The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Dance The subject of the Holocaust has been depicted within modern dance.Forward (22 March 2012) Traiger, Lisa "Telling the Holocaust Through Dance" In 1961, Anna Sokolow, a Jewish-American choreographer, created her piece Dreams, as an attempt to deal with her night terrors. Eventually, it became an aide-mémoire to the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1994, Israeli choreographer Rami Be'er tried to illustrate the feeling of being trapped in Aide Memoire (Hebrew title: Zichron Dvarim). The dancers move ecstatically, trapped in their turmoil, spinning while swinging their arms and legs, and banging on the wall; some are crucified, unable to move freely on the stage. This piece was performed by the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. In 2016, Tatiana Navka caused controversy when she and her dancing partner, Andrei Burkovsky, appeared in the Russian version of Dancing on Ice dressed as concentration camp prisoners.
Film
The Holocaust has been the subject of many films, such as Night and Fog (1955), The Pawnbroker (1964), The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), Voyage of the Damned (1976), Sophie's Choice (1982), Shoah (1985), Korczak (1990), Schindler's List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997), The Pianist (2002) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008). A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida, and the most comprehensive Holocaust-related film database, comprising thousands of films, is available at the Yad Vashem Visual Center.
Arguably, the Holocaust film most highly acclaimed by critics and historians alike is Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps. Many historians and critics have noted its realistic portrayal of the camps and its lack of the histrionics present in so many other Holocaust films. Renowned film historian Peter Cowie states: "It's a tribute to the clarity and cogency of Night and Fog that Resnais' masterpiece has not been diminished by time or displaced by longer and more ambitious films on the Holocaust, such as Shoah and Schindler's List."
With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has been an increased focus in recent years on preserving the Holocaust memory through documentaries. Among the most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), which attempts to tell the story in as much a literal manner as possible without dramatization. Reaching the young population (especially in countries where the Holocaust is not part of education programs) is a challenge, as shown in Mumin Shakirov's documentary The Holocaust – Is It Wallpaper Paste? (2013) and Mickey Rapkin's short film The Anne Frank Gift Shop (2023).
Central European film The Holocaust has been a popular theme in cinema in the Central and Eastern European countries, particularly the cinemas of Poland, the Czech and Slovak halves of Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. These nations hosted concentration camps or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the gas chambers and, consequently, the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews have haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lent themselves more easily to exploring the subject. Although some directors were inspired by their Jewish roots, other directors, such as Hungary's Miklós Jancsó, have no personal connection to Judaism or the Holocaust and yet have repeatedly returned to explore the topic in their works.
Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska's semi-documentary The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, Poland, 1947) and Alfréd Radok's The Long Journey (Daleká cesta, Czechoslovakia, 1948). As Central Europe fell under the grip of Stalinism and state control over the film industry increased, works about the Holocaust ceased to be made until the end of the 1950s (although films about World War II continued to be produced). Among the first films to reintroduce the topic was Jiří Weiss' Sweet Light in a Dark Room (Romeo, Juliet a tma, Czechoslovakia, 1959) and Andrzej Wajda's Samson (Poland, 1961).
In the 1960s, several Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust, either directly or indirectly, had critical successes internationally. In 1966, the Slovak-language Holocaust drama The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, Czechoslovakia, 1965) by Ján Kadár and Elmer Klos won a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. Another sophisticated Holocaust film from Czechoslovakia is Dita Saxova (Antonín Moskalyk, 1967).
While some of these films, such as Shop on the Main Street, used a conventional filmmaking style, a significant body of films were bold stylistically and used innovative techniques to dramatize the terror of the period. This included nonlinear narratives and narrative ambiguity, for example in Andrzej Munk's Passenger (Pasażerka, Poland, 1963) and Jan Němec's Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, Czechoslovakia, 1964); expressionist lighting and staging, as in Zbyněk Brynych's The Fifth Horseman is Fear (...a paty jezdec je Strach, Czechoslovakia, 1964); and grotesquely black humor, as in Juraj Herz's The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, Czechoslovakia, 1968).
Literature was an important influence on these films, and almost all of the film examples cited in this section were based on novels or short stories. In Czechoslovakia, five stories by Arnošt Lustig were adapted for the screen in the 1960s, including Němec's Diamonds of the Night.
