From his posts at the European Union and the Commerce, Treasury and State departments, Stuart Eizenstat was the administration\’s \”point man\” on Holocaust restitution, with a unique portfolio to pursue the assets that were looted from Nazi victims.
The process of changing Nazi history in films and television actually began some time ago in films and television. From Chaplin\’s \”The Great Dictator\” to \”Hogan\’s Heroes,\” from Ernst Lubitsch\’s \”To Be or Not to Be\” to \”The Grey Zone,\” World War II and the Holocaust have been told almost solely from the point of view of the victors and the victims.
On Nov. 15, the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale, along with other Los Angeles choral groups, left for a European trip that included performances in Prague and, most notably, Nuremberg, where the chorale participated, on Nov. 25 and 26, in performances of Leonard Bernstein\’s \”Symphony No. 3, Kaddish,\” in a concert hall built on the site of the famous Nazi Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s.
The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust: The Activities of Vaad-Ha-Hatzala Rescue Committee, 1933-1945, Efraim Zuroff, Yeshiva University Press, 316 pages, $39.50
A small but vocal group of demonstrators rallied outside Paramount Pictures in Hollywood last week, wielding signs and chanting slogans like \”Jodie Foster wants to glorify a Nazi\” and \”Stop Jodie\’s project now.\”
All the time Deborah Oppenheimer was growing up, her grandparents remained silent, one-dimensional portraits in a silver frame in the living room. \”They were always there but never referred to,\” says Oppenheimer, who is in her 40\’s and the executive producer of \”Norm\” and \”The Drew Carey Show.\” \”I knew virtually nothing about them.\”
Since 1996, Jewish groups and their lawyers have gone to the mat with the likes of the Germans, the Swiss and the French, extracting $9 billion in restitution for the evil wrought in Europe by Nazi forces and their collaborators.
The hiding places in the title of Daniel Asa Rose\’s new memoir refer to the haylofts and cellars where his relatives hid from the Nazis during the war years, and also to the suburban tool sheds and coat closets where the author crawled into during his childhood in a mostly gentile Connecticut town. The title also alludes to the author\’s efforts to avoid his Judaism. Traveling to Europe to find his family\’s hiding places in Belgium and France with his two young sons, Rose comes to see that hiding places are \”not merely dark holes of concealment\” but also \”places of revelation.\” The trip leads him to understand the links between present and past, his own connections to his family\’s past and to the Jewish future.
What a peculiar piece of work is \”Bent.\” The film version ofMartin Sherman\’s play, first presented on the London stage in 1979,and later on Broadway, has taken almost 20 years to come to thescreen. It\’s not difficult to see why. Not only is it turgid stuff,with a paucity of unfilmable ideas, but in an industry that sometimesseems to specialize in specious history, it will be hard to matchthis one for irresponsibility.
One could almost see historyon the march in Washington last week when the House Banking Committeeheld a day of hearings on Nazi plunder — stolen artworks in themorning, looted insurance policies after lunch — and how to restoreit to its rightful owners.
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