First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

Introduction

1 For many, the Holocaust has become the most important historical event of the twentieth century. Indeed, it has become part of the American experience , providing Americans a point of reference firmer even than the Civil War or Pearl Harbor.1 As an extreme of human behavior, it informs not only the understanding of history but also contemporary politics as the international community strives to comprehend, prevent, or prosecute programs of genocide, a term itself coined to describe the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews. Images, especially cinematic ones, have been a crucial means for inculcating public awareness of the Holocaust. Indeed, widespread Western skepticism about Nazi crimes was decisively defeated by screening newsreels of the camps at the end of the war. More recently, several popular films, including Marvin J. Chomsky’s Holocaust television miniseries (1978) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), further raised mass consciousness about the Holocaust. While these are reconstructions, audiences are also familiar with fragments of the original newsreel images, which have been recycled for both authorial films, such as Alain Resnais’s seminal Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard [1955]), and TV documentaries, such as the final two parts of Thames TV’s 1973 World at War (“The Final Solution,” directed by Michael Darlow), to name but two. Yet rarely do we pause to reflect on the genesis of the newsreel images. This oversight masks an extraordinary ignorance about the first mov-  Introduction 2  INTRODUCTION ing images to depict the Holocaust not taken by perpetrators themselves. These little-considered films were made and shown before the newsreels showing U.S. and British soldiers liberating camps in Germany in 1945, usually regarded as the “first” films of the Holocaust. The neglected images —Soviet wartime films—are cinema’s initial attempts to represent the Holocaust, the subject of this study. Above all, identifying and examining these movies will shed new light on the apparently familiar subject of humanity’s first encounter with images of the Holocaust. By shifting the focus away from the familiar territory of the 1945 U.S. and British newsreels and to that of Soviet newsreels , documentaries, and features, we can better observe how the unprecedented sights of brutality were grasped within established narrative frameworks. For the Soviets, this meant adapting representations of Nazi atrocities so as to convey a “Soviet” version of the Holocaust, to “Sovietize ” it, to claim the victims as their own, a process that can be compared to American filmmakers’ later tendency to “Americanize” the same events. By analyzing how Soviet filmmakers shaped and distorted their discoveries , we can better understand and guard against analogous appropriations of the Holocaust by other factions. Such an analysis not only reveals a great deal about the effects of cultural , political, and ideological biases on Holocaust film but also illuminates the process of cinematically representing the Holocaust, the ways in which narrative tropes for its representation were elaborated. This comprises the passage from eyewitness testimony and firsthand accounts, on the one hand, to the reportorial gathering information and shaping narratives , on the other. Finally, focusing on this body of films also enables a greater understanding of less-considered dimensions of history proper—specifically, of the initial stage of the Holocaust, the Nazis’ mass murder of Soviet Jews, which began in 1941, before the construction of the death camps and gas chambers. It likewise enables a rare insight into the unique culture of the wartime Soviet Union, which experienced a distinct moment of “spontaneous de-Stalinization.”2 The Soviet Union and the Holocaust Investigating Soviet wartime cinema’s depiction of the Holocaust may seem a deliberately paradoxical and provocative endeavor. For one thing, it is anachronistic in that the filmmakers did not perceive these works as INTRODUCTION  3 depicting the fate solely of Jews and certainly not as documenting the “Holocaust,” for that term became widespread even in the English-speaking world only beginning in the 1960s. Indeed, Soviet authorities rejected the very notion of the Holocaust and restricted the representation and discussion of the fate of Jewish victims of the Nazis’ genocidal activities as being separate from that of Soviet citizens more generally and other occupied peoples.3 In the context of the Soviet rejection of the word, it is worth considering its coinage. This word is a deeply problematic one in that it bears long-standing Christian associations and implies sacrifice, a repellent notion when...