Authors: Margaret Helfgott
After many of their number had been sent to Treblinka, only around 6,500 Jews remained in the Czestochowa ghetto, which was
then allocated smaller borders. On January 4, 1943, about 300 men in the ghetto, calling themselves the Jewish Fighting Organization,
unsuccessfully tried to launch an uprising. The next day the Nazis shot 250 children and old people as punishment. In June,
the remaining Jews were transferred to two slave labor camps set up at the Hasag factories in Czestochowa that were privately
owned by a German industrialist. On July 20, 1943, some 500 prisoners from these camps who had “served their purpose” were
taken to the town’s Jewish cemetery and executed. Before evacuating Czestochowa on January 17, 1945, the Germans managed to
deport almost 6,000 prisoners from the Hasag camps to the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and Ravensbrueck.
(One of those, then aged seven, who worked at Czestochowa’s labor camp and subsequently survived Buchenwald, is Yisrael Lau,
now Israel’s Chief Rabbi.)
By the end of the war, only about 2,000 of Czestochowa’s prewar Jewish population of almost 30,000 remained alive. Among those
who had been murdered were my mother’s two sisters and all my father’s immediate family, including his sisters Miriam, Na’acha,
and Rivka and his brothers Zelig and Abraham. Among those who survived were my mother’s brother Johnny (liberated from Buchenwald)
and her stepmother Bronia (liberated from Bergen-Belsen). Zelig Lewcowitz, a cousin of my father (whom I used to visit at
his home in Tel Aviv until he passed away a short time ago), went back to Czestochowa in 1945 and could find no one else of
our family alive. Today, when nearly all other Polish Jews have left Poland, there are still small organizations of Czestochowa-born
Jews active in Israel, the United States, Canada, Argentina, and France. In Czestochowa itself hardly any signs exist that
a half century ago Jews comprised 30 percent of the population. The Jewish museum, for example, is now a school; and a big
industrial factory has been built around the Jewish cemetery, making it impossible to see it from the street without going
through the factory.
Incredibly, some of the Jews who managed to survive the death camps were killed in Poland in the two years after Germany’s
surrender. For example, in the town of Kielce, not far from Czestochowa, 42 Jewish concentration camp survivors were killed
by a Polish mob in July 1946.
A whole world had been destroyed. Clearly, for the survivors, Poland was no place to rebuild their shattered lives, and the
vast majority fled the country, going mainly to Israel (or Palestine, as it was known before independence was declared in
1948). Bronia and Johnny came to Melbourne in 1946, part of an estimated 18,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who moved to Australia
at the end of the war. Even now, the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who visited Australia in May 1997, is still negotiating
over compensation payments for survivors living there.
After the war, Franz Stangl, the Austrian commandant who ran Treblinka (and before that Sobibor) escaped, aided, unbelievably,
by the Red Cross and the Vatican. He went first to Syria and then moved to Brazil in 1951, where he registered at the Austrian
consulate under his own name and worked as an engineer for Volkswagen in Sõo Paulo. In 1967, he was tracked down by the Nazi
hunter Simon Wiesenthal, extradited to Germany, and convicted in a Düsseldorf court of the murder of 900,000 people—including
my mother’s two little sisters and most of my father’s family. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in
1971.
The Holocaust was “the most horrible crime committed in the whole history of the world,” as Winston Churchill described it,
and it traumatized Jews and many others. But neither my father nor my mother had personally experienced the hell of the concentration
camps—contrary to what Scott Hicks implies when playing around with my family’s lives. To portray my father as a brute and
then explain this behavior by insinuating that he was a concentration camp survivor is not only a terrible slur on my father
but highly insulting to all Holocaust survivors and their families.
The very idea, so strongly suggested by Hicks, of my father, the supposed Holocaust survivor, adopting the manner of his persecutors,
is grotesque. In the film, the Holocaust is strongly evoked by the use of images—barbed wire cuts across my father’s face
as he nails shut the garden fence to keep his children’s friend out; scrapbooks are burned, there is a mark on Peter’s forearm.
To add insult to injury, Hicks cast a German actor with a strong German accent to play my Polish father. In the eyes of many,
my father thus became a German Jew: “David Helfgott’s mind was knocked off-kilter by a despotic German-Jewish father,” said
the
Financial Times
of London, January 2, 1997.
This undercurrent of Holocaust themes has deeply hurt me both personally and publicly. Without exception, after they saw
Shine
, friends and acquaintances of mine presumed that they “knew” from the film that my father was a concentration camp survivor.
They were astounded when I said he wasn’t. For those with even a little knowledge of the Holocaust the signs in the film are
obvious.
As a columnist in the Philadelphia
Jewish Exponent
wrote to his great surprise in the March 20, 1997, issue: “A recent article in the
New York Times
revealed that the real-life Helfgotts were not Holocaust survivors. They left Poland before Hitler’s invasion. This is not
a trivial detail to Holocaust survivors, who are rightly sensitive about comparisons between their memories and those who
watched from a distance.”
My friends, presuming like everyone else that
Shine
was true, had trouble believing me. “What about when he showed the concentration camp number to one of his daughters?” was
a constant refrain. “What about the barbed wire?” Some shuddered when they recalled the “nighttime burning of the documents,
the flames,” just like Nazi Germany purging itself of Jewish “influences.” The nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich
Heine was right when he said: “Where books are burned, human beings are also destined to be burned.” To make sure we get the
point, we see the photo of “young David” surrendered to the flames. When Peter throws David’s material into the stove, the
reflection of the fire flickering across his glasses, an image of the crematoria where the bodies of Jews—including many of
my relatives— were incinerated is conjured up.
Friends also say: “I remember when your father beat David in the bath in the first part of the film—so it gave me shivers
when David looked up from his bath in a later scene and saw clouds of steam emanating from the shower nozzle head.” It is
no accident that in this scene the camera lingers for a moment too long on the shower nozzle and on the steam. It bears a
close resemblance to the beginnings of gassing scenes in Holocaust films.
These powerful visual images are combined with many suggestions in the dialogue. The word “survivor” is used repeatedly throughout
the film. For example, the character of David says: “To survive, to survive undamaged” in scene 2; Peter says: “In this world
only the fit survive.” It is the dialogue put in David’s mouth that essentially also reinforces the Holocaust theme. He declares:
“You see, Daddy’s daddy was religious, vee-eery religious, very strict; and a bit of a meanie. But he got exterminated, didn’t
he, so God didn’t help him. Whooahhh” (scene 4); or “The Pole-popolski. Like Daddy and his family before they were concentrated”
(scene 18). Even in the halfway house David’s character is muttering: “The weak get crushed like insects, like grasshoppers.”
Another example of Hicks and Sardi mixing dialogue and visual imagery is scene 25 when my father says: “You are very lucky
to have a family,” and then immediately his face appears over the corrugated iron fence with a strand of barbed wire running
across the top.
We can see, by comparing the screenplay with the film version, that Hicks is deliberately changing the facts as he goes along.
Scene 30 of the screenplay says my father had a SCAR on the palm of his HAND (“Peter extends his hand … to reveal a scar”).
But in the film he rolls up his sleeve and my young sister looks goggle-eyed at a MARK on my father’s FOREARM at exactly the
place where concentration camp inmates were tattooed with their identity numbers. Then, having muffled his next words that
refer to the scar, so as to render them barely audible (a point picked up by a reviewer for the
New York Times
), my father regains his normal clear voice: “No one can hurt me! Because in this world only the fit survive. The weak get
crushed like insects.”
The director was fully aware that my father was not a concentration camp survivor, yet created a film with the aforementioned
imagery. Not surprisingly, newspaper commentators and film critics were misled by Hicks’s hideous Holocaust implications.
“Scott Hicks tells a true story and tells it deftly … Darkness enters with Armin Mueller-Stahl’s father… a concentration camp
survivor” (London
Times
, January 2, 1997); “The real-life Helfgott … was for more than a decade lodged in mental institutions and kept from playing
… Peter drives his son relentlessly … fueled by his Holocaust experiences” (
Chicago Tribune
, November 27, 1996). The most awful things were written in reviews, reaching an audience that may not themselves even have
seen the film. The critic for London’s influential newspaper, the
Evening Standard
(January 2, 1997), described my father as “a character only slightly less lovable than Himmler: yet he’s suffered and survived
the death camps … [he comes out] a mental and physical bully … and I can’t forgive him because of his morally privileged status
as a Holocaust survivor.” On the other side of the Atlantic, reviewers were drawing much the same conclusions.
