In Israel, at 10 a.m. one day, traffic stopped. People came out of their vehicles into the street and stood while air raid sirens blared and the nation stopped for two minutes, which in current times can be considered an eternity. They were recalling the six million Jews who died during World War II and its aftermath that haunted generations of people around the globe; this was also done by HBO movie last night. The Survivor was released on Yom HaShoah first night, which will continue till April 28th, this year, and is commonly referred to as Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This film now streaming on HBO Max takes place in Auschwitz concentration camp during the war years and many others after that all are centered around Hertzko Haft’s life known by his American name Harry. This heartbreaking film is based on his true story which captures a difficult existence of a man who managed to live through death camps albeit at an unimaginable prize.
Haft is a boxer with bad luck fortunes and somewhere in his tortured mind one gets the idea that he wouldn’t have it any other way. Unconsciously perhaps these bloody beatings he sustains with his flattened strawberry nose against swollen cheeks are just a kind of masochism to seek punishment for his transgressions. In Auschwitz, Haft learns boxing from an enterprising SS officer who recruits him into it so as they could stage matches for bored Nazis and earn money from them.
Haft walks into the ring surrounded by screaming Nazis holding money or beer bottles while cheering for their bets as they refer to themselves as ‘mein fuhrers’. One knows that if you win you get rations but if things don’t go well then you’ll be shot in the head after being beaten senselessly until your pretend demise; another person enters knowing that there are some kickbacks involved when it comes to purchasing foodstuff each month. Consequently, Haft survives death camps, bathes, drinks some whiskey, sleeps with a prostitute and in general is treated as a pet dog by his SS coach Schneider (a horrifyingly captivating Billy Magnussen).
Schneider has some cold, Nietzschean philosophies about power and struggle. To some extent, he is right that the history of civilization amounts to a chronicle of genocide, slavery and dominion with each ‘great’ nation having been established through conquering another. “It’s inevitable,” he reiterates quoting Goethe the German writer.“‘You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.’ However,” says Schneider, “choosing to be the hammer doesn’t mean that I enjoy striking the anvil.”
Maybe Haft thought that this philosophy could help him win fights in order to survive. The problem with Schneider’s power dynamics however is there is morality. For those who have it, ‘striking the anvil’ isn’t a one-time action; Haft recalls beating other Auschwitz inmates senseless and collaborating (even if not doing so meant being put to death) with Nazi Germans. These memories are evoked by anything ranging from fireworks or someone referring to him as an “animal,” showing his severe PTSD. He may have been left standing in Auschwitz rings but did not really defeat anyone else down there. “You can’t win…all you can do is stay alive,” one character adds.
This describes Haft as he relives his past while trying to get through it. He narrates his tale for a journalist of newspaper (always exceptional Peter Sarsgaard) who writes article “At What Cost Survival: Fighting For the Nazis,” which ruins what was left between him and Jewish community considering him as traitor because they believe he betrayed his people. But Haft always wanted publicity so that he could eventually fight Rocky Marciano for real and also hoped that any woman (although she was taken away into camps), whom he loved might see his name on pages and come search for him.
Haft’s portrayal by Ben Foster is almost perfect. In fact, the actor lost 62 pounds to shoot camp scenes and then regained 50 of them back in less than five weeks; “I would not suggest anybody do that. It’s not something I would advise anyone to do,” he told Variety. Besides his physical changes, Foster is good at expressing sensitivity as well as anger in a self-loathing character whose soul has been tarnished by the world. His Polish-Jewish accent and those of some other actors are only a little thick, but Foster is Jewish himself while Haft actually spoke with such cadence (and had Foster disregard a lisp for no reason), so it hardly counts.
The rest of the cast is amazing too including John Leguizamo’s tough performance and an unexpectedly touching Danny DeVito one. Vicky Krieps plays Haft’s redemption partner. She comes with the same quietness and mystery she brought to Phantom Thread, and nicely counterbalances Foster’s smoldering portrayal. It all goes along well with the melancholic yet occasionally rumbling score by great Hans Zimmer.
At 80 years old, director Barry Levinson has made the best film in over two decades, at least since Liberty Heights (which, ironically, starred Ben Foster in his first film role and was also largely about the Jewish experience). His great populist filmmaking of Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam, and Wag the Dog becomes much more subdued in The Survivor, which is (for the most part) short on crowd-pleasing melodrama and heavy on thoughtful, quiet moments that nonetheless construct emotionally devastating scenes.
One can almost feel just how personal he feels about this movie as a Jew. He talks about Simka who stayed with his family for two weeks while he was still a boy. They were sleeping across from him in his bedroom. They would mumble at night before suddenly screaming. “I woke up one night because he was thrashing about in bed,” the director told Deadline, “he was speaking a language, and he was yelling out, and he’s tossing and turning, and then he fell back asleep. And night after night after night, it would be the same thing.” His mom later informed him that Simka had made it through those camps.
“Nobody wants to hear the truth about the camps,” Haft tells the newspaper reporter. “They shouldn’t have a choice,” the man replies. Not only is Holocaust cinema broad ranging but it also contains some of cinema’s greatest masterpieces; films that are easy tools for emotional manipulation by wily filmmakers too often use it that way. When tragedy is used for art there is always potential for exploitation – why one film uses these events; how does it tell this story; what kind of profit is being made from it or who gets paid? Stephen Spielberg famously declined payment for his Oscar-winner Schindler’s List calling it “blood money.”
The Survivor doesn’t seem to resort to exploitation being made by fellow Jews properly released on Yom HaShoah not dwelling on unnecessary suffering to manipulate emotions and honoring the life of a man who survived and the lives of countless who didn’t. Like Sophie’s Choice before it, the film explores the dead-end of bad choices and the spiritual mutilation they can cause. It’s certainly not the best film on this subject in relation to The Holocaust by any stretch of one’s imagination but is a great character study as well as an eerie meditation about what really constitutes survival.
“Once you were out of that camp, you have survived,” Levinson said in a recent Variety interview, “but you haven’t totally survived.” There is always a part of us lost with trauma; while everything else that comes after is learning to be happy despite being incomplete; let us all take some time off for those parts disappeared.
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