Truth, Anguish and Jump-Cuts

Documentaries or documentariezzzzzz?

A speech-making TV executive in another city tells me that he begins his public talks by asking how many in the audience favor having more documentaries on the air. Nearly every hand shoots up.

Then he asks how many can name the last documentary they’ve watched. No hands.

Rim shot.

This unscientific polling persuades him that, to most Americans, documentaries make better lip service than viewing. You’re supposed to watch them because some jerk somewhere said they’re good for you. But borrrrrring, an exception being the Discovery Channel’s recent “Walking With Dinosaurs,� three hours of natural history whose average audience of 10.7 million obviously never met a flying reptile it didn’t like.

To many viewers, though, TV documentaries are the dinosaurs, fossils from TV’s Triassic and Turassic periods that merit extinction, despite good work being done in that field today, most notably on PBS, HBO and even juiced, jump-cutting MTV (more about that later).

The subject came to mind recently as I perused a list of documentaries related to the Nazi-imposed Holocaust, whose death camps murdered an estimated 12 million during World War II, about half of them Jews.

This is hardly virgin territory. The Jewish Passover and Tuesday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day triggered the recent group of such documentaries on KCET-TV, including “Burning Questions,� which found a Polish Catholic survivor of Bergen-Belsen accompanying his filmmaker daughter back to his homeland.

Another was “In Our Own Hands: The Hidden Story of the Jewish Brigade in World War II,� which reviewed the complex underpinnings of the volunteer force of Palestine Jews that fought for the British against Germany. Recalled one of these veterans about informing cadaverous Jews they were being liberated from a death camp by a Jewish brigade: “They touched us like we were the Messiah.�

A moving memory.

Yet to air, though, is a much more haunting film on KCET, its “never forget� wail joining other Holocaust warnings about humanity’s capacity for evil. In Monday’s “Witness: Voices From the Holocaust,� European Jews and others who either survived or witnessed Nazi death camps tell their stories to the camera for the first time, some calmly, some emotionally, some haltingly as if on some level even they can’t quite comprehend the enormity of what they are describing.

Helen K. (last names are omitted) recalls her younger brother dying in her arms from lack of oxygen in a windowless cattle car en route to the Majdanek death camp, a nightmarish journey that also killed two of her aunts.

She recalls, after being transferred to Auschwitz, three of her female friends and camp mates who worked in a munitions plant being publicly hanged for smuggling out gunpowder that she and others used to blow up a crematorium. Their bodies weren’t cut down for days.

She also recalls children lined up to be gassed.

“Sometimes,� she says, “I cannot believe what my eyes have seen.�

Although presented on TV for the first time, these remarkable accounts were taped starting in 1979 for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. The subjects ranged in age from 45 to 72 when taped. A few have since died, most are now quite elderly, attaching even more importance to their stories being recorded when their memories were as vivid as the numbers on their arms.

Some recall the anti-Semitism of their Polish homeland in the 1930s and rejecting warnings by friends to escape before bad things happened. “We thought, ‘That’s impossible. My father was born here. My grandfather was born here.’ �

There was also constant unease over not knowing when arrests would come, with one man recalling how he developed an educated ear for the sounds of certain kinds of boots on the street. “We used to live in terror of these boots.�

Another has a story of his family being yanked from bed in the middle of the night. “And they burst through the door . . . bayonets . . . helmets.�

Calling the Holocaust “the greatest tragedy of my life,� a remorseful Czech priest adds: “There I was, Jewish people were being deported all around me, and I did nothing.�

The words on this page hardly do justice to the speakers on the screen. That includes the man who recalls that when he and his family were brought to a death camp by train, he thought he was doing the right thing by instructing his little brother to go with their parents. “Little did I know that I send him to the crematorium. I kill him.� He now wonders “what they were all thinking when they went to the crematorium. I can’t get it out of my head. It hurts me and bothers me. I don’t know what to do.�

These powerful living histories evoke many emotions. As a Jew just old enough to recall flickering snippets of the war’s end, though, I sometimes wonder just where most Holocaust documentaries register on the Richter scale, if at all, in the minds of those to whom this history is too distant to be anything but an abstraction.

How would a typical 17-year-old respond to “Witness: Voices From the Holocaust,� which however arresting to me and my generation, is delivered in a conventional, unadorned talking-heads manner? Would kids get it, too?

And if they wouldn’t get it, shouldn’t such subjects be conveyed to them in their language instead of the foreign tongue of other generations?

Could the flashy sounds and eye candy of MTV be applied to such a somber subject without trivializing it, for example? It’s a question whose answer I know.

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As do others who watched MTV on Nov. 17, when an hour it devoted to the menace of “hate� included a Holocaust documentary it produced in conjunction with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The documentary was about German-born Holocaust survivor Bert Strauss, who now travels the U.S. on behalf of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, addressing high school students about this decade of murderous history not so long ago.

Although less than a half-hour, the unnarrated documentary was stunningly effective. That was because, unlike programs with related themes, it spoke eloquently in the music-video idiom of its young audience as part of MTV’s superb “BIOrhythm� series of documentaries, which began in 1998, its subjects nearly always coming from music or other forms of entertainment.

Do unto the Holocaust as MTV would do unto Madonna, Sid Vicious, Queen Latifah, Jim Carrey, Lenny Kravitz or Wednesday’s subject, rapper Eminem?

Exactly.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center was never hipper, the Holocaust never more sensitively or perceptively remembered than in this documentary that purposely assaulted viewers the way Strauss’ teenage mind must have been assaulted by the Hitlerist policies that killed his father, mother and sister and scarred him forever.

In “BIOrhythm� fashion, there were visual messages and fast cuts of old photos that juxtaposed Strauss’ own coming of age with Hitler’s rise to power. There were stylized grainy pictures of Strauss speaking to the camera. There were splashy graphics--the word “BURNED� zooming at you like a 3-D meteor, for example--and audio that included Smashing Pumpkins, Flaming Lips, the Cranberries and Blur.

“Come on, come on, get through it,� go the Blur lyrics from “Tender� that accompanied footage of Jews being transported to the Riga ghetto, a printed message informing viewers that Strauss’ mother died there of malnutrition, as a photo of her face dissolved into his.

Later, the surviving family members were taken to the Stutthof death camp. The documentary winds down on a note of excruciating sadness, with Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings� accompanying slow-motion footage of a skeletal corpse being dragged along the ground, its feet making shallow grooves in the dirt, followed by other bodies being flung into a ditch.

Then, a final message from Strauss--�Times change, but people don’t change�--as today’s Sieg Heil-ing skinheads were shown doing their thing.

*

Jeff Olde is executive producer, Suzanne Gladstone supervising producer and John Miller executive in charge of production for the Peabody-winning “BIOrhythm� series, which last year also slipped in an excellent half-hour on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. What’s amazing about this series, whether the subject is King or rapper Master P, is how much it is able to say, so powerfully, with such brevity.

Unfortunately, there are no plans for future “BIOrhythm� shows along the lines of Bert Strauss and King and the grim and epic histories they represent.

If only MTV would consider widening this format into a genuine teaching tool that would revolutionize documentaries by speaking intelligently to the teen crowd on a pantheon of topics, from history’s other genocides to Hiroshima, Watergate and even international trade and the global economy.

“BIOrhythm� would make these not only accessible while giving them their serious due. Somehow, they would also sing.