Reliving the Nazi Nightmare

By Frank Rich

HOLOCAUST NBC, April 16 through April 19

At first it seems like an obscene idea: a network mini-series about the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. American television has a tendency to trivialize almost everything it touches, and, of all important subjects, the Holocaust should be immune to such treatment. But about an hour into Part 1 of Holocaust's four installments, it is clear that this NBC Big Event is far from the same network's Loose Change or King--or just about any other TV movie. Not only is Holocaust faithful to the facts of a horrific historical episode, this show also has the power to keep fickle TV viewers riveted to the tube. It is an uncommonly valuable achievement: Holocaust is likely to awaken more consciences to the horrors of the Third Reich than any single work since Anne Frank's diary nearly three decades ago.

What makes Holocaust particularly fascinating is that it is an orthodox product of network television. The creation of veteran TV showmen, it is splintered by commercial breaks and loaded with soap-opera plot devices designed to make the audience tune in each night. Yet Holocaust demonstrates that TV's built-in limitations can become assets: they can make difficult material more accessible to a mass audience. It is hard to imagine Holocaust being so effective in another format. Were the show exhibited in movie theaters, no one would sit still for its 9 1/2-hour running time. Were it produced for PBS, Holocaust would probably be drowned in a sea of historical minutiae. By creating their show for NBC, the authors have forced themselves to be equally responsive to the demands of both prime-time show biz and historical accuracy. They prove that such a marriage of commerce and art can bear remarkable fruit.

Like Roots, Holocaust is neither documentary nor docudrama, but a fictionalized interpretation of real events. Its dramatic structure is simple: Writer Gerald Green has invented a bourgeois family of assimilated Jewish Berliners and then propelled its members through the events of 1935-45. Shortly after the show opens, the head of the Weiss family, a doctor played by Fritz Weaver, is exiled from Berlin to the Warsaw Ghetto. His wife (Rosemary Harris) soon follows, and eventually the couple end up in Auschwitz. The oldest Weiss son (James Woods), an artist, marries a Roman Catholic (Meryl Streep), only to be sent to Buchenwald, then to the "privileged" camp of Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz. His brother (Joseph Bottoms) goes on the run, meets and marries a Czech Zionist (Tovah Feldshuh), and later joins the underground Jewish partisans fighting in the Ukraine. As Green traces the stories of these and many related characters, the audience gradually takes in the panorama of the Holocaust. It stretches from the first major anti-Jewish riot in Berlin (the 1938 Kristallnacht) to the early stages of the postwar struggle to create the state of Israel.

Holocaust is often brutal. "Unlike pop movies about genocide such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Voyage of the Damned, this show does not leave the brunt of Nazi violence offscreen. Almost all the major characters in Holocaust die, and we see how they are murdered: in mass machine-gun executions, in death-camp ovens, in torture chambers. Though some viewers may be tempted to turn off the horror, Green does everything in his power to keep the audience transfixed. Once some early exposition is out of the way, his narrative races along at a relentless pace, spinning off subplots and love stories as it goes. Green knows the drama speaks for itself, so he never bothers to halt the action for gratuitous sermons or quotes from Santayana.

He is also shrewd enough to give the audience a wide assortment of characters with which to identify. Holocaust's Jews are religious and nonreligious, Zionist and non-Zionist; some of the younger characters (notably those played by Bottoms and Feldshuh) are out-and-out heartthrobs, designed to hook the kids who often dictate the TV-watching habits of American households. As a result, most viewers will be trapped by the time the story reaches its most grisly sections.

If Holocaust is necessarily rooted in the conventions of melodrama, it is sophisticated in its approach to the history it covers; Green does not miss too many angles. He dramatizes the special anti-Semitic character of Hitler's policies, but also shows that many non-Jews were victims of German genocide. He depicts those Jews who went quietly to the slaughter as well as those who tried to resist. He reminds the audience that a few Jews even curried favor with their German captors and that the Allied powers (the U.S. included) stood idly by as evidence of the Holocaust grew. At the end, he touches on the awesome guilt of the concentration camps' survivors.

Perhaps the finest achievement is the depiction of the Germans. In most movies or TV shows that describe the Third Reich, the Nazis are heel-clicking automatons who run around yelling "Heil Hitler!" The effect of such theatrics is to rob genocide of its meaning; audiences can dismiss the Final Solution as the creation of a few madmen. In Holocaust, most Nazis are seemingly normal people who all too easily answer the call of a racist and fascist government. One of the show's principal characters is an intelligent lawyer and family man, Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), who rises in the SS by dreaming up "legal" justifications for the Fuehrer's extermination program. We also meet doctors, technicians and clergymen who lend their aid to the Nazi cause. These characters, like the famous Nazi leaders who appear (Eichmann, Heydrich, Himmler), are played without German accents by such skilled actors as David Warner, Robert Stephens, T.P. McKenna and Ian Holm. They, too, invite audience identification--and so force us to wonder whether we might ever collaborate with an immoral government for the sake of opportunism and self-preservation.

The entire cast is first-rate. The producers were smart to turn to accomplished stage actors rather than the Hollywood Squares refugees who usually populate network miniseries. Marvin Chomsky's direction, while more efficient than inspired, is well above typical TV standards, and some of his images kick the audience sharply in the gut. He shows nude women and children marching silently into the showers; his camera takes in the piles of corpses in the ditches at Babi Yar. Unlike routine cops-and-robbers TV violence, which is too impersonal and stylized to move an audience, these sequences have a shocking impact.

