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malta human rights library
the movies

Holocaust

A Love to Hide (TV movie - 2005)

A young Jewish girl looking to escape the clutches of the Third Reich after seeing her parents and sister brutally slain while attempting to make their way to England is sheltered by an old friend whose status as a member of the "third" sex soon leads the Gestapo pounding on his door as well. Betrayed by a smuggler who sat idly by as her family was casually slaughtered by the SS, terrified Sara flees into the comforting care of childhood summer-vacation chum Jean and his faithful lover Philippe. Though safe for the moment thanks to Jean's quick-thinking plan to pass her off as a Gallic employee of his family's laundry business, Sara watches in horror as her homosexual protector is forced into a Nazi labor camp as a tragic result of a bad decision made by Jean's troublesome brother Jacques.

Director: Christian Faure



Amen. (2002) 


During WWII SS officer Kurt Gerstein tries to inform Pope Pius XII about Jews being sent to concentration camps. Young Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana gives him a hand.

Director: Costa - Gravas




Immagine
Angry Harvest - Bittere Ernte (1985)

In the winter of 1942-43, a Jewish family leaps from a train going through Silesia. They are separated in the woods, and Leon, a local peasant who's now a farmer of some wealth, discovers the woman, Rosa, and hides her in his cellar. Leon's a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, tormented by his sexual drive. He doesn't tell Rosa he's seen signs her husband is alive, and he begs her to love him. Rosa offers herself to Leon if he'll help a local Jew in hiding who needs money. Leon pays, and love between Rosa and him does develop, but then Leon's peasant subservience and his limited empathy lead to tragedy. At the war's end, a ray of sunshine comes from an unexpected place.

Director: Agnieszka Holland



Anne Frank: the Whole Story (2001 - Miniseries)

When the war began, she was only a little girl. When it ended, she was the voice of a generation. A compassionate and sensitive televisual portrait of the Holocaust's greatest diarist.

Director: Robert Dornhelm





Bent (1997)

Max is gay and as such is sent to Dachau concentration camp under the Nazi regime. He tries to deny he is gay and gets a yellow label (the one for Jews) instead of pink (the one for gays). In camp he falls in love with his fellow prisoner Horst, who wears his pink label with pride.

Director: Sean Mathias





Conspiracy (2001)

A dramatic recreation of the Wannsee Conference where the Nazi Final Solution phase of the Holocaust was devised.

Director: Frank Pierson




David (1979)

A West German film tells the story of a rabbi's son in Germany during the Holocaust, who tries to raise money to escape to Mandate Palestine.

Director: Peter Lilienthal





Defiance (2008)

Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village in order to protect themselves and about 1,000 Jewish non-combatants.

Director: Edward Zwick






Die Wannseekonferenz (TV movie - 1984)

A precise, real-time (exactly 85 minutes - the length of the actual event) reenactment of the infamous Wannsee Conference, a meeting called in January, 1942 to map out the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Director: Edward Zwick




Divided We Fall - Musíme si pomáhatIn (2000)

Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia, a childless couple agree to hide a Jewish friend at great personal risk of discovery and execution.

Director: Jan Hrebejk


Immagine




Edges of the Lord (2001)

A 12-year-old Jewish boy hides with a family of Catholic peasant farmers to escape the Nazis.

Director: Yurek Bogayevicz




Escape from Sobibor (TV movie - 1987)

The historical recreation of the escape from the Nazi Death Camp Sobibor, where approximately one-quarter million Jews were executed. Of approximately 600 prisoners who attempted escaped in October 1943, around 300 succeeded. However, nearly all were ultimately recaptured; only about 60 people survived Sobibor.

Director: Jack Gold



Europa Europa (1990)

A boy in Nazi Germany, trying to conceal that he is Jewish, joins the Hitler Youth.

Director: Agnieszka Holland 





Fateless (2005)

14-year-old György's life is torn apart in World War II Hungary as he is sent to a concentration camp where he is forced to become a man, and learns to find happiness in the midst of hatred, and what it really means to be Jewish.

Director: Lajos Koltai






Gebürtig (2002)

A holocaust survivor now living as a respected writer in Manhattan is the only person who can identify a suspected Nazi back in his native Austria. When a beautiful reporter eager for a scoop tries to lure him back, Geburtig must decide whether to confront his past.

Directors: Robert Schindel, Lukas Stepanik 




Holocaust (TV miniseries - 1978)

The saga of a Jewish family's struggle to survive the horror of Nazi Germany's systematic marginalization and extermination of their community.

