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‘Sketches from Auschwitz’
Monday was the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. From Radio Free Europe:
Unique images of Auschwitz were sketched by a Soviet Jewish artist who arrived with the Red Army in the hours after the camp was liberated. The images were quickly exhibited across Poland, but the artist, Zinovy Tolkachyov, was accused of “Zionism” by Soviet media and unable to work for 20 years.
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Published in History
Thank you Doug.
I don’t know which is stranger: that it took until 1965 to get them published in the Soviet Union, or that they then allowed publication.
The local classical station today played Tanec (Dance) for String Trio (1943-44) by Hans Krasa, a Czech composer, written while he was in a Nazi concentration camp, and played by the Black Oak Ensemble. Shortly after it was written, Krasa was moves to Auschwitz and killed.
How such light and beautiful music could come from the horrors of such a place is beyond me.
Tanec (Dance) for String Trio (1943-44) by Hans Krasa
Well, I tried to out smart the computer as it wouldn’t let me copy the url and paste it. So I typed in the url and then I got two of them.
The USSR could be really strange about relations with Jewish issues. It’s hard for some of us outsiders to understand.
The film Commissar by Alexandr Askoldov was produced in 1967 and immediately banned. It takes place during the Russian Civil War. In it, the female commissar, a brutal type, gets pregnant and is put with a Jewish family in a small village until the baby is born. She softens up a bit and becomes motherly until her duties call her back into the war. There is a scene in which the Jewish man of the house, played by Rolan Bykov, forsees an extermination camp with smoking chimneys in the future. Some sources say that if he would have changed that one scene, the ban could have been removed. But he refused. (His Wikipedia article tells it a little differently.) So he was kicked out of the Communist Party and banned from making any more films. Bykov and Nonna Mordukova (the female lead) pleaded for nothing worse to be done to him.
During Glasnost, some foreign filmmakers asked Gorbachev why this film (which they knew had been secretly kept from destruction) was not released along with so many others that had been suppressed until then. When the authorities looked into it, instead of releasing the film they kicked Askolodov out of the party again (he had been reinstated somewhere along the line) but in response to further pressure the film was finally reconstituted and released just before the USSR ended. Maybe 12-13 years ago I heard about it, and put in a request for Netflix to get it for its repertoire, which they did. It is now on YouTube with English subtitles. It’s a good one.
The “extras” on the Netflix CD had Askoldov explaining in an interview that he was inspired somewhat by what happened to him as a small child. The NKVD had come and taken his parents away (never to be seen again) leaving him alone in the apartment. Rather than waiting for the NKVD guys to come back, the little Alexandr somehow had enough sense to get himself out of the locked apartment and then went to a Jewish family he knew, who took him in and cared for him.
Mordukova thought Askoldov should have given ground about the troublesome scene, because the ban deprived us of any more films from him. But she did plead on his behalf, while a number of other famous and supposedly courageous film directors did not. (One name she mentioned was Sergei Bundarchuk.)
I see that Askoldov died two years ago. Mordukova and Bykov are no longer with us, either.
Several years ago I was on a Russian movie web site that had a section that paid tribute to Bykov. I noticed that Commissar was not listed among his films. He had a lot of other good roles, too, but this one really should have been included. (This web site was not kino-teatr.ru, which is my usual go-to site for information about Russian films. It’s sort of the Russian IMDB, and does list that role in his filmography.)
From watching the film it’s really hard to understand why it produced the reaction it did among the Soviet censors.
Or that they were not destroyed by Stalin’s men. Perhaps they were held first as evidence against the artist, and then kept as useful down the road.
I remembered this part wrong. (I just now re-watched it for the first time in many years.) It’s not the Bykov character who foresees the Jews going to an extermination camp.
I’ll look it up. Thanks.
I’m remineded of the concentraion camp liberation scene from Band of Brothers. IIRC, one of the scouts came back to the CO and said something like, “You have to see this.” The CO replied, “What is it?” The scout said it couldn’t be described, that it had to be seen in person.
It’s been a long time since I watched the Miniseries, but I remember the scene as gutwrenching. I believe when Ike found out about the camps, he ordered the military to round up as many German citizens as they could find and make them tour the camps. His reasoning was a worry someone in the future would deny it ever happened.
This is from an article about Ike from The Tablet. Interesting to read the entire article.
I always feel gratitude for those who post on the Holocaust, especially non-Jews. Thanks, Doug. At the same time, seeing those drawings is so painful.
Here it is on YouTube. I really like the B&W camera work, as I do for several other Russian films of the 60s. They did have color movies, even in the 40s, but they still did a lot of B&W work in the 60s, partly because of the expense of color film.
So many thoughts: