Some completely missed the mark
Steven Spielberg's historical drama about German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the camps by employing them in his factories, is the highest-profile Holocaust movie ever made. The film, starring Liam Neeson as Schindler, won universal acclaim and numerous awards.
'The Zookeeper's Wife,' directed by New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro, tells the true story of how Jan and Antonina Żabiński rescued hundreds of displaced and persecuted Polish Jews from the Germans by hiding them in their Warsaw zoo during the Second World War. Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh star as the heroic couple.
Based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1935, 'Enemies, A Love Story' follows a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States believing his first wife is dead. In New York, he marries a non-Jewish woman but soon afterwards embarks on an affair with another Holocaust survivor. Plagued with constant paranoia and perpetual desperation, his life becomes even more complicated when his first wife from Poland turns up very much alive. Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, and Margaret Sophie Stein portray said quartet.
Translating into English as "Goodbye, Children," Louis Malle's critically acclaimed film about a French priest and headmaster who attempts to shelter Jewish children during the Holocaust is based on a real-life incident. During the Second World, a young Malle witnessed a Gestapo raid in which three Jewish students and a Jewish teacher were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz.
'The Reader' stars Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz who, unbeknown to her young lover, Michael, hides a dark past as a Nazi concentration camp guard. After disappearing, she turns up many years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial, and Michael is there in court witnessing proceedings as a law student.
This biographical film dramatizes the late 1990s Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case in which Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt was sued by English author and Holocaust denier David Irving for libel. The film, which received positive reviews, stars Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, and Timothy Spall.
Released just 16 years after the end of the war, 'Judgment at Nuremberg' is loosely based on a real tribunal, the Judges' Trial of 1947, also known as the Justice Case. The defendants were 16 German jurists and lawyers: nine were officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice, while the others were members of the People's and Special Courts. Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, and Maximilian Schell are among those heading the cast.
Quentin Tarantino's alternate history war drama revolves around a group of Jewish American soldiers who plan to assassinate top-ranking Nazi officials. The subplot centers on a Jewish woman with the same thing in mind after her family is murdered by the SS.
Sources: (Los Angeles Times) (France24) (Smithsonian Magazine) (Holocaust Encyclopedia) (Time) (The Guardian)
See also: Films that accurately and realistically portray war
This Sidney Lumet-directed tour-de-force was the first American film to depict the horrors of the Holocaust. In it, Rod Steiger plays Jewish pawnbroker Sol Nazerman, who survived the camps but lost his family. Now living in New York, he is haunted by his experiences, has lost his faith, and rarely shows any emotion.
Meryl Streep delivers a remarkable performance as Zofia "Sophie" Zawistowski, a Polish immigrant and concentration camp survivor living in a shared Brooklyn boarding house with her lover, Nathan, and a young novelist called Stingo. Through time, Sophie's "choice" is revealed as a dark and horrifying episode from her past.
Jewish Italians Guido and Dora Orefice have their idyllic existence shattered when the couple, together with their son, are sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Separated from Dora, Guido comforts his son with games and humor to distract him from the horrors of their situation. Roberto Benigni directs and stars in this poignant drama, which is as much about paternal love and human dignity as it is the terrifying ordeal experienced by those dispatched to face certain death.
The story of Jewish diarist Anne Frank has been told in numerous plays, movies, and television series. Most critics agree, however, that this 1959 production is the best film adaptation of Anne Frank's diary. It stars Millie Perkins as the young writer.
Roman Polanski's film adaptation of the 1946 autobiographical book 'The Pianist,' a Holocaust memoir by the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, received widespread critical acclaim. Adrien Brody stars as Szpilman, who ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto along with his family.
The striped pajamas refer to the clothing worn by Shmuel, an eight-year-old Jewish prisoner who's befriended by Hugo, the young son of the camp's Nazi commander. The pair strike up conversation across the fence, an innocent exchange of words that ultimately leads to tragedy. Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon portray the two lads in question.
This Austrian-German drama fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a plan hatched by the Nazis to bomb Britain with forged bank notes thereby destabilizing the economy. In the film, the Germans coerce Jewish counterfeiter Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), who is interned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, into assisting in the scam. The character is based on Holocaust survivor Salomon Smolianoff.
Directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, 'Europa Europa' is based on the true story of a young German Jew, Solomon Perel (Marco Hofschneider), who survived the Holocaust by falling in with the Nazis. In order to conceal the fact that he is a Jew, Perel joins the Hitler Youth and later falls for Leni (Julie Delpy), a beautiful but anti-Semitic woman who wants his child.
Translating into English as "The Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference," this German film recreates the infamous meeting chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann that addressed the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Dietrich Mattausch and Gerd Böckmann head the cast. It was remade in 2001 as 'Conspiracy,' which stars Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci in corresponding roles.