Time magazine
(December 2, 1996) said my father speaks to his son in a “führer-knows-best-tone.”
Just when I thought nothing could possibly upset me further, even more horrible reviews appeared. “Stahl had the juiciest
part of all as Helfgott’s gestapo-like father,” wrote Gary Wolcott in the
Tri
-
City Herald
(Pasco, Washington) on March 14, 1997, under the headline “Film
Shine
s Light on Effects of Child Abuse.” Elaine Dutka, writing her pre-Oscar roundup in the
Los Angeles Times
in March 1997, quoted acting coach Larry Moss as saying: “Mueller-Stahl [in
Shine
] was unafraid to let the audience dislike him. He showed the monster inside with fangs and blood intact. The actor was almost
Hitleresque in his body language.” This review not only compares my father to Hitler but also imbues him with a vampirelike
persona, with overtones of some hideous creature straight out of a medieval purgatory painting. It reminded me of some of
the vilest anti-Semitic drawings produced by early German
volk
(folk) literature, and of the virulent anti-Jewish propaganda films the Nazis used to influence the public in their crusade
against the Jews.
My blood also ran cold when I came across the idea that my real-life father was so evil that he did not deserve to be genetically
linked to David. Peter Helfgott “does not, by spiritual measures, belong on David’s family tree,” wrote Brent Northup in the
Helena Independent Record
(Helena, Montana) on March 14, 1997.
Some reviewers directly suggest that the house that I grew up in had the atmosphere of a concentration camp. For example,
Bill Hanna writing in the
Intelligencer
(a daily newspaper in Wheeling, West Virginia) on March 15, 1997, says, “David’s fanatically strict father runs his household
much like a prison camp.”
Sometimes I was able to correct journalists before the damage was done. Thane Rosenbaum of the
New York Times
called me while writing a feature article on
Shine
. He was taken aback when I told him that my father was not in fact a Holocaust survivor. He wrote about what was for him
an astonishing revelation in his subsequent article, on March 2, 1997, stating that “each of these images [in
Shine
] points to the conclusion that Peter Helfgott was a Holocaust survivor.”
From the most highbrow publications to the popular magazines the story was the same: in a sickening role reversal the “victim”
became the “aggressor.” “Mr. Hicks offers us the Holocaust-surviving father, unwittingly imposing his tragic suffering on
the next generation … He damages his son’s health and art. Have the sins of the fathers been visited upon the sons?” (Kyle
Pruett in the
New York Times
, November 17, 1996). “[Helfgott is] controlled by his loving but bull-headed and physically abusive father, a victim of the
Holocaust” (
Cosmopolitan magazine
, December 1996).
By the time of the Oscars, Leslie and I were giving interviews on major television stations, such as CNN, trying to get the
truth across. Some commentators saw these interviews and realized what Hicks was up to. “Hicks is certainly playing Holocaust
head games with the
Shine
audience,” wrote Gerald Peary in the Rhode Island paper
The Providence Phoenix
(April 4, 1997). It wasn’t enough for Hicks to turn my father into a monster, he had, as one reviewer said, to make my father
“a monster with an explanation.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read Hicks, quoted in the
New York Times
on the role the Holocaust plays in
Shine
: “This subject is still an open wound for some people,” he said, “and I didn’t want to trample on profound sensitivities
by being offensive.”
I wish I could say that Hicks’s offensive treatment of Jews was restricted to the Holocaust. But his entire treatment of Judaism
and Christianity raises very disturbing questions. Whereas the Jewish-related themes in
Shine
are dealt with in a negative, gloomy way throughout most of the film, at the end—coinciding with the entrance of love and
happiness into David’s life—Christianity and Christian symbols are suddenly introduced, accompanied by bright blue skies and
uplifting choral music. In several unexplained scenes and camera shots, large crosses appear and we see David in church. If
the character of David has not quite become a Christian, Hicks seems to want us to know he has at any rate been saved by Christianity.