Why Pacino’s new TV series should not have sensationalised the Holocaust
Anew TV drama starring Al Pacino has found itself in trouble for its depiction of the Holocaust. Hunters, the latest blockbuster from Amazon, revolves around a gang of vigilantes in Seventies New York who discover a network of former Nazis living in America.
Heavily influenced by the films of Tarantino, the violence in the 10-part series is deliberately stylised and over the top, and I’m sure it has attracted a slew of young fans.
But, in their effort to shock, the creative team has featured scenes of sadistic abuse in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which simply did not happen. In particular, the series has been condemned for a scene in the first episode that portrays a game of human chess, in which Jewish prisoners are used as pieces and ordered to kill their opponents’ pawns, bishops and knights with switchblade knives.
This gruesome passage has been branded “immoral” by critics and a gift to Holocaust deniers, who will use it to reinforce their twisted assertion that the Nazi horrors have been exaggerated or wholly invented.
Of course, historical fiction is an important branch of the arts. Where would Shakespeare or Hilary Mantel be without it?
Deployed judiciously, it has the power to engage audiences and provoke thought in a way that nonfiction cannot. But, when it comes to the Holocaust, the facts of which are continually targeted by antiSemites, an extra degree of caution is required.
In essence, the work needs to retain the spirit of authenticity. So, for example, the harrowing but compelling 2015 film Son of Saul told the story of a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (the Jewish prisoners forced to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims) looking for a rabbi to bury his son.
As far as anyone’s aware, that is a fictional story. But the way in which the experiences of the hero were portrayed was based on a lot of historical research and, in some sense, the film’s story was true to that history. Similarly, Primo Levi’s only novel
If Not Now, When?, about a group of Jewish partisans, was based in part on Levi’s experiences after liberation. But, primarily, his experience of the Holocaust was a very different one, and he used the testimonies of people who were partisans to write the book.
There are other great examples of Holocaust fiction: When Hitler Stole
Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, the author of the children’s book The Tiger Who
Came to Tea, is a lightly fictionalised account of how Kerr’s own family fled the Nazis in the Thirties. And, more recently, Sandi Toksvig wrote a brilliant novel, Hitler’s Canary, about the rescue of Jews in Denmark, which is part of her family history.
Waiting for Anya by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, about a boy who risks his life to take Jewish refugees to safety during the Second World War, has been gripping young readers since 1990.
But when a work of art strays too far from historical truth, as Hunters does with its human chess game, it threatens to do more harm than good, spreading misconceptions, especially among the young, that are quite hard to shake, and creating the potential for deniers to say: “Look, this is all invented.”
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne, a book that was made into a film starring Asa Butterfield and, today, is more widely read in schools than The Diary of Anne Frank, is another example, giving false impressions of Auschwitz and of the ignorance (or rather, lack of ignorance) about the Holocaust among ordinary Germans.
And there is one further problem with Hunters’ chess game. The makers have said that the scene was meant to illustrate the sadism and violence of the Nazis and, of course, there were perpetrators of the Holocaust who were sadists. But they were very much in the minority, and if we say that the Nazis were all psychopaths then it allows us to avoid a far more troubling fact: that most of these people did not fall into that category.
A better work of art would ask its audience this question: what was it that made, on the face of it, perfectly ordinary human beings – loving parents and previously law-abiding citizens – commit such horrendous crimes?
‘If we claim all Nazis were psychopaths, it allows us to avoid a troubling fact: most were not in this category’