Literature of the Holocaust Blog

How eerie is it to see this? Filmed in 1941, this footage has Anne Frank looking out of her window at a wedding party.

It's weird to think that if Anne Frank had lived she would have been 92 now. It's weird to think how much that diary she kept meant to so many people. How differently would we think about The Holocaust if it has never been written, or just lost? How many other Anne Franks never got to tell their story? How much does Social Media help oppressed people share their stories with the world in real time? How much does censorship of the internet and media keep people from telling theirs?

Mo Mandel is a great comedian that I got to open for about 5 years ago at Sacramento Punch Line. So funny. This is a pretty cool clip of him talking about performing in Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CL46yOhZ8s

This is a pretty great old clip of Norm Macdonald on David Letterman joking about the Robert Begnini film Life is Beautiful. I love that he has to dance around saying Holocaust on national TV by using the term "that unpleasantness in Europe." It gets so uncomfortable, Dave just says, "Let's move on, Norm."

With the youngest of people that were conscious of the horrors of World War 2 now in their late 70s, it's clear in the 20 years to come, we'll live in a time with no living survivors or witnesses from that era. With all literature of the Holocaust being relatively close to the actual event timewise, there's been a fresh immediacy to the work that makes it even more horrifying. I wonder if as time goes on, our approach will change? Will facts and narratives change to promote the dramatic? One only needs to look back at America's own revisionist history of events from 1620-1920 and wonder how things might change with how The Holocaust was depicted. How different would a film like Schindler's List be if it were made in the year 2050? How much will something like Anne Frank's diary hold up? Will there be some new unspeakable horror that will have occurred that will make The Holocaust some distant memory?

Reading Maus again after many years, I had some vague memories of pages I had read that DO NOT appear in the collected hardcover of Maus 1 and 2 that own now. I thought maybe I was inventing these rememberances, but after some internet digging I see I used to own MetaMaus which had this really cool page of Art Spiegelman looking back at the historical significance. I remember some other page where he was addressing the use of pigs to represent Polish people, too, but can't seem to find it. What a weird last few panels, as he suggests he's not wearing a mask at all.

It's horrifying to consider how many times a country has committed genocide in modern History even outside of World War 2. Cambodia killed 3 million people, literally a THIRD of their own population. Russians have killed and starved millions of their own people. 3 million Bengali Hindus were killed by Pakistan in the '70s. 1 million people in Rwanda killed, which included 70% of the Tutsis in that country. The list goes on and on and on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll Can you believe we even have genocides occuring today in Myanmar, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, and Central African Republic? https://www.businessinsider.com/genocides-still-going-on-today-bosnia-2017-11#darfuris-in-sudan-5

It's sad to think about the journey of Primo Levi. A chemist who was taken to Auschwitz, he survives the experience and writes a harrowing and gripping account of the experience. I saw a video where he revisited Auschwitz nearly 40 years later. He committed suicide shortly after that. How much of a burden did these experiences weigh on Levi for his life? The mantle of being a survivor and to have to speak to what happened for the rest of your life must be heavy indeed.

People think of Henry Ford as one of the great Americans, but few are aware of the fact that he was instrumental in promoting Anti-Semitism in the USA. So vocal and powerful were his efforts that they influenced Hitler himself. Through a company produced newspaper called The Dearborn Independent, Ford promoted and reprinted writings from a work from 1903 called The Protocols of the Elders of Zio n. This work was a hoax that showed how Jews controlled the world's gold supply, and even contained far-fetched claims that Jewish leaders met with The Devil himself in a Prague cemetery to discuss their plains for world domination. Though the work was easily condemned as fradulent, it was shared with many throughout the world. Henry Ford began publishing a series of articles titled "The International Jew." Though he was legally forced to admit they were false 7 years after he began publishing them, his influence and reach already caused enough damage. Hitler was an avid fan of ...

It's sad to think how many "non-Nazis" were complicit in the horrors of The Holocaust. How much did America know about this before we got involved? How much did the average German know and just didn't care? Was the promise of improved economy and better standing enough to look the other way for most people? How strong or effective was the resistance? How did we let this happen?

All of the talk about representation and the recent death of Chadwick Boseman had me thinking about how important the movie Black Panther was. The representation in that film was amazing. The nearly all black cast, black writer, and black director made it a remarkable way to showcase black culture in a way that wasn't confined to the sidekick type roles so many black action characters have had in the past. Though a fictional country, Wakanda seemed like a fully developed and wonderful place where science and knowledge thrived, and stayed hidden from the world. Colonization and white destruction of culture was presented in a thought provoking way that gave even the villain's motives some truth to them. Though it's a tragedy that Boseman died of cancer at the crazy young age of 43, he left a legacy with just this film alone. Fortunatley, Black Panther and it's world is bigger than any actor that portrayed him so it can carry on in a respectful way.

With films like Inglorious Basterds and series like The Man In The High Tower and the Amazon series Hunters , we see stories that are based on actual events, but highly fictionalized. Quentin Tarantino's "Basterds" ends with Hitler getting point blank shot in the face with automatic rifles. Of course it never happened, but it's sort of a retroactive propaganda akin to the first issue of Captain America in 1941, who's cover famously featured Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw! Works of fiction that portray Nazis often ignore The Holocaust completely. The Nazis in the TV SHow "Hogan's Heroes" were portrayed as laughable, and the living condition of Hogan and his jovial crew were better than many people living in poverty. It's clearly not the type of show that could exist anymore. Indiana Jones famously fought Nazis in some of his films. It's weird to think about how Dr. Jones had to get The Lost Ark to keep the Nazis from destroyi...