Even so, no TV show or movie, including this one, can make an audience feel what it was like to be a Jew caught in the Holocaust: only those who were there can ever know. But Holocaust does a lot to increase our comprehension of its unfathomable subject. As one character says on her way to the gas chamber, "It's so hard to remember that we're individual people." Holocaust attaches human faces to the inhuman statistics of mass murder. It envelops the audience in grief and suffering, and long after the show has ended, the pain does not easily go away.

About halfway through Holocaust, SS Henchman Erik Dorf returns home to spend a jolly Christmas singing carols with his wife and children. For Michael Moriarty, who plays Dorf, the scene was almost impossible to act. In the midst of the caroling, he bolted from the set, tears streaming down his face. "I found him sobbing, 'How can they do it? How can they do it?' " recalls Holocaust Producer Robert Berger. "The knowledge that thousands in Germany's Christian community were caroling while Jews were massacred was too much for him. He fell to pieces."

Such incidents were quite common during the 18 weeks it took to shoot NBC's $6 million miniseries. In contrast to ABC's Roots, which re-created African villages on Hollywood back lots, Holocaust was filmed in the area where its horrors actually happened. One of the key locations was the Austrian prison camp of Mauthausen, which was used to simulate Auschwitz and Buchenwald. "It was a frightening place," says Berger. "The average life span of a Jew there was 48 hours. At one point in the filming, Cyril Shaps, a totally professional English actor of Jewish descent, was putting on his pajama-striped prison garb in the barracks at Mauthausen; suddenly he said, 'I don't think I can go on.' He was destroyed when he realized, as we all did, that we would have been in those uniforms or worse if we had been living in Germany then."

There were formidable practical problems in making Holocaust. First planned for six hours, the mini-series grew and grew. By the end, 150 actors and 1,000 extras had been employed; 100 miles of film had been shot. Director Marvin Chomsky, who also did half of Roots, even had to miss his father's funeral in the U.S. to keep up with his shooting schedule in Vienna. He felt his father, who had been a Zionist in the 1920s, would have wanted it that way.

The machinery for this mammoth undertaking was set in motion two years ago, when the idea for Holocaust occurred to NBC Programmer Irwin Segelstein. The project was assigned to Titus Productions, headed by Berger and his partner Herbert Brodkin (The Defenders, The Missiles of October). Titus' main asset was Writer Gerald Green, 56, best known for his novel The Last Angry Man. Long absorbed by the plight of Jews during the war, Green had already written two books on the subject.

The decision to build the story around the fictional Weiss family was a carefully calculated one. "We felt it was dramatically important that the audience be able to recognize people whose religion is not a nationality, but whose nationality was a place of birth," says Green. "I wanted a real German family, the equivalent of American Jews who think of themselves first as Americans. We didn't want to do Fiddler on the Roof Jews, although they were prime victims of the Holocaust. We were afraid they would vitiate what we were trying to do--appeal to a broad audience." Though the Weisses are products of Green's imagination, the historical framework of Holocaust is, of course, not. The show was exhaustively researched. Besides relying on the vast literature on the Third Reich and Green's previous interviews with death-camp survivors, Titus consulted with religious leaders and even purchased "home movies" of Nazi atrocities from ex-SS officers.

After Green wrote the full treatment for the show, he feared that NBC would reject his frank depiction of life and death in the camps, but the network immediately gave its O.K. "It was the week Roots went on," says Green. "I think the decision to go ahead might have been delayed for a longer time if Roots had not been such a whopping success." Current NBC Programming Chief Paul Klein, however, points out that the two shows are very different: "Holocaust is not Roots. It's not sex and violence. It is not an exploitation film. It doesn't have anyone's legs being cut off. It doesn't have Chuck Connors raping a nubile black girl." The network's censors have made sure of that: they have bowdlerized four seconds of a scene in which naked women enter a gas chamber.

The decision not to cast the mini-series with big-name actors came early on. "People want to see this show or they don't," explains Klein. "It would have been ludicrous to star-stud it." Instead of celebrities, the audience will see prominent actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company (Ian Holm), the New York Shakespeare Festival (Meryl Streep) and Broadway (Rosemary Harris, George Rose). The Nazis are mainly played by British. Says Berger: "We did not want any comedic overtones of Hollywood." Most of the cast members accepted their roles as soon as they saw the script. One of the two actors who turned down parts felt that the show overly humanized the Nazis. "When I heard that," says Green, "I didn't sleep for three days."

If anyone is losing sleep over Holocaust now, it is probably NBC executives, who are waiting to see how the show fares in the ratings. Says one anxious veteran of the No. 3 network: "Roots was about a civil rights struggle that brought an end to slavery; our story doesn't have a conventional happy ending. That's a worry." To minimize disaster, should it occur, NBC has scheduled the mini-series a week before the beginning of the fiercely competitive and all-important Nielsen sweeps. "I had dreams of glory for King [a ratings flop]." says Klein, "but now I'm hardened. Even if Holocaust does badly, it will still reach 25 million people."

There is at least one sign that Holocaust may do better than NBC executives expect. Earlier this month, Bantam brought out Green's paperback novelization of his shooting script, expecting the book to take off after the show went on the air. Much to the publisher's surprise, the novel hit a nerve with the public from the moment it appeared on the racks. Holocaust has already gone through eight printings (1.25 million copies) and is climbing on best seller lists. Not even Alex Haley's Roots had so wide a circulation before the airing of the TV show.

-Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.