Boxer's Holocaust ordeal, aftermath told in `The Survivor'
LOS ANGELES >> In “The Survivor,” filmmaker Barry Levinson reaches back 80 years to tell the grueling story of a boxer who put the lives of fellow concentration camp prisoners at risk to save his own.
The moral and psychological repercussions for Harry Haft are why Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of “Rain Man,” was drawn to the project based on a book about Haft's Holocaust ordeal written by his son, Alan Scott Haft.
“This is not about the life of somebody in a camp. It's the fragments of what happened in the camp, and what happened there to survive,” Levinson said. “Now he's trying to get on with life and struggling with it.”
Haft must face the questions of “how do you have a life, how do you have a full life?” he said.
HBO's “The Survivor,” starring Ben Foster, debuts 8 p.m. EDT Wednesday to mark Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. It honors the 6 million Jews who died as part of Nazi Germany's mass murder of European Jews.
The film, written by Justine Juel Gillmer (“The 100”), dramatizes Haft's experience in Auschwitz, a central part of the Nazi death camp system. An estimated 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland and at least 1.1 million died, according to its museum and memorial website.
A teenager when arrested, Haft is among those kept alive as slave labor, held under horrific conditions and given tasks, including the disposal of bodies. Always ready with his fists, Haft is given the chance to take part in boxing matches, becoming an amusement and source of betting income for German officers.
As depicted in the film, the champion goes on to fight again; the loser's fate is likely death. Haft is driven to prevail in the ring by love — he longs to be reunited with Leah, his childhood sweetheart. Convinced she will somehow survive imprisonment and the war, he let's nothing stand in his way to do the same.