Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Inglourious Basterds

by Dustin Stein

I had the privilege of seeing the New York premiere of Inglourious Basterds at the Museum of Jewish Heritage with a rare audience that included film buffs, young professionals, Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Weinstein, Eli Roth, and two dozen Holocaust survivors.

As a member of the Young Leadership Board of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and as an attorney that practices in the field of Holocaust restitution, I often converse with Holocaust survivors. When I recover property or bank accounts for survivors, I see the gratitude in their faces. They have seen more pain than anything I can imagine, and the frustration they must feel when they hear about world leaders denying the Holocaust would be enough to break any human. Yet by fighting for their lost property throughout the world, we force humanity to acknowledge these crimes. The symbolic justice in receiving a bank account or seder plate resonates with survivors, but this is imperfect justice. Exchange rates and the time value of money makes the monetary values of these accounts minimal. Additionally, these survivors lack closure – they lost their family, they were unable to say good-bye, their relatives, mere ashes in some cases because of the crematorium, cannot be brought back. Survivors must cope every day with the pain and suffering the Nazis brought on them.

But Inglourious Basterds brings to the screen one of what may be a survivor’s wildest dream – the chance to exact revenge on the Nazis.

The film is provocative to begin with, but it was even more thought-provoking when seen with Holocaust survivors. I sat there wondering how the survivors would respond to a fantasy about killing Nazis.

The death of the film’s first Nazi brought thunderous applause. I realized that Tarantino’s perversion of history may have fulfilled a lifelong desire of many survivors to kill Nazis, and my frustration with Holocaust fantasy movies likely put me in the minority in the theater that night.  With the first post-screening comment, we heard survivors reiterate that the meaning of life is survival. I thought survivors would not want to see any film that diluted the historical and factual nature of the most atrocious human rights tragedy the world has seen. But the repeated comments from survivors, wishing they could kill Nazis themselves, quickly made me realize my folly.

I wondered how the world could not seem like a completely evil place for a survivor. Many in the audience had their entire families decimated, yet they sat there entranced by the characters’ slow dialogue and the anticipated climax.

Seeing the film made me want to know how survivors feel about death. Many of them have told me that they feel they have cheated death by surviving concentration camps, but are now faced with old age and an impending end. They saw hell and survived it, but will still succumb to their own inevitable demise; despite their extraordinary tales, they face the same fate as everyone else. While speaking with Tarantino after the film, many of them expressed that their dreams had come to life on screen. They wanted to murder the Nazis, but here in their eighties and nineties, some with nurses, walkers, or wheelchairs, seemingly bereft of the very vitality that kept them alive during the Holocaust, they saw a perverted film with just enough historical basis to ground it but also enough delusion to entertain.

I can’t help but think of Imre Kertesz’s book, Kaddish for a Child Not Born. The title of his book hints at the pessimistic attitude he seems to have towards life. He asks the question, how can we as humans bring a child into a world capable of such evil as the Holocaust? Once we have seen the depths of evil in the Nazi soul, how could anyone allow someone else to suffer in this same world? Which begs the question – why go on living?

To which survivors find an answer. Many of them defy death as a big middle finger to the Nazis who tried to force them to take their last breath against their will. These individuals measure life with each heart beat and accomplishment.

Photo by Fan the Fire Magazine, licensed under Creative Commons.

Tags: Holocaust

Posted by Sarah, Wednesday, January 6th, 2010, 6:01 pm, Death and Tragedy.