At age 12 or 13, documentary filmmaker Peter Stein saw a Holocaust film for the first time — the bleak 1956 documentary “Night and Fog” — during Sunday school in San Francisco.
“What an intense, intense, beautiful but just shattering film that was, particularly for impressionable kids,” Stein, now 65, recently told J. As the son of a World War II refugee, he was acutely aware of his personal connection to the subject matter.
On Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day will mark 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. That evening at JCCSF, Stein will discuss and show clips from films about the Holocaust made between 1944 and 1949, exploring questions about how the world understood the Holocaust during and immediately after the war and how survivors processed their pain in the first years after their trauma.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
J.: Why has “Night and Fog” stuck with you all these years?
Peter Stein: It’s a beautiful film. Directed by the French filmmaker Alain Resnais, “Night and Fog” is the first film to make what I would call an artistic argument for the inexpressible horror of what happened to Jews in the Holocaust. It’s weird to say that it’s an artistic expression, but it does try to grapple in film imagery with the unspeakable.
When I was the executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, I watched, sometimes gladly and sometimes with great pain, many stories of the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. Stories were used, mined, re-mined, exploited — sometimes beautifully rendered. Every time you thought that every Holocaust story had been told in film, there’d be another way to tell a story. And many of those are very earnest attempts to grapple with the depths that human depravity can sink to or the resilience of the human spirit, but at some point you start to see all the tropes.
Is it possible to identify a definitive “first” Holocaust film?
No, not really. I’m going to show little clips of a film made before the end of the war in 1944, an American propaganda film made in Hollywood called “None Shall Escape.” It’s set in the near future and it imagines, in a prescient way, that the war is over and the war criminals, the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities, are being held to account in an international tribunal, a kind of Nuremberg trial setting — and the war is not even over yet!
Even though it has a very particular, patriotic point of view, it doesn’t shy away from showing some of what had begun to come across through news wires and newsreels as to the persecution that Jews faced. So already in 1944, films are being made that directly address the persecution of Jews and the war crimes.
What are one or two of these early Holocaust films you wish more people would see?
There’s a really fascinating one called “Long Is the Road.” It’s in German, Yiddish and Polish. That was made in 1948. It mainly tracks one family, some of whom survive, some of whom don’t, from persecution in Poland to the displaced persons camps just after the war — and it’s making the case for Jews needing a homeland of their own. So it has a very Zionist perspective.
One that was new to me from this research, that is currently my favorite, is called “Border Street.” It’s made in 1948 by a Jewish Polish filmmaker named Aleksander Ford. It’s remarkable for being focused on Jewish resistance and survival in the Warsaw Ghetto, and made in the shadow of the ruins of the ghetto. This film was really eye-opening to me.
The other utter revelation to me is a recently restored film called “The Last Stage,” made by a woman, a Polish filmmaker named Wanda Jakubowska, who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner. She survived, and two years later, comes back and makes a film about women prisoners and underground resistance within Auschwitz. And she makes it on the grounds of Auschwitz with former prisoners as some of her cast. It’s just jaw-dropping. She’s coming back to the scene of the crime and telling it in almost unwatchably brutal detail.
The reason I’m doing this talk at JCCSF for International Holocaust Remembrance Day is that I’m just so fascinated by this period in the immediate aftermath of Holocaust. People don’t even really get what has happened in their midst, and yet they’re already finding the need to start telling narrative stories about it. What did those first drafts of the narrative look like? How did they shape the tropes we see now, 80 years later, in Holocaust storytelling — or how were they dismissed?
I’m excited to show folks some of the imagery that was being created in the first couple of years after the war and to talk about how we can look back on that now with some admiration, as well as some critique, as to how the material was handled by these filmmakers.