Holocaust

It was hard to believe that Monday morning’s introduction to the Italian writer Primo Levi on Radio 4 lasted for only 15 minutes. It was so rich, multi-layered, filled with meaning. Presented by Janet Suzman, it was intended as a fanfare for the 11-part adaptation of Levi’s most original book, The Periodic Table, in which he explores the chemical elements by equating them to episodes in his own story. Levi, an Italian chemist, was captured by the Nazis as a resistance fighter and a Jew, and at first detained and later sent to Auschwitz. His science training and his knowledge of German saved him from the gas chambers; and a

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

This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there are often times they probably wished they were. For two of them, Niklas and Horst, the journey is about confronting their fathers, who were high-ranking Nazi officials responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, while for the third, the eminent British human-rights lawyer Philippe Sands, it means visiting the place where his grandfather’s family was exterminated. This place, Galicia, which straddles the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine, is the exact place my own grandmother’s family were murdered. Her father lost every one of his seven siblings. She lost

So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has gone. Your wife, your kids, your nephews and nieces, your friends, your customers: they’ve all been kidnapped and dragged off to a place so barbarically horrible that really they’d be better off dead. Your daughter, for example. If she’s nine or over then she’s considered fair game. She’ll be sold as a slave in the market to the highest bidder — as ever, there’s a premium for blonde hair or blue eyes— after which her new owner can use her as she wishes. The very least she can expect is

Woman in Gold feels rather like a Jewish version of Philomena as this too is about an older woman seeking justice for what has been stolen from her in the past but, unlike the Jewish version of almost everything, this is not in any way superior, and may even be a dud. It is based on a true story, which is an excellent and fascinating story, but it’s the storytelling that counts, and the storytelling here is not only familiar and pedestrian, but so emotionally manipulative that it doesn’t come with one sentimental ending, but several in quick succession. ‘Oh good, it’s over,’ you will think to yourself, as you

Big event. A new play from Sir Tom. And he tackles one of philosophy’s oldest and crunchiest issues, which varsity thinkers call ‘the hard problem’. How is it that a wrinkled three-pound blancmange sitting at the top of the spinal cord can generate abstract thoughts of almost limitless complexity? In real life Sir Tom is said to have such a flair for philosophical chitchat that he can fire off searching observations about Descartes, mind-body dualism, the nature of immateriality, being and non-being, the ‘cogito’ and so on, until those around him have slithered into a coma. Which is not rude of them. It’s perfectly acceptable to pass out during an

At the synagogue where I happened to be singing last Saturday, the rabbi wrapped up her regular notices with a timely exhortation to her congregants to try to watch the André Singer documentary Night Will Fall. In 1945, as the Allied forces fought their way across Europe, in the process uncovering the hideous network of Nazi death and slave-labour camps, film producer Sidney Bernstein was despatched by the Ministry of Information to lead a few dozen army cameramen tasked with documenting the astonishing extent of the German atrocities. The project was intended to serve not merely as a current affairs update for the edification (and/or mortification) of the British public,