self to be recorded, ideally in a trusting relationship with the filmmaker.The filmmaker mediates and adds their subjective layer to the testimony, aestheticizing in the service of the most powerful transmission of that testimony.The audience, ever more adept at reading television, receives the film and decodes it’s layers of mediation according to their own subjective viewpoint, to arrive at a version of the story that they believe. Ellis writes:“When the personhood of the other is recognised by the person who witnesses, then empathy follows.This empathy can be intellectual or

208 Hoffman 2005: 54
209 Spiegelman Maus 1991: 234
210 Amery At the Minds Limits 1980: 20

emotional, or a combination of the two… Arguably, the rapid development of the audiovisual has contributed, through its ability to present the distant as a simulation of presence, to a wider acceptance of the personhood of remote and distant others.”211 It’s important to recognise that the accessibility of television does not necessarily preclude it’s potential for education, insight or integrity. If documentaries are effective they can provoke empathy, anger, understanding, knowledge and resolve in the audience, resolve to speak out against the discrimination and persecution of others. Hirsch writes:“Truly responding to the ethical provocation that witness testimony has transmitted and conveyed across generations and political boundaries would then entail our determined and collective efforts to prevent or to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing from being committed again.”212 Whether the television audience feels compelled to act on what they see is beyond the scope of this thesis, but a documentary offers an alternative collective memory.

A central conclusion of this thesis is that Holocaust survivors should be re- humanised and represented in all their moral complexity, however uncomfortable that may be for an audience. In new documentaries about the Holocaust there is room for more acceptance of the cruelty and passivity in human nature and fewer claims of evil or uniqueness, which Bauer calls an “elegant form of escapism.”213 Representations should work against what Slavoj Zizek calls “depoliticisation”214 - turning the history into an untouchable holy relic, and towards what Hirsch calls “unerasure” – testifying to and representing the Holocaust as a powerful undoing of the Nazis attempted concealment of their crime, and of course, the survivors’ greatest fear: Holocaust denial, particularly when there are no survivors left to contest it. Soon after its completion, one of the survivors in the film, Harry Fox215, suddenly died, while playing his weekly game of tennis. His

211 Ellis 2012: 320
212 Hirsch/Spitzer in MHTD 2010: 405
213 Bauer in Franklin A Thousand Darknesses 2010: 5

214 Zizek Camp Comedy in Sight & Sound April 2000

215 Harry Fox appears in After the Holocaust at the camp & ghetto survivors committee meeting. He is quoted in chapter 2 - p.31

physical fitness at the age of 82 had led everyone who knew him to expect him to be the last one standing. His death was an unhappy reminder of the urgency of this work.The youngest camp survivors are now in their eighties.There may only be a few years left in which to hear and record their testimony, and the older they get the more fragile the testimony becomes. Records of performed testimony will remain after they are gone, but there is a limited opportunity to record unperformed testimony - Hirsch’s “different kind of truth” that tells us “more about the meaning of the event, and the process of its recall in the present, than about the event itself.”216 This dissertation has investigated how unperformed testimony can be ethically represented and best transmitted to a wide audience, resulting in a more subtle understanding of the psychology of survivors.

After the Holocaust featured survivors that were both confident enough to perform testimony and relaxed enough to allow their unperformed and unconscious testimony to be recorded.An unflinching form of listening allowed the unbearable and uncomfortable from beneath the “skin of memory”217 to be transmitted.The film didn’t judge, but adjusted it’s frame of moral reference to fit the moral vacuum in the camps. Catharsis was rejected and the temptation to make stories palatable resisted, while style and humour were embraced in service of the most effective transmission.An interactive mode of filmmaking was employed in order that the subjective be included in the film and the most nuanced story recorded. Unspeakability was reassessed as a reason for prohibition on representation and instead became the object to be represented itself. Forgetting, contradictions and mythologies were likewise represented as an inherent part of testimony.The use of archive footage to represent reality was rejected due to it’s capacity to numb the audience and dehumanise the dead, but still photographs were included in order to provide a glimpse of the past that would contrast starkly with the survivors’ ordinary

216 Hirsch/Spitzer in MHTD 2010:401

217 Delbo in Langer 1991: 6

present, where the film was based. Much time was allocated to building trust with the survivors in the film, and managing their expectations of the representation.The final cut privileged moments of unperformed testimony, allowing objects to be the punctum, or trigger, for deep memory, and encouraging the legacy that played out in survivors relationships to emerge. It made use of juxtaposition to draw poetic truth from the performed testimony.

Jean Amery insists that emotions are not relegated to the margins in rational investigation. He writes “Emotions? For all I care, yes.Where is it decreed that enlightenment must be free of emotion? To me the opposite seems to be true. Enlightenment can properly fulfill its task only if it sets to work with passion.”218After the Holocaust aimed to take a warmer, more intimate approach than is commonly found in Holocaust documentaries.The film strove to create a space for anger, humour, forgetting and performing all to be an inherent part of survivors’ testimony. Geoffrey Hartman writes that the strength of survivor testimony “lies in recording the psychological and emotional milieu of the struggle for survival, not only then, but also now.”219 He too asks that emotion and empathy accompany knowledge. As this thesis has argued there is an important place for facing and registering the emotional impact of testimony whilst resisting exploitation of the subjects and the transforming of their story into a palatable fable of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

As well as emotion, there is laughter in After the Holocaust, which sits uneasily next to horrific memories, but as they exist together in life, so they must exist together in the documentary. As Zizek argues, comedy “at least accepts in advance its failure to render the horror of the Holocaust.”220 The humour belongs firmly to the survivors in the film and is never adopted by the film itself.The past is intercut with the present in the film, in order to represent them as

218 Amery At the Minds Limits 1976: xiii

219 Hirsch/Spitzer in MHTD 2010: 405

220 Zizek in Kerner 2011: 82

entwined and inseparable parts of each survivor’s identity. Memories are shown to be part of their lives; they still live alongside the Holocaust.The brutality and inhumanity of what lies in each survivor’s past is vividly transmitted by the shadows that it casts in the present.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank all the Holocaust survivors and families that I met during the making of After the Holocaust and the writing of this dissertation, but especially those that appeared in the film: Zigi Shipper, Gena Turgel and Freddie Knoller.Their hospitality was beyond the call of duty and their toughness and humour was inspiring. I also want to remember and thank the late Harry Fox for his wonderful attitude - for him the Holocaust was just “a difficult start in life.”221 It was a privilege to know him.

I am grateful to my tutors Graham Dawson, Cathy Bergin, Lucy Noakes, Anita Rupprecht, Peter Taylor and Ulla Spittler, on the MA Cultural History, Memory and Identity, for their acceptance of my lack of education at the start and willingness to help me double my vocabulary and open up a whole new world of ideas and concepts. I particularly want to thank my supervisor Cathy Bergin who both inspired me and sharpened up my thinking and writing with perceptive determination and great humour.

Finally I want to thank my children Lola and Lenny for patiently accepting I might not leave my room for days at a time, for walking the dogs, looking after each other, and dealing with the lack of sympathy for everyday complaints that came with studying the Holocaust. I’m sorry for going on about how lucky you are… I’m very lucky to have you.

221 Harry’s son quoted him saying this at the funeral at Edgwarebury cemetery on the 16th August 2012.

Filming the Shadows: Recording the Unperformed Testimony of Holocaust Survivors

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