Director: Marvin J. Chomsky





Holocaust Survivors - Remembrance of Love ( TV movie - 1978)

Joe Rabin is a Holocaust survivor. After the war he went to America, married someone and had a family. Today, he is on his way to Israel for a reunion of Holocaust survivors. It seems that he has another reason for going. It seems like during the war, he had a girlfriend and they were separated and she was pregnant. He has never found out what happened to her, or their baby, he hopes to find out now.

Director: Jack Smight 



In Darkness (2011) 

A dramatization of one man's rescue of Jewish refugees in the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Lvov.

Director: Agnieszka Holland 






Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000) 

The story of the child refugees who were transported to Britain to escape the Nazi Holocaust.

Director: Mark Jonathan Harris


Jacob the Liar (1975)

A Jewish ghetto in the east of Europe, 1944. By coincidence, Jakob Heym eavesdrops on a German radio broadcast announcing the Soviet Army is making slow by steady progress towards central Europe. In order to keep his companion in misfortune, Mischa, from risking his life for a few potatoes, he tells him what he heard and announces that he is in possession of a radio - in the ghetto a crime punishable by death. It doesn't take long for word of Jakob's secret to spread - suddenly, there is new hope and something to live for - and so Jakob finds himself in the uncomforting position of having to come up with more and more stories.

Director: Frank Beyer 




Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)

In 1948, an American court in occupied Germany tries four Nazi judges for war crimes.

Director: Stanley Kramer







Kapò (1960) 

A young Jewish girl leads an escape attempt from a concentration camp.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo


Landscape After Battle (1970)

Film opens with the mad rush of haphazard freedom as the concentration camps are liberated. Men are trying to grab food, change clothes, bury their tormentors they find alive. Then they are herded into other camps as the Allies try to devise policy to control the situation. A young poet who cannot quite find himself in this new situation, meets a headstrong Jewish young girl who wants him to run off with her, to the West. He cannot cope with her growing demands for affection, while still harboring the hatred for the Germans and disdain for his fellow men who quickly revert to petty enmities.

Director: Andrzej Wajda 



Life is Beautiful - La vita è bella (1997)

A Jewish man has a wonderful romance with the help of his humour, but must use that same quality to protect his son in a Nazi death camp.

Director: Roberto Benigni



Max and Helen (TV movie - 1990)

Based on the fact-based novel by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal based on his 1962 prosecution of the head of a Polish factory whom he learns was a murderous labor camp commandant. To be able to take him to justice, he must find witnesses who can help him. This leads him to Max Rosenberg, a still tormented individual who lost his wife, Helen, in the camps. Initially Max refuses to cooperate, but gradually his story unfolds beginning before the Holocaust.

Director: Philip Saville



Muderers Among Us (1946)

After returning from a concentration camp, Susanne finds an ex-soldier living in her apartment. Together the two try to move past their experiences during WWII.

Director: Wolfgang Staudte






Music Box (1989)

A lawyer defends her father accused of war crimes, but there is more to the case than she suspects.

Director: Costa - Gavras


Nackt unter Wölfen (1963)

As rumors reach them that the Allied armies are advancing on their concentration camp at Buchenwald, Polish prisoners renew their feeble hope for survival and freedom. When a group of prisoners is transferred from Auschwitz, a four-year-old child is smuggled into the camp in a valise. Born at Auschwitz, he is Jewish and will be killed if discovered. A group of prisoners decide to protect the child from the searching Germans, and although the kapos cannot smuggle the boy out of Buchenwald, they manage to hide him--moving from one place to another within the camp as the Nazis comb it. Threats and torture by SS men fail to turn up the boy who becomes a symbol of the struggle between captives and captors.

Director: Frank Beyer


Playing for Time (1980)

Female prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp (Auschwitz) are spared from death in return for performing music for their captors.

Directors: Daniel Mann, Joseph Sargent



Rosenstrasse (2003)

After the death of her father, Hannah becomes concerned with the strange behavior of her mother. As her mother's troubled childhood is revealed, Hannah realizes how little she ever knew.

Director: Margarethe von Trotta






Schindler's List (1993)

In Poland during World War II, Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.

Director: Steven Spielberg


Sophie's Choice (1982)

Sophie is the survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who has found a reason to live in Nathan, a sparkling if unsteady American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust. They befriend Stingo, the movie's narrator, a young American writer new to New York City. But the happiness of Sophie and Nathan is endangered by her ghosts and his obsessions.

Director: Alan J. Pakula


Sophie Scholl - The Final Days (2005)

A dramatization of the final days of Sophie Scholl, one of the most famous members of the German World War II anti-Nazi resistance movement, The White Rose.