Based on the novel of the same name by Leon Uris, 'Exodus' is set after the Second World War and focuses on the founding of Israel, in 1948. Paul Newman plays Ari Ben Canaan, whose smuggling of 600 Jews out of Cyprus onboard a cargo ship, later rechristened Exodus, effectively begins the migration by thousands of Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—to their new homeland. In a wider context, the films also depicts the bloody Arab–Israeli conflict.
Directed by Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras and based on fact, 'Amen.' examines the controversial political and diplomatic relationship between the Vatican and Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The plot centers on SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), who tries to inform Pope Pius XII about Jews being sent to extermination camps. A young Jesuit priest agrees to help Gerstein raise public awareness about what is happening to the Jews in Europe.
Similarly hailed as one of the greatest Holocaust films of all time, 'Ida' is a Polish production starring Agata Trzebuchowska as the titular character, a Polish orphan raised by nuns who learns that she is, in fact, a Jew. Ida later uncovers a family secret dating back to the German occupation of her homeland and embarks of a painful journey to uncover the truth. Paweł Pawlikowski directed this critically acclaimed picture.
Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes' harrowing historical drama follows a day in the life of Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a member of the Sonderkommando—a unit of Jews forced to aid in the killing of other Jews—at Auschwitz.
Based on the 1979 play of the same name by American dramatist Martin Sherman, 'Bent' stars Clive Owen as Max, a gay man who because of his sexuality ends up in Dachau. Once in the camp, he falls in love with Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), who shows him the dignity that lies in acknowledging one's beliefs.
Christopher Plummer turns in a stellar performance as an elderly Holocaust survivor who despite the onset of dementia sets out to find the person he believes to be responsible for the death of his family at Auschwitz. Bruno Ganz and Martin Landau costar.
This Mar Targarona-directed movie is based on the life of Francisco Boix, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and photographer who was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Boix worked in the photography department of the camp administration, taking ID photos of inmates and documenting events in the camp. He hid and preserved over 2,000 negatives that were later printed up and used at the Nuremberg trials as photographic evidence of war crimes committed at the camp. Spanish actor Mario Casas portrays Boix.
During the Second World War, Marcel Marceau, who later became a celebrated mime artist, worked with a group of Jewish boy scouts and the French Resistance to save the lives of numerous Jewish orphans. Swearing to eliminate the French Resistance is Klaus Barbie, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon." Jesse Eisenberg, Clémence Poésy, and Matthias Schweighöfer head the cast in this biographical drama directed by Venezuelan filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz.
Known in English as 'The Round Up,' this gripping French production depicts the shameful Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv), the mass arrest of Jews by French police who were accomplices of Nazi Germans in Paris in July 1942. The film stars Mélanie Laurent and Jean Reno.
Based on the true story of the Bielski partisans, a group led by Polish Jewish brothers who saved and recruited Jews in Belarus during the Second World War, 'Defiance' stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, and George MacKay as the four brave siblings.
A young girl (Sophie Nélisse) lives out the Holocaust by stealing books and reading them to the Jewish refugee being sheltered by her adoptive parents, played by Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson.
'Operation Finale' follows the efforts of Israeli Mossad officers to capture former SS officer Adolf Eichmann in 1960. Eichmann was seized in Argentina in a daring kidnap operation and brought back to Israel to face numerous war crime charges. He was subsequently found guilty in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem, and was executed in 1962. Ben Kingsley portrays Eichmann.
This wartime tragicomedy set in 1944 in a ghetto in German-occupied Poland was written by Holocaust survivor Jurek Becker. It tells the story of Jakob Heym (Robin Williams), who attempts to raise the morale inside the ghetto by sharing encouraging rumors that he claims he has heard on a radio, for example that the Russians are about to liberate Warsaw. Heym doesn't own a radio (an offense punishable by immediate execution), and his tall tales are at best fantastical predictions of the future. But his stories serve as motivation to stay alive.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the mass, industrialized murder of European Jewry during the Second World War. This systematic, state-sponsored persecution and slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis began in 1933 and ended in 1945 with Germany's defeat. By the early 1960s, cinema was beginning to depict the horrors of this terrible period in history. Today, the Holocaust movie has become a genre in its own right.
Click through and be reminded of the Holocaust on film.
Powerful films that capture the impact of the Holocaust
Films that deal with the horrors of WWII
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The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the mass, industrialized murder of European Jewry during the Second World War. This systematic, state-sponsored persecution and slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis began in 1933 and ended in 1945 with Germany's defeat. By the early 1960s, cinema was beginning to depict the horrors of this terrible period in history. Today, the Holocaust movie has become a genre in its own right.
Click through and be reminded of the Holocaust on film.