"The Pianist" Plays Germany:
What's So Funny About the Holocaust?
William Grim
MUNICH -- Has Germany really changed since 1945? I used to think so. But after living and working
here for two years, I'm not so sure.
It's the little things that you notice at first:
The casual anti-Semitic remarks, the apoplectic reactions
at any mention of the Yiddish language, or business
clients who proclaim in meetings that "the Jews control all
the money in the world."
After a while, the experiences seem less
random and more sinister. One day a group of students I'm
helping prepare for their college entrance exams were
having trouble with their vocabulary lesson, particularly
the word "crematorium." I define the word and one
student pulls out a cigarette lighter, flicks it on and says,
"So, Jueden-Oven." His classmates do likewise.
This was a private, upper middle-class
school well-known for its left-wing politics.
It's Friday evening in Munich and I'm walking
past the Museum Lichtspiele Theater where Roman
Polanski's new Holocaust film, "The Pianist," is playing. The
theater is an art house, catering to the tastes of Munich's
cosmopolitan elite. On the spur of the moment, I decide to
see the movie.
There are about 200 people in the
audience, mostly white, good-looking, expensively attired
young urban professionals in their late 20s and early 30s.
Undoubtedly all are well-educated, well-heeled and
sophisticated, representative of the "new" Germany, the
Germany we are told has severed all ties to its Nazi
past. There isn't a skinhead to be seen. As far as I can tell,
I'm the only American.
The film's gruesome scenes pile on top of
one another with frightening intensity. I'm having trouble
holding back the tears. Since I'm one of those males
who views crying as unmanly, I furtively look around the
room in embarrassment to see if anyone has seen me
daubing my eyes. What I see are smiling faces.
On screen, a Jewish family is brutally
murdered by the SS. This time, the smiling faces are
accompanied by laughter -- not nervous laughter or the laughter
of shame, but Schadenfreude, pure and simple. Later
in the movie, an SS guard remarks how clever the Jews
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On Seeing
"The Pianist"
Ruth King
I saw the movie this afternoon. It was the
first showing and around me were mostly senior citizens.
In a bizarre juxtaposition, it was playing in the same
theater as some Hollywood fluff with Jennifer Lopez, and
my husband and I watched who went to see what film.
He remarked that it was those of us with memories and
ghosts who chose "The Pianist." Maybe so.
The movie is at times virtually unendurable.
Subtly, constantly, the noose around Warsaw's Jews
tightens. Fear, fatigue, cold, hunger become terror and
death. The brutality is almost too much to watch. Perhaps
for those without ghosts it does not even ring true. The
numbers of Warsaw's Jews is repeated throughout. First,
half a million, dwindling, until the transports, to a few
thousand. I kept reminding myself that one out of every
three Jews in the world was killed during the Holocaust,
and almost half of them were Polish.
I kept reminding myself that one out of every three Jews in the world
was killed during the Holocaust, and almost half of them were Polish.
The protagonist, a concert pianist, endures
and survives, but the audience is exposed to scenes of
such horror, such depravity, that one is filled with fury
rather than any feeling of triumph. The Jews are a people
like any other, but always "the other."
Unlike William Grim's experience, in ours
the audience sobbed, sniffled and sighed. Americans
are good people. At the end, most people just silently
walked out, almost avoiding each other's eyes.
I must confess what I was thinking. First, I
was filled with sorrow that David Bar-Illan could not see
this movie. Bar-Illan was one of the early leaders of AFSI
and a world-class concert pianist who performed
internationally with the greatest orchestras. David returned to
Israel in the 1980s. He became editor of the Jerusalem
Post. He gave up that role to become the press spokesman
for Benjamin Netanyahu during the latter's tenure as
Prime Minister. David suffered a near lethal heart attack
almost three years ago. He is disabled. He would have praised
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