The Holocaust in the arts and popular culture

[2] In 1994, Israeli choreographer Rami Be'er tried to illustrate the feeling of being trapped in Aide Memoire (Hebrew title: Zichron Dvarim).

[5][6] The Holocaust has been the subject of many films, such as Night and Fog (1955), The Pawnbroker (1964), The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), Voyage of the Damned (1976), Sophie's Choice (1982), Shoah (1985), Korczak (1990), Schindler's List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997), The Pianist (2002) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008).

[8] Arguably, the Holocaust film most highly acclaimed by critics and historians alike is Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps.

These nations hosted concentration camps or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the gas chambers and, consequently, the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews have haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lent themselves more easily to exploring the subject.[which?

][citation needed] Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska's semi-documentary The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, Poland, 1947) and Alfréd Radok's The Long Journey (Daleká cesta, Czechoslovakia, 1948).

Among the first films to reintroduce the topic was Jiří Weiss' Sweet Light in a Dark Room (Romeo, Juliet a tma, Czechoslovakia, 1959) and Andrzej Wajda's Samson (Poland, 1961).

[citation needed] In the 1960s, several Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust, either directly or indirectly, had critical successes internationally.

[citation needed] Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary.

Holocaust films from this time include Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay's The Revolt of Job (Jób lázadása, Hungary, 1983), Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau (Poland, 1988), and Ravensbrück survivor Juraj Herz's Night Caught Up With Me (Zastihla mě noc, Czechoslovakia, 1986), whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Steven Spielberg's similar sequence in Schindler's List.

[citation needed] A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to several more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's Korczak (Poland, 1990), Szabó's Sunshine (Germany/Austria/Canada/Hungary, 1999), and Jan Hřebejk's Divided We Fall (Musíme si pomáhat, Czech Republic, 2001).

Both Sunshine and Divided We Fall are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.

The Holocaust has been a common subject in American literature, with authors ranging from Saul Bellow to Sylvia Plath addressing it in their works.

Poet Charles Reznikoff, in his 1975 book Holocaust,[36] created a work intrinsically respectful of the pitfalls implied by Adorno's statement; in itself both a "defense of poetry" and an acknowledgment of the obscenity of poetical rhetoric relative to atrocity, this book utilizes none of the author's own words, coinages, flourishes, interpretations and judgments: it is a creation solely based on U.S. government records of the Nuremberg Trials and English-translated transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.

Aside from Adorno's opinion, a great deal of poetry has been written about the Holocaust by poets from various backgrounds—survivors (for example, Sonia Schrieber Weitz[38]) and countless others, including well-known poet, William Heyen (author of Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, The Swastika Poems, and The Shoah Train), himself a nephew of two men who fought for the Nazis in World War II.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Hana Volavkova is a collection of works of art and poetry by Jewish children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt.

[40] Elsewhere, Roy explored different aspects of Anne Frank's memoir of the Nazi atrocities, one of the more poignant remembrances of the excesses of World War II.

[52] The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar inspired a poem written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No.

The song is particularly notable for its allusions to The Holocaust, inspired by Geddy Lee's memories of his mother's stories[53] about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where she was held prisoner.

The song was written by the band's lead vocalist, Alissa White-Gluz, who based it on her Jewish grandparents experiences in the concentration camps.

[55] There are many plays related to the Holocaust, for example "The Substance of Fire" by Jon Robin Baitz, "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" by Bertolt Brecht, Jeff Cohen's "The Soap Myth", Dea Loher's "Olga's Room", "Cabaret", the stage adaptation of "The Diary of Anne Frank", "Broken Glass" by Arthur Miller, and "Bent" by Martin Sherman.