You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a troubled and troubling book. It was written by someone—primarily a concerned citizen with a good heart—who was moved to write
it out of intense concern that the countless victims of the largest and perhaps most horrific evil ever perpetrated by one segment of humanity upon another might be lost for a second time unless continual efforts are made to keep their memory alive. As the author emphasizes at the beginning of the book, the Holocaust and its victims have tended to disappear from people's minds as the result of a combination of denial, the wish to forget, shift of public interest to new concerns, and the pronounced tendency of the survivors to refuse to talk about their experiences, including and especially with their own children.
Ginsparg notes that a number of Holocaust survivors have written memoirs containing accounts of their experiences as their lives have approached an end, so that they might communicate about the horrendous chapter in human history in which they painfully participated—not to their children but to their grandchildren. Apparently, they have overcome their wish to put distance between themselves and their past out of fear that the world will choose to forget what happened and be at risk of reverting to the dangerous conditions that once affected them and now might arise again to endanger those who succeed them in life.
The film world turned a blind eye to the Holocaust for almost a whole generation. Many decades passed after the end of World War II before the movie industry began to produce movies with Holocaust themes. It did so out of apparent fear of entering into an emotional abyss (or cesspool?), which the film-watching public would not be able to handle, and of alienating those who would prefer to hide the truth or to deny its own responsibility for allowing it to happen. This occurred even though film, in a major way, as Ginsparg observes, is an ideal vehicle for establishing a permanent record of what happened between t