RESEARCH . . .
Find out about the real events of the 'Holocaust'. Claude
Lanzmann's film Shoah (1985) is a nine-hour documentary created out of a series
of interviews with some 350 survivors and witnesses of concentration camps at
Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec. It includes accounts by the
people who assisted in the extermination: a Polish barber tells how he cut the
hair of those about to go to the gas chamber; an SS officer talks about the
'processing' of the victims; a railway worker describes the practical
difficulties associated with transporting so many Jews to the camps.
Read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl (1949). Anne was a
teenage Dutch girl whose family, along with another Jewish family, managed to
hide from the Nazis in an 'annexe' at the back of a house in Amsterdam. After
some years, they were betrayed and deported, and Anne died in the camp at Bergen-Belsen.
Her father published her diaries after the war.
Read the memoir by the Italian writer Primo Levi recollecting
his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Se questo e un uomo (If
this is a man, 1947). You might also like to read the other books by Levi that
Amis lists in his Afterword as being influential: The Truce, The Drowned and
the Saved and Moments of Reprieve.
Read Robert Jay Lifton's book The Nazi Doctors-. Medical
Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986), another text cited by Amis.
RESEARCH 'HOLOCAUST' STORIES ON FILM . . .
A great number of films have been made about the
con-centration camps set up under the Nazi regime during the 1930s. Examples
might include Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), Roberto Benigni's La
Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982)
and Liliana Cavani's II Portiere diNotte (The Night Porter, 1973). One such
film that features a Nazi dentist who should be a healer as in Time's Arrow is
John Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976).
Compare the filmic treatment of the facts of the concentration
camps with Amis's literary treatment of the same subject.