Although some works, such as Munk's The Passenger (1963), had disturbing and graphic sequences of the camps, generally these films depicted the moral dilemmas the Holocaust placed ordinary people in and the dehumanizing effects it had on society as a whole, rather than the physical tribulations of individuals actually in the camps. As a result, a body of these Holocaust films was interested in those who collaborated in the Holocaust, either by direct action, for example in The Passenger and András Kovács's Cold Days (Hideg Napok, Hungary, 1966), or through passive inaction, as in The Fifth Horseman is Fear.
The 1970s and 1980s were less fruitful times for Central European film generally, and Czechoslovak cinema particularly suffered after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary. Holocaust films from this time include Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay's The Revolt of Job (Jób lázadása, Hungary, 1983), Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau (Poland, 1988), and Ravensbrück survivor Juraj Herz's Night Caught Up With Me (Zastihla mě noc, Czechoslovakia, 1986), whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Steven Spielberg's similar sequence in Schindler's List.
Directors such as István Szabó (Hungary) and Agnieszka Holland (Poland) were able to make films that touched on the Holocaust by working internationally, Szabó with his Oscar-winning Mephisto (Germany/Hungary/Austria, 1981) and Holland with her more directly Holocaust-themed Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte, Germany, 1984). Also worth noting is the East German-Czechoslovak coproduction Jacob the Liar (Jakob, der Lügner, 1975) in German and directed by German director Frank Beyer, but starring the acclaimed Czech actor Vlastimil Brodský. The film was remade in an English-language version in 1999 but did not achieve the scholarly acceptance of the East German version by Beyer.
A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to several more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's Korczak (Poland, 1990), Szabó's Sunshine (Germany/Austria/Canada/Hungary, 1999), and Jan Hřebejk's Divided We Fall (Musíme si pomáhat, Czech Republic, 2001). Both Sunshine and Divided We Fall are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.
In comparison to movies from the 1960s, these current ones have been significantly less stylised and subjectivized. For example, Polish director Roman Polanski's The Pianist (France/Germany/United Kingdom/Poland, 2002) was noted for its emotional economy and restraint, which somewhat surprised some critics given the overwrought style of some of Polanski's previous films and Polanski's personal history as a Holocaust survivor.
Literature A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel – or else it is not about Auschwitz.-- Day by Elie Wiesel
There is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of studying Holocaust literature is the language often used in stories or essays; survivor Primo Levi notes in an interview for the International School for Holocaust Studies, housed at the Yad Vashem:
On many occasions, we survivors of the Nazi concentration camps have come to notice how little use words are in describing our experiences... In all of our accounts, verbal or written, one finds expressions such as "indescribable," "inexpressible," "words are not enough," "one would need a language for..." This was, in fact, our daily thought; language is for the description of daily experience, but here it is another world, here one would need a language of this other world, but a language born here.
This type of language is present in many, if not most, of the words by authors presented here.
Accounts of victims and survivors
Joaquim Amat-Piniella wrote K.L. Reich, in which he describes his time at Mauthausen camp. Jean Améry wrote At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bruno Apitz, an East German author, wrote Naked Among Wolves. Aharon Appelfeld wrote the satirical novel Badenheim 1939. Alicia Appleman-Jurman wrote Alicia: My Story. Inge Auerbacher wrote I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust. Denis Avey wrote The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, where he describes his experiences as a prisoner of war. Nonna Bannister wrote The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister, a collection of diary entries and memoirs she wrote before, during, and after her time in a Nazi labor camp. Gad Beck wrote An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. Jurek Becker, East German Jewish author, wrote Jacob the Liar. Mary Berg wrote The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto. Pierre Berg wrote Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora. Zdena Berger wrote Tell Me Another Morning about her experience in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen Hélène Berr wrote a diary about experiences in Holocaust that was published as The Journal of Hélène Berr. Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Informed Heart. Livia Bitton-Jackson wrote I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust. Aimé Bonifas wrote Prisoner 20-801: A French National in the Nazi Labor Camps in the summer of 1945, on his life in Buchenwald and other camps. Cornelia ten Boom helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust and was imprisoned for her actions. Her book, The Hiding Place, describes the ordeal. Tadeusz Borowski wrote This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and We Were in Auschwitz. Thomas Buergenthal wrote A Lucky Child about his experiences of Auschwitz as a ten-year-old child. Renata Calverley wrote Let Me Tell You a Story: One Girl's Escape from the Nazis. Leon Cohen wrote From Greece to Birkenau: The Crematoria Workers' Uprising.