Movies To Watch For Holocaust Memorial Day

TV & Film

Apr 23

Holocasut memorial Day — Image Source: cta.org

As we enter into the warm and pleasant Spring season, there is a day that beckons for us to take a moment and reflect on a not-so-pleasant part of history: the Holocaust, the systemic murder of six million Jews throughout Europe and North Africa, not to mention, the murder of many homosexuals, Slavic peoples, Roma people, Communists, and whoever else the Nazi regime thought would be a threat to the Third Reich. As it is known in Hebrew, Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, is held the week after Passover on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This year, it begins on Wednesday evening of April 23 until Thursday evening of April 24. In the years that followed the end of World War II, there were many movies made to try to explain man’s inhumanity to man. Many of the audience found these films educational and eye-opening, as many survivors could not find it within themselves to speak about what they endured for many years after these events. These films helped to fill in the gaps of what happened. Below is a list that you may want to check out for yourself this Holocaust Memorial Day. SPOILERS FOR ALL MOVIES MENTIONED BELOW!

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5. The Diary Of Anne Frank (1959)

Starring Millie Perkins in the title role and Oscar-winner Shelley Winters, this is a good movie to start with, as many people are familiar with reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in school. This is the dramatization of the diary Anne Frank kept while in hiding in an attic annex above her father’s factory in Amsterdam as the Nazis came to power in the Netherlands and began deporting Jews to concentration camps. Anne wrote about typical coming-of-age adolescent girl stuff, figuring she would publish her diary at the behest of the monarchy in exile, and she dreamed of becoming a writer.

There are several points in the movie where there is optimism, as one of Anne’s more famous lines is “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”, and includes a very touching Hanukkah scene, but the movie ends with the Nazis breaking down the door to the annex after one of the factory workers betrayed the families hiding there. Even with this ending, Otto Frank’s character says that they “no longer have to live in fear but can go forward in hope”. Unfortunately, he is the only survivor of their group. The diary did as Anne wished, living on after her death, and, along with this 3-hour long movie, there have been quite a few other adaptations, and it has been translated into many languages.

4. Life Is Beautiful (1997)

This is an Italian language movie, directed, co-written, and starring Roberto Benigni, who won the Oscar for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film. Life is Beautiful is also the second-highest-grossing foreign language film in the United States of all time, right behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, it is also adapted from a book, In the End, I Beat Hitler by Rubino Romeo Salmonì, and also from the experiences of Benigni’s own father, who was in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I remember when it first came out that this film had raised some eyebrows as it was a funny Holocaust movie. “How on Earth could this be?!” exclaimed the pearl-clutchers! But this movie proved itself as an honest, heartwarming show of the lengths a parent will go to protect their child.

It follows the story of Guido and his son Giosuè as they are deported to a concentration camp along with their wife and mother Dora. Dora is separated from them, but Guido explains to Giosuè that the camp is an intricate game, and as long as he follows the rules and plays properly, Giosuè can win a tank! And, at the end, Giosuè does win his tank, but the audience will be smiling through their tears.

3. The Grey Zone (2001)

Unlike the first two movies I have mentioned, there is nothing optimistic or cheerful about The Grey Zone. I have vivid memories of watching this with my parents when it came out to rent, probably on VHS. It is about a child, but this very graphic movie is not for children. Starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Natasha Lyonne, it tells the story of a Jewish doctor at Birkenau, the extermination camp adjacent to Auschwitz. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli is part of the Sonderkommano, a group of Jewish prisoners who help the Nazis kill other Jews at the camp. It shows the depths that a person will go to in order to survive. The Sonderkommandos realize that they, too, will be eventually killed, and they work with the women and local Poles to get what they need to blow up the crematorium.

All is going to plan until they discover a 14-year-old girl who has survived being gassed. Will they take care of this one girl, which could ruin their plans, instead of going ahead with their plans to save hundreds, if not thousands, of people? This is based on the true story of the Sonderkommando uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As I alluded to, this is not for the faint of heart. For a more sanitized concentration camp uprising movie, there is Escape from Sobibor. Also based on a true story, this was a successful uprising and escape from a notorious camp. The Nazis were so humiliated by this, they ordered the camp to be demolished, hiding what had gone on there. Even though 300 prisoners escaped, only 50 survived the war.

2. A Real Pain

With so few Holocaust survivors remaining with us, how is the next generation going to learn from their history and continue their families’ legacies? This movie, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, tackles this dilemma. Eisenberg wrote this movie about two cousins who go on a Jewish history tour of the concentration camp sites in Poland.

They do this to honor their grandmother’s legacy. Like many of us who are second- and third- generation survivors, we can recognize how the Holocaust continues to cause generational trauma in our families and we can relate to how these cousins deal with the quirks that are normal for our family idiosyncracies, but maybe not-so-normal to other families that don’t have this in their history. This movie is considered one of the best movies of 2024, and my mother, being a second-generation survivor, highly recommends it.

Honorable Mentions:

I would have to write another two or three articles to fit in all of the movies that I would have liked to review here. Among these are: The Pianist, Defiance, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Europa, Europa, Woman in Gold, The Ritchie Boys, and Judgment at Nuremberg. All of these are based on true stories, and each shows that although when we think of the millions of people who were killed and affected by the Holocaust, each of these people has a story and had a life that was forever changed. Judgment at Nuremberg shows how educated, cultured people can justify their horrific actions, not even realizing how depraved they are.

1. Schindler’s List (1993)

This is considered to be the masterpiece of Holocaust films. Steven Spielberg wrote the script, adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel, Schindler’s Ark, and directed this black-and-white movie. It is about the businessman Oskar Schindler who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis. This movie shows the character arc of Schindler, who starts as an opportunist, not so much caring about the individual Jews, but then, as he witnesses more of the horrors of the war and the toll it is taking, becomes determined to save as many Jews as he can.

One scene that stands out to me is the one where Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, saves Jewish children by holding their fingers up to the Nazi officer and declaring that he needs the children for his factory because their fingers are small enough to fit inside the bullet casings to clean them. Despite Schindler’s best efforts, some of the Jews that are under his protection are still subject to the horrors of the concentration camps. My dear grandfather, who very seldom went to see any movie, went to see this one, and he said that it is the most accurate portrayal of the war that he ever saw. Like the fictional grandmother in A Real Pain, my grandfather was in Majdanek and Auschwitz, a real person who lived through this horrible time. With the haunting score by John Williams, this film was also the catalyst for Spielberg to start the Shoah Foundation through USC to record the memories of Holocaust survivors before they leave this world.

Schindler’s List ends with the survivors wondering where they will go. They certainly can’t go back to their homes in Europe, most of which were taken over by their gentile neighbors. My grandfather told me a story many times over of two women and a man who went back to their homes in Poland, only to find the Polish neighbors had taken them over. The farmer then shot the man dead, even though the war was over. (The end of the war did not magically stop the 1000 years of antisemitism that pervaded European society.) A Soviet officer who declares the Jews liberated tells them to go East, and most of the Schindler Jews, as they are called, end up in the land of Israel. Oskar Schindler and his wife, Emilie, were declared Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem, and I have visited his grave in Israel. Another movie that is beyond the scope of this article is Otto Preminger’s 1960 four-hour epic Exodus, which details the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust emigrating to Israel, starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint.

However you choose to spend this Holocaust Memorial Day, I hope that you find meaning in it.

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