Filming the Final Solution

In July 1986, nine months before he died, I met the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi at his home in Turin. He was in shirtsleeves for the interview and the concentration camp tattoo 174517 was visible on his left forearm. (‘A typical German talent for classification,’ he tartly observed.) If This is a Man, Levi’s chronicle of survival, offers a warning to those who deliver facile judgments of condemnation: only those who have survived the Nazi camps have the right to forgive or condemn.

Attempts to recreate the Final Solution on screen were mostly a ‘macabre indecency’, said Levi. The 1978 Hollywood television soap opera Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep, helped to break 33 years of near-silence in Germany surrounding Hitler’s war against the Jews, but Levi feared the dramatisation would cheapen the enormity of Auschwitz. Once that happens, the process of forgetting has already begun. The 1970s saw a rash of other films that falsified the nature of Nazi violence.