Frontline: "The Last Survivors" (Minnow Films, BBC, GBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 7) I watched a PBS Frontline documentary, originally aired on April 30, 2019, called “The Last Survivors.” In case you were wondering what event they were the last survivors of, it was the Nazi Holocaust. Given that this program was just five years old, it’s not surprising that the people profiled in it were very old when they were interviewed but were just children when they actually went through the death camps and somehow came out alive, though permanently scarred psychologically, at the other end. The show is important for a number of reasons, including the attempts by modern-day Right-wingers to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or that it really wasn’t as bad as all that, or that the victims actually died of disease rather than deliberate extermination (though that would still make the Nazis culpable in their deaths since it was they who set up the camps and allowed diseases like typhus to spread in the first place), or any number of cop-outs and excuses. For me the most interesting person profiled on the show was sculptor Maurice Blik, whose pieces are elongated human figures. He’s often been described as making self-portraits, but he said his sculptures are actually representations of his father, who “disappeared” during the Holocaust and was presumably murdered by the Nazis. “When I was 6 years old, I thought that I’m going to be a doctor and cure people,” Blik explained. “And it wasn’t till I faced the reality of that, that it occurred to me that, you know, if I went into medicine, then I would be dealing with dead people, corpses, and so I didn’t go that way. I wanted to give life to things. Maybe this is a sort of rather curious way of recreating life in sculpture, trying to resurrect these corpses, as it were, which is a crazy idea. I still don't know exactly what happened to my father. I know he was taken to Auschwitz. My fantasy is that, you know, maybe he was the sort of person that got killed trying to escape. I’ve got no idea. And so it’s always been a struggle, you know. How do you deal with that loss and my need to somehow bring my father back to life?”

Another survivor, Manfred Goldberg, recalled the way the Nazis’ death machine operated so relentlessly people literally “disappeared” and were never seen nor heard from again. “Both I, who was in the men’s camp, and my mother, who was separate in the women’s camp, we were both selected to be moved at the same time to the same camps,” Goldberg remembered. “So we spent the whole war together, and we were liberated together. My mother survived, as I did. My younger brother, who was four years younger, he almost certainly did not survive. I’m saying ‘almost’ because to this day, we do not know his fate. He just disappeared. I as a 13-year-old had to go out and do sort of a day’s slave labor, but he was four years younger, and he was permitted to stay in the camp. One day we came home from work, and he and three other young kids who were allowed to stay in the camp had disappeared. During the day they had been picked up by some SS members who had orders to pick them up, and since then he appears to have vanished from the face of the earth.” Indeed, one of the most moving parts of the show was Goldberg’s attempt to resurrect his dead brother Hermann, symbolically, with the aid of a photo that was the one surviving image of him. Goldberg hired an artist to paint a portrait of Hermann based on that photo, and at the end he’s shown planting a memorial plaque to Hermann and his parents, as well as one made out for himself, in a remembrance garden. Also among the most moving parts of the documentary were the recollections of children of the Holocaust survivors, who learned early on that there were parts of their parents’ pasts that they didn’t want to talk about.

One Holocaust survivor, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, wrote a letter to her children saying, “Dear children, I have written and compiled this document with one thought in my mind; namely that I am dedicating it to you and to your children. We have never talked much about those dark days and how it came about that you do not have any grandparents. At what point does one start explaining to one’s child that there are people in the world who had as their ideology the total annihilation of Jews and other undesirables by murdering them in the most sophisticated manner?” Her daughter, Maya Jacobs-Wallfisch, said, “A lot of my difficulties were to do with trauma. Why was I so disturbed? Why was I picking my face when I was 2? … [S]he did sort of project into me this sort of feeling, an idea that, yes, there was something wrong with me; there was really something wrong with me. … [W]hy couldn’t I be grateful that no one was trying to kill me, or at least I had parents, and so on and so forth? So there was absolutely no connecting going on in terms of this was my history, and this was – nothing at all, absolutely nothing.” At least part of the trauma of watching this program is the full realization that the attitudes that gave rise to the Holocaust are still very much a part of the political and social worlds. Neo-Nazi political parties like the Alliance for Germany not only still exist but are doing fairly well in recent elections – the most recent elections in Italy were won by a neo-fascist party formed in the wake of World War II with the explicit intent of keeping Benito Mussolini’s political legacy alive – and even here in the U.S. there are people openly identifying with the Nazis and their horrific legacy.

Today’s Republican Party is trying to exploit accusations of anti-Semitism to attack critics of the state of Israel and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, while simultaneously embracing actual anti-Semites. Former President Donald Trump infamously said of the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia that there were “very fine people on both sides – on both sides,” morally equating the neo-Nazis who paraded through the streets chanting, “Jews will not replace us!,” with the anti-Nazi counter-protesters who mobilized against them. Also, members of the crowd that rioted and stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and tried to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election to replace Donald Trump wore T-shirts with slogans like “Camp Auschwitz” and “6MWE,” which means “Six Million Weren’t Enough” – a call to resume the Holocaust and finish the job Hitler started of exterminating all the world’s Jews.