Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

At least I have a better understanding, I think, about the Christ-killing rap, why some Christians get so upset with us Jews; the Romans technically killed Jesus, yes, but only because we forced them to. We gave them no other choice, us Jewish rabble-rousers.

But, wait. . didn’t Jesus have to die in order to save everyone, or something? In order for Christianity to even exist? Wasn’t that the whole bizarre plan ? Doesn’t this mean Judas — and by extension, the bloodthirsty Jewish mob — actually did do the right thing? Exactly what God wanted? Everything still seems like our fault, though, somehow.

So, how responsible am I for killing Jesus Christ, little half-Jewish Valley Girl that I am? Should I feel guilty? Should I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty? I’m still so confused.

Sometime during the year of Heston-Moses and Blond Rocker Christ, my father provides some new context, another jigsaw piece to this puzzle of Jewish identity. We are sitting in a movie theatre (of course), probably on a Saturday afternoon while my mother is off shopping, waiting for Coming Attractions, although I have no memory of what movie we are actually there to see. My father — my devout atheist, once-Lutheran father — begins talking about a thing called “The Holocaust” (a word I don’t think I have ever heard, perhaps only overheard in a low-voiced adult conversation or two. .), which happened a long time ago over in Europe when millions (a word, like Holocaust , too abstract to carry any real meaning) of Jews were rounded up and put in camps and then killed by the German Nazis for no other reason than that they were Jewish. And while we don’t practice or believe any religion in our house, not Judaism or Christianity, my mother is Jewish, my grandparents are Jewish, and so I am, too, and it is important that I know that. It is important I understand what a special thing that is. It is something I must never forget . It is an inescapable part of me, in my very blood. Judaism is not just about “faith” or some bullshit religion: It is a racial and cultural and historical heritage.

Surely I must have had questions about this (the wise child? the wicked child, simple child? No, at this moment I am indeed the child who doesn’t even know how to pose an actual question, not about this), but the lights dimmed, the curtain went up, the Coming Attractions began, and there in the dark cinema I am once again made Jewish, have once again become a Jew —but defined now by something both too abstract and too horrifying, too staggeringly relevant and weighted with responsibility: Judaism as death warrant.

My first Holocaust film — what an obscene way to phrase that,the genre-fying of genocide — was not, technically about the Holocaust: The Odessa File , in 1974, is a peppy Cold War thriller, set in 1963 Berlin. 21Jon Voight is Peter Miller, an apple-cheeked (and so Aryan) journalist with an ebb-and-flow German accent, who comes into possession of a diary written by an old Jewish man who has just committed suicide by gassing himself. Twelve minutes into the film, Peter sits down to read this hand-scribbled account of the old man’s experience in WWII; he is immediately engrossed, and the groovy espionage music fades to a quavery voiceover:

SALOMON V.O.

I am Salomon Tauber, and I have stayed alive this long only because there is one more thing I wish to do. The friends I have known, the sufferers and victims of the camp are long dead, and only the persecutors are still around me. I see their faces on the streets. . and in the night I see the face of my wife, Esther, and I remember how she clung to me on the train as we pulled into the station at Riga. .

The bright saturated colors of early ’70s film transform to grainy black-and-white images: Dazed, dull-eyed men, women, and children huddled together in an enclosed cattle car, rocking listlessly to the movement of the train. Jewish Stars of David glow achromatically white on coat lapels. Salomon and Esther cling to each other, yes.

SALOMON V.O.

We had been three days and three nights in that cattle car, without food or water. The dead, and there were many of them, were crowded in among us.

The Jews stumble from the train, stagger around the platform. SS Officers herd them, carrying truncheons, guns, whips. They converse in German without subtitles, Ich Ich Ich , sounding disconcertingly like bar mitzvah Hebrew. There are barking German shepherds. There is barbed wire. The bodies of dead Jews are dragged off. There is a hint of smoke in the air, as if a sheer black stocking has been pulled over the camera lens.

SALOMON V.O.

It was there I first saw him: Captain Eduard Roschmann¸ the SS Commandant of the camp. The Butcher.

And there is SS Roschmann, the Commandant, an unnervingly handsome Maximilian Schell in a well-tailored coat, collar turned dashingly up, a skull decorating his black cap.

SALOMON V.O.

Roschmann had a hobby. He liked to destroy human beings. First their soul, then their body.

Jews standing on footstools have ropes around their necks; Roschmann, Ich -ing, kicks the stool out from beneath an adolescent boy. His feet dangle in space. Jews kneel at the edge of trenches, are shot in the back of the head by Nazi officers, fall conveniently forward. Roschmann plays a game; behind the next-in-line kneeling Jew, a young boy, he smiles at another officer, puts his finger to his lips, and shoots into the air. The boy, unharmed, falls forward. The boy then gazes up at the Nazis, his face blank. Roschmann chuckles, nods to the officer, who aims into the trench, shoots the boy. The Nazis laugh, joke around. Their unsubtitled German is an appropriately incomprehensible language for incomprehensible actions.

SALOMON V.O.

Sometimes, Roschmann amused himself by kicking those about to die as they huddled together naked, stripped of dignity and all hope. He enjoyed watching the dogs feed on them while they were still living.

We are not shown any of this. More trainloads of Jews arrive.

SALOMON V.O.

Roschmann had many of the women, children, and elderly exterminated on arrival — they were more valuable dead: Their clothes, their hair, their teeth, were a cash asset.

We do not see these images. We see only Salomon and Esther, being marched down a street. A hollow-eyed Esther is loaded onto a van, while musicians play; Salomon, stumbling, is held back by Roschmann’s truncheon. Esther, realizing they are separated, screams and screams. When Salomon struggles, pleads, Roschmann beats his face until black blood drips. He can only watch, helpless.

SALOMON V.O.

The expression in Esther’s eyes has stayed with me always.

The van is sealed, driven off, the Jews packed inside suffocated by carbon monoxide.

SALOMON V.O.

After her death, my soul died inside me. But my body and mind remained alive. I was determined to survive and tell what Eduard Roschmann did to our people here.

Salomon informs us that after the war, Roschmann disappeared, but:

SALOMON V.O.

I bear no hatred, no bitterness toward the German people. Peoples are not evil, only individuals are evil. If, after my death, this diary should be found and read, will some kind friend say Kaddish for me?

Back to Peter in his apartment, pensive, closing the manuscript; the final few moments of the movie focus on his obsession with finding Roschmann and bringing him to justice — in doing so, he discovers Roschmann has come under the protection of the Odessa, a cabal of postwar Nazis who have reassimilated themselves as ordinary upstanding German citizens, dedicated to (1) helping other Nazis on the run, and (2) sabotaging the State of Israel. Peter’s boss is opposed to this investigation (“Dead Jews don’t sell papers!”), his mother is opposed to this (“Don’t do this, people want to forget the horrors of the war!”), but Peter persists, eventually going undercover as an Odessa operative and confronting the now-aging Roschmann, who has been hiding in plain sight as a successful German businessman. There is a big spy-thriller twist/revelation at the end, and we conclude with a repeat of Salomon’s voiceover insistence that he bears no bitterness, that peoples are not evil, his wish that someone say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for him — which the Ayran Peter does.