{"id":89723,"date":"2021-10-02T17:05:51","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T15:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=89723"},"modified":"2021-10-01T13:26:45","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T11:26:45","slug":"10-05-68","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=89723","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Auschwitz Report\u2019: Slovakian film follows real-life escapees who tried to warn the world"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>\u2018The Auschwitz Report\u2019: Slovakian film follows real-life escapees who tried to warn the world<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

ANDREW LAPIN <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Two Auschwitz prisoners escape in a scene from “The Auschwitz Report.” (Samuel Goldwyn Films<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

(JTA) \u2014 Were it not for Rudolph Vrba and Alfr\u00e9d Wexler, would the world today know the true extent of the mass murder the Nazis inflicted during the Holocaust? <\/span><\/p>\n

The two men, both Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, secretly recorded fastidious notes about details of the death camp unknown to the outside world. These included schematics of the gas chambers, the Nazis\u2019 use of the deadly chemical Zyklon-B, the number of prisoners being brought in to their deaths every day and the planned construction of a new rail line for deporting Hungarian Jews directly to the camp. The information the men smuggled out of Auschwitz formed the basis for the Vrba-Wetzler Report<\/a><\/strong><\/span> \u2014 the first time the international community had heard of much of these horrors.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new Slovakian film \u201cThe Auschwitz Report,\u201d directed by Peter Bebjak, somewhat clunkily dramatizes Vrba and Wexler\u2019s 1944 escape and attempt to get their message to an outside world still largely ignorant of what was transpiring at the camps. This being a Holocaust film, Bebjak also spends considerable time (a full half of his 94 minutes) re-enacting the hell of the camp itself. <\/span><\/p>\n

These early sequences \u2014 Nazis beating a man to death, shooting a father\u2019s daughter in front of him, stacking naked dead bodies like meat \u2014 are stomach-churning in a familiar way, and serve as the film\u2019s intent to align itself with more brutal siblings like \u201cSon of Saul\u201d rather than softer works like \u201cLife is Beautiful.\u201d Whether you find such scenes a necessary tool of the \u201cnever forget\u201d philosophy will likely depend on how many Holocaust movies you\u2019ve already seen, and how many more you feel like you can tolerate.<\/span><\/p>\n

The escapees are referred to in the film as \u201cFreddy\u201d and \u201cWalter\u201d and played by Noel Czuczor and Peter Ondrejicka. In one of the movie\u2019s bolder (or perhaps simply more economical) choices, there is nothing inherently heroic or special about these men. We know just as much about their backstories as we do about any of the other prisoners, which is to say, none \u2014 we only meet them in Auschwitz. This helps Bebjak and his co-screenwriters, Tom\u00e1s Bombik and Jozef Past\u00e9ka, avoid the ugly yet typical Holocaust-movie misstep of casting the survivors in a more favorable light than everyone else, as though they simply had more strength of will than the ones who didn\u2019t make it.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this approach also has a downside. None of the Jewish prisoners in \u201cThe Auschwitz Report\u201d come off as real people whose lives have value outside of their striped uniforms. In fact, the only prisoner who\u2019s given a bit of individual backstory is pointedly referred to as a Franciscan. An early fake-out scene, in which one of the protagonists imagines himself being hanged by the camp\u2019s gates, is meant to shock our senses; but the prisoners are so interchangeable that it has the opposite effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

recommended by: Leon Rozenbaum
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/span>A 10-minute, unbroken sequence at the very end of the film seems to finally get at the moral concerns the filmmakers are after: Namely, how do you convince people of something so shocking that it defies belief? After they\u2019ve fled the camp and spent several days trekking through the woods, Freddy and Walter finally reach the Polish-Slovak border (this being during the First Slovak Republic\u2019s brief existence as a Nazi-aligned \u201cfree\u201d state) and, with help from the burgeoning Slovak resistance, get themselves an audience with a British member of the International Red Cross. Only, he doesn\u2019t believe their account. <\/span><\/p>\n

The aid worker (John Hannah) notes that reports from his colleagues who\u2019ve visited the camps make no mention of death squads, and that everything he\u2019s seen indicates the Nazis are treating their prisoners humanely \u2014 a reflection of the real-life deception the Nazis played on the international aid community. He only snaps out of it when told that his colleagues, too, had been murdered by the Nazis. \u201cIt\u2019s not just Jews!\u201d the Jewish men tell him, in one of the only lines of dialogue in the film that mentions Jews at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s here, at the intersection of desperate pleas and uncaring bureaucracy, where we begin to understand why the Holocaust was allowed to continue for so long, while the world stood silent. The film\u2019s provocative ending credits try to continue this theme; Bebjak underlays them with an audio montage of modern-day world leaders (including, yes, some familiar American voices) spouting hateful, nativist views. Some also traffic in Holocaust denial and Nazi appreciation. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Auschwitz Report\u201d is hardly the first film of our modern era<\/a> to try to make these connections<\/a>, and the unfortunate truth is that some artists concerned about fascism and Nazis can draw that link more convincingly than others. By focusing so much on the unimaginable nightmare of Auschwitz itself, and very little on the actual work of the protagonists trying to convince people those nightmares were real, the film comes up short in its plea for us to grapple with the facts of history.<\/span><\/p>\n

The real-life Vrba became a significant figure in the post-Holocaust Jewish landscape, appearing in Claude Lanzmann\u2019s \u201cShoah\u201d and remaining intensely outspoken about what he saw as the moral failings of the international community that did not quickly act on his report. Though the report did help to save more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported to Auschwitz, many more perished at the camps before action was taken. \u201cThe Auschwitz Report\u201d emphasizes this point, in its endless depictions of the camp\u2019s horrors. And yet, it\u2019s hard not to feel like this film\u2019s real story \u2014 the psychological gap between those horrors and an uncaring outside world \u2014 has yet to be told.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2018The Auschwitz Report\u2019: Slovakian film follows real-life escapees who tried to warn the world ANDREW LAPIN Two Auschwitz prisoners escape in a scene from “The Auschwitz Report.” (Samuel Goldwyn Films (JTA) \u2014 Were it not for Rudolph Vrba and Alfr\u00e9d Wexler, would the world today know the true extent of the mass murder the Nazis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89723"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89731,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89723\/revisions\/89731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}