"the red magician"

[sergebroom]

I finished reading Lisa Goldstein's The Red Magician last night, a novel about the Holocaust, and surviving and feeling guilty for having survived when others did not.

They left the camp quickly, without looking back, and began to walk along the road to the train station. The road was hot and dusty and they rested often. Occasionally they passed soldiers on leave or refugees traveling in groups carrying all their possessions between them. No one stopped to look at them, the tall man in the long black coat and the pale young woman in the new town-bought dress and shoes.

Kicsi thought that none of this could be real - not the people, or the well-kept houses, or the trees and shrubs flowering by the roadside. Sometimes when she passed a soldier, she marveled that there could be anyone so healthy left in the world.

I've been wondering… Have the younger generations ever seen films of what happened in concentration camps?

Comments

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

In what country? I'd say Americans have had the opportunity to see clips of the liberations at Dachau and Buchenwald. On the other hand, many have never seen any clips about what happened in American internment camps like Manzanar.

I'd think for Europeans it would be difficult to avoid some knowledge of the camps, at least in Central Europe and the former Soviet bloc.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the USA. And Canada. True, when you and I were growing up, it wasn't unusual for mainstream TV to show such clips while the children were still up and awake. Today? Well, we don't want to upset the public's digestion of their suppers, do we? I was reminded of that absence of the Nazis's monstrosities when I last watched Stanley Kramer's Judgment in Nuremberg.

As for Manzanar, that was a damned shameful chapter in American History. Interestingly, it was the subject of the most recent episode of cop show Cold Case. Luckily some people have learned some lessons from the past. (By the way, did you know that George Takei was in one of those camps? I'm glad he didn't stop loving his country.)

[(Anonymous)]

I saw footage of it growing up, but I don't know how many people have. I imagine some people who got better schooling than I did saw it at school.

I like what George Takei says about what he learned from his time in the camps, which is that it just reinforced to him the need to participate in his society.

-ethan

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of something I read in the early 1990s. One day, the German guards disappeared from a concentration camp because the Americans were coming, and they left their prisoners to wander around the place until they collapsed. One of them finally opened his eyes again and saw someone looking down at him, dressed like an American soldier, but with a Japanase face. He thought that meant he had truly finally died.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I think they have. Certainly of the liberation of German camps.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I'm glad some of them know what it is the Nazis did.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Some of them, true.