Director: Marc Rothemund






The Aryan Couple (2004)

A WWII Drama about a German/Jewish industrialist who, in order to ensure his family's safe passage out of Germany, is forced to hand over his business to the Nazis.

Director: John Daly




The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

Set during World War II, a story seen through the innocent eyes of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commandant at a concentration camp, whose forbidden friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence has startling and unexpected consequences.

Director: Mark Herman

The Counterfeiters (2007)

Master counterfeiter Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, a Jew without morals, is arrested and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he weasels through by offering his 'artistic' services. After transfer to Sachsenhausen he's given an official alternative: taking 'artistic' charge of a cons teams assigned to produce perfect forgeries of allied banknotes for the Third Reich. Survivor Sally accepts, but conscience matters among the team prove no less dangerous then a sadistic jailer, which only the CO may keep in check.

Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky

The Devil's Arithmetic (1999)

This is another telling of the holocaust, but this time from the perspective of a modern teenage girl who only grudgingly accepts the Jewish traditions, but when she is asked to "open the front door" as part of the Seder feast finds herself, not unlike Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, to have entered the 1940's and has stepped into the life of a prisoner in one of the German death camps where she experiences all of its horrors firsthand.

Director: Donna Deitch



The Grey Zone (2001) 

A Nazi doctor, along with the Sonderkomando, Jews who are forced to work in the crematoria of Auschwitz against their fellow Jews, find themselves in a moral grey zone.

Director: Tim Blake Nelson




The Hiding Place (1975)

Corrie and Betsie ten Boom are middle-aged sisters working in their father's watchmaker shop in pre-WWII Holland. Their uneventful lives are disrupted with the coming of the Nazis. Suspected of hiding Jews & caught breaking rationing rules, they are sent to a concentration camp, where their Christian faith keeps them from despair and bitterness. Betsie eventually dies, but Corrie survives, and after the war, must learn to love and forgive her former captors.

Director: James F. Collier


The Island on Bird Street (1997) 

Alex is an 11-year old boy who, during WWII, hides in the Jewish ghetto from Nazis after all the relatives have been sent to the concentration camp. The movie portrays the ghetto through his eyes.

Director: Soren Kragh-Jacobsen 




The Ninth Day (2004)

A drama loosely based on Jean Bernard's Nazi-era prison diary.

Director: Volker Schlondorff 




The Pawnbroker (1964)

A Jewish pawnbroker, victim of Nazi persecution, loses all faith in his fellow man until he realizes too late the tragedy of his actions.

Director: Sidney Lumet





The Pianist (2002)

A Polish Jewish musician struggles to survive the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto of World War II.

Director: Roman Polanski


The Ritchie Boys (2004)

During WWII, the U.S. formed an elite intelligence unit -- mostly German Jewish academics -- at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Tasked with devising ways to break the morale of the SS, these men are often credited with bringing an early end to the war. Some of these heroes, who are now in the eighties, are reunited in this documentary.

Director: Christian Bauer


The Shop on Main Street (1965)

Slovakia during WW2. Tono lives a poor life, but the authorities offer him to take over the Jewish widow Lautman's little shop for sewing material. She is old and confused and thinks that he is only looking for employment and hires him. The odd couple begin to like each other. But some time later the authorities decide that the Jews must leave the city. What should he do with the old lady?

Directors: Jan Kadar, Elmar Klos



50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus (2013)

In the spring of 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus embarked on a risky and unlikely mission. Traveling into the heart of Nazi Germany, they rescued 50 Jewish children from Vienna and brought them to the United States.

Director: Steven Pressman



The Truce (1997)

Based on Primo Levi's autobiographical "The Reawakening".

Director: Francesco Rosi


The Wall (TV movie - 1982) 

A dramatic re-enactment of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish uprising in April 1943 were 650 armed members of the Jewish Fighting Organization of Poland held off a 3,000 strong Nazi force in which only a handful of Jews survived. Tom Conti plays Dolek Berson, a Jewish smuggler who joins the resistance movement and is aided on the Aryan side of the wall by a former teacher named Regina Kowalski played by Rachel Roberts in her final role.

Director: Robert Markowitz



Train of Life (1998)

In 1941, the inhabitants of a small Jewish village in Central Europe organize a fake deportation train so that they can escape the Nazis and flee to Palestine.

Director: Redu Mihaileanu






Uprising (TV movie - 2001)

Jews rise up in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis in 1943.

Director: John Avnet

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Photos used under Creative Commons from L. Richard Martin, Jr., L. Richard Martin, Jr.