PBS: Prisoner of Paradise
Prisoners arriving at Theresienstadt camp.
The Theresienstadt camp(this is a current photo) looked like an ordinary village in the 1940s.
PBS had an excellent documentary about the Holocaust last night ( http://www.pbs.org/previews/prisoner/ ). This is an amazing story of a famous German Jewish actor and director Kurt Gerron living in Berlin during the 1920s. As the Nazis came to power and sweep across Europe some Jewish artists, musicians, actors, and intellectuals were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp where SS Colonel Karl Rahm was the commander. About 144,000 were sent to this former Czech military garrison. But this story gets even stranger—and more horrible-- than a Twilight Zone episode!
This fortress concentration camp wasn’t the ordinary death factory with gas chambers and crematorium that we are familiar with; this was a transit camp for Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps, but was also used to deceive neutral countries into believing that the Jews were being treated humanely by showing off the camp to Red Cross officials and to the world in film as a paradise ghetto for Europe’s Jews.
Kurt Gerron once acted opposite of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.
The deception was so successful that film director Kurt Gerron was forced by threat of death and torture to become a part of the macabre project of making a documentary film, "The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews," showing Theresienstadt as a safe haven where Jews could live in comfort and peace. Meanwhile many of the prisoners of this “paradise” died of disease, malnutrition, torture, and murder. Think of the internal conflict of an artist having to use his creative talent to conceal massive ongoing crimes against humanity. The prisoners were dehumanized by unbelievable cruelty, but he now had to portray them to the world as human beings in a pseudo-reality. Yet this project gave Gerron an opportunity for a brief escape back to his past life and self-identity when he was allowed some freedom as a human being. But was it ethical for Gerron to pursue this director’s project? Was the film’s goal inherently self defeating? Does all film and media have an inherently lethal potential of distorting human existence and thereby aid in destroying human freedom? Can this potential be subverted? Is the camera recording, or creating reality? Is Gerron a hero for trying to restore humanity to his people just as he was attempting to restore his lost status and identity as a creating artist? What does the film say about humanity before and then after it is exposed as a deceptive propaganda film? These are questions not irrelevant to directors, viewers, intellectuals, and artists today.
The desire for escape is understandable. Theresienstadt was an uninhabitable inhuman reality. There were about 15,000 children in the camp, but only an estimated 1,100 to 150 survived to the end of the war. 33,000 died in Theresienstadt with about 88,000 deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Theresienstadt had no gas chamber, but did build a crematorium because the military garrison lacked space to bury the large number of dead.
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The crematorium could dispose of 190 corpses per day. Once the ashes were searched for melted gold (from teeth), the ashes were placed in a cardboard box and stored. Near the end of the war, the Nazis tried to cover their tracks by disposing of the ashes. They disposed of the ashes by dumping 8,000 cardboard boxes into a pit and dumping 17,000 boxes into the Ohre River. http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa092797.htm
On June 23, 1944 the Red Cross commission for Sweden and Denmark would be escorted through the camp to see opera, cabaret, playgrounds, parks, schools, shops, and cafes. They even heard children complain of too much “sardines” for dinner. Food would be plentiful, but the prisoners where not allowed to eat. Flowers where planted everywhere. Gerron’s film was shown to the world in short vendettas as propaganda, but Gerron’s camera couldn’t conceal that look—a suppressed distant alienated gazed--on the children’s face as he filmed them living in this false reality. This is a study of the human spirit, repression, Art, and Power.
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In the meantime Ivan Fric has arrived [at Theresienstadt], agile in his late 60s. He speaks about the humiliations which the SS inflicted upon the former UFA star [Gerron]. They insisted that he personally perform as well, also in front of the camera. Gerron perspired, was ill, sang Mackie Messer, tried all the tricks of his popular art, tried to make some jokes – the audience ordered to be there did not move and sat there silently.
Then he was sent away, says Fric. The film was finished without him. With the last big transport, in October 1944, straight to Auschwitz. Straight into the gas chamber. “I saw him in Theresienstadt at the ramp”, says Vlasta Schön. “The train was ready to leave. Gerron fell on his knees and asked for permission to stay. He said: I made this movie for you! The SS boots kicked him inside the wagon.”
They played for their life. They gave hope and confidence to themselves and to others, even then, when everything was lost. They did not want to believe it. Gerron’s colleague Kurt Kapper, an author for cabaret as well, then wrote the bitter necrolog, anticipating evil for himself and his kind: “We thank you, good Jew, we say it to you frankly: pack your suitcases now, be so kind, because you are now in line for Poland.”
The few who survived the inferno are still at a loss. “I don’t understand it”, says Louis de Wijze, “how is that possible. Those wonderful artists. What they achieved then. Under these conditions. Then, then the play was over and one did not need them any longer, one says, thank you and simply puts them into the oven?” “A nightmare”, says Jetty Cantor in Hilversum. “And you dream about it again and again. But the worst is that you wake up, wet with perspiration, and you know that is not a bad dream, no, it was really like that.”
http://www.jewish-theater.com/visitor/arti...x?articleID=529
Then he was sent away, says Fric. The film was finished without him. With the last big transport, in October 1944, straight to Auschwitz. Straight into the gas chamber. “I saw him in Theresienstadt at the ramp”, says Vlasta Schön. “The train was ready to leave. Gerron fell on his knees and asked for permission to stay. He said: I made this movie for you! The SS boots kicked him inside the wagon.”
They played for their life. They gave hope and confidence to themselves and to others, even then, when everything was lost. They did not want to believe it. Gerron’s colleague Kurt Kapper, an author for cabaret as well, then wrote the bitter necrolog, anticipating evil for himself and his kind: “We thank you, good Jew, we say it to you frankly: pack your suitcases now, be so kind, because you are now in line for Poland.”
The few who survived the inferno are still at a loss. “I don’t understand it”, says Louis de Wijze, “how is that possible. Those wonderful artists. What they achieved then. Under these conditions. Then, then the play was over and one did not need them any longer, one says, thank you and simply puts them into the oven?” “A nightmare”, says Jetty Cantor in Hilversum. “And you dream about it again and again. But the worst is that you wake up, wet with perspiration, and you know that is not a bad dream, no, it was really like that.”
http://www.jewish-theater.com/visitor/arti...x?articleID=529