ertainment

Man
Who
Cried'

MICHAEL FOX
Special to the Jewish News

A t once both epic and
enpersonal, Sally Potter' s
The Man Who Cried evokes
more lost worlds than one
can count.
rpm a shtetl on t he
order to pre-
444t. oceu-

LOST WORLDS

from page 69

without a deeper understanding.
"That can induce tremendous feel-
ings of hopelessness. But the reality is
that the Holocaust did not win."
All of Potter's films have strong
female protagonists. In Orlando
(1992), a riff on sexual politics, a
British nobleman ages 400 years and
changes gender midway. In The Tango
Lesson (1997), Potter stars as a woman
(coincidentally named Sally) who mas-
ters the dance and her dance teacher.
In The Man Who Cried, the fictional
Fegele loses her Yiddish language but
finds her voice, literally, through song.

Each heroine is an outsider who
survives on her wits — not unlike
Potter herself.
The daughter of a poet and a singer,
Potter grew up in a bohemian, politi-
cally radical household in a run-down
section of London. "Sometimes, there
wasn't food in the house, but there was
always a . book," she said during a tele-
phone interview from her home in a
converted East End shoe factory.
When Potter was 14, she received her
first 8-mm camera; a year later she
dropped out of school to become an
artist. Over the years, she pinched pen-
nies and occasionally stayed in houses
while working as a dancer, performance

artist and experimental filmmaker.
Potter began writing The Man Who
Cried in the "grief and aftershock" of
her father's unexpected death from a
heart attack in 1995. "I found myself
contemplating his absence," she says.
"The [motif] in the story became
Fegele's search for her father. His
absence haunts her life."
To research her period drama, Potter
perused photographs of shtetls, read
hundreds of books and interviewed
dozens of Holocaust survivors in Russia,
England and Israel. She listened to
klezmer music for inspiration while writ-
ing the movie. At one point, she says,
she became "the woman who cried."

llitler's Holocaust'

4

New TV documentary on Nazis _peeks into ordinary Germans' minds.

TOM TUGEND
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Maia

A'roi*Stor:'.

°

6/15
2001

here was no shouting or
wailing," recalls a Nazi army
veteran in wonder after
watching Polish Jews digging
their own graves before being machine-
gunned. "There was a deadly silence."
The observation is among the hun-
dreds of telling remarks and casual
asides by ordinary German soldiers
and their officers who participated in
or witnessed the day-by-day unfolding
of the "Final Solution," as document-
ed in the History Channel's Hitler's
Holocaust.
The six-part miniseries, starting June
18, was made by German television
producers for German audiences. It

also will be shown at a later date on
the History Channel's affiliates in
Israel, Britain, China and Australia.
Hitler's Holocaust is remarkable on
two accounts.
It lets the perpetrators — not the
masterminds but the ordinary "willing
executioners" — tell their stories.
The documentary also illustrates
how even the greatest horror ultimate-
ly became part of a daily routine —
not just for the murderers but also, in
some measure, for the victims.
As one Latvian collaborator puts it,
after a while, the killing of Jews "just
became work to be done."
Besides death and starvation, the vic-
tims faced a constant degrading psy-
chological pressure. One survivor recalls
that "we started to believe ourselves

that we were really untermenschen," or
sub-humans, "and that they were really
the herrenrasse," or the master race.
The six segments, some shown in
tandem on the same night, are
"Invasion," "Decision" "Ghetto,"
"Mass Murder," "Resistance" and "The
Final Toll."
In one episode, no less a witness
than Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal
recalls that while imprisoned he was
called to the side of a fatally wounded
SS officer, who demanded to see a Jew
before he died.
When Wiesenthal entered the hospi-
tal room, the SS man grabbed his
hand and asked him for forgiveness. "I
withdrew my hand and walked out,"
says Wiesenthal.
The lifestyle of some Nazi higher-