The Survivor by Justine Juel Gillmer (review)

Boxing is a Darwinian enterprise, with victory going to the most athletic, fit, and skilled rival over their opponent. In Nazi concentration and death camps, however, winning meant survival, with the incapacitated loser being gassed or shot after the contenders brutalized each other without wearing gloves. For the SS guards and officers, such pugilistic spectacles provided entertainment, an opportunity to gamble, and contrived confirmation that their ethnic, political, racial, and religious enemies were so depraved they would sacrifice their comrades to obtain extra food and less strenuous work assignments. Although the winners remained alive if they could continue to triumph, the fate they meted out to those whom they vanquished demoralized and haunted them for the rest of their lives.

Barry Levinson's The Survivor alternates between the wartime and postwar boxing experiences of one of these morally compromised gladiators, the Polish Jew Harry "Hertzka" Haft. He managed to survive his captivity by beating seventy-six adversaries in the Auschwitz subcamp of Jaworzno, thereby dooming them to execution. According to the film, an SS officer named Schneider recruited Harry to box after witnessing him pummel a guard who was viciously assaulting a fellow inmate in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Schneider's patronage of Harry actually began less dramatically when he enlisted Harry to pilfer diamonds confiscated from incoming inmates and groomed Harry to box by furnishing him with extra rations and getting him medical treatment following a savage punishment he received when other guards uncovered his crime. Schneider appreciated that Harry did not betray him during this merciless interrogation. Betting on Harry's bouts, Schneider amassed a small fortune. Aside from the film's fabricated fight against his best friend in the camp, the matches depicted in The Survivor graphically mirror the toll these matches took on Harry's body and mind. In return for sparing Harry's life, Schneider expected Harry to vouch for his "benevolence" if he were tried by the Allies in the wake of the war.¹ The Survivor satisfies Harry's thirst for revenge by showing him kill Schneider, even though Harry's real victim was an SS man he murdered after escaping from a death march in the closing days of the war.²

When Harry immigrated to the United States in 1948, he resumed boxing in the hope of attracting the attention of Leah, the woman he had been engaged to before his internment and whom he believed was still alive. Handicapped by his toe-to-toe style, he nevertheless delivered powerful punches and possessed extraordinary stamina. He won his first twelve fights, but then went on a losing streak, eventually suffering a technical knockout by the undefeated Roland LaStarza.³ The film fictionally attributes an interview Harry gives to a reporter about his experiences in Auschwitz to his getting booked to fight the ascendant Rocky Marciano. The column leads to Harry's ostracism by Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors who considered him a traitor. The core of the film foregrounds Harry's training for the match with Marciano and how the drubbing he took in its three rounds prompted his retirement from boxing. Thereafter he married an American Jewish woman named Miriam, who purportedly worked for a Jewish agency assisting him in locating Leah but who really was a tenant in his apartment building.⁴

Incidents from Harry's postwar life trigger black-and-white flashbacks to his anguished past. Unlike previous feature films about imprisoned boxers fighting at the behest of the SS, The Survivor focuses as much on the guilt and PTSD that plagues Harry as on his wartime ordeal.⁵ He confides in his brother Peretz, "If I could cut every memory from my head, I would." Harry realizes that he had faced an impossible quandary of surviving or consigning his foes to death. His defense of his actions echoes Primo Levi's admonition to refrain from harshly judging...