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Our Past in Present Tense
Should
Mel Gibson Produce A Holocaust Series?
An
Open Letter to the ABC TV Network
Dr.
Yehuda Shabatay
Dear
Mr. Quinn Taylor,
I
understand that you are ABC’s Senior Vice President in charge of movies
broadcast on your company’s television network. I address this letter to you
because you may decide whether Mel Gibson’s Con Artists Productions should be
contracted to provide ABC with a four-hour miniseries on the Holocaust.
I
fully realize that television is big business, its primary interest is to make
as much profit as possible. I also recognize the fact that Mr. Gibson’s latest
film on The Passion of the Christ attracted huge audiences not only in the
United States, but in numerous other countries as well, with hundreds of
millions of dollars in ticket sale revenues. That alone may inspire you to
seriously consider Con Artists Productions’ proposal to produce a TV series
for you — an attractive business deal, as far as any company executive may be
concerned.
But,
as a survivor of the Holocaust, I am revolted by the possibility that any
presentation of that horrible event would be considered primarily on its
potential to provide profit for any business venture. Whether you believe it or
not, the cold-blooded, systematic massacre of six million Jews and of an untold
number of Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and communists still
cries to heaven. And what about the 70,000-100,000 innocent, “pure-blooded”
German children who were exterminated because they were deformed or too sick to
fit the “Aryan” ideal of a perfect human being, as depicted by the Nazis?
According
to an article that appeared in the December 7, 2005 issue of The
New York Times, Mr. Gibson’s approach to those heinous crimes is
nonchalant at best. Last year, when he was asked in an interview whether, in his
opinion, the Holocaust took place, he did not deny it outright, as his father
has done for many years. “Yes, of course” it happened, Mr. Gibson replied.
But “war is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people.
Some of them were Jews in concentration camps.” Thus, in Mr. Gibson’s
opinion, there was nothing special about herding millions of human beings into
gas chambers, and then burning their bodies in huge crematoria. It was just part
of a war, so why on earth do Jews make such a big deal of the extermination of
one-third of their brothers and sisters in half a decade, and of the Nazis plan
to extend the “Final Solution” to all the rest?
I wonder what Mr. Gibson and his father would say if their parents, brothers,
and sisters would have been ordered to dig enormous graves, get fully undressed,
lie in those graves tightly so as to enable lots of others to join them, then be
machine-gunned and buried while some of the victims still screamed in their
death-throes? Or, if their family members would have been loaded on trucks, with
their exhaust pipes inside, and slowly suffocated as the trucks’ engines
roared?
Of
course, if all that will be shown in a TV miniseries, the number of viewers may
multiply, because in the 21st century so many of our fellow citizens
seem to be eager to watch cruelty, man’s inhumanity to man. “The Passion”
was full of torture, yet millions of customers lined up to see it, paying full
price for the privilege of spending half an hour or longer viewing the horrible
death of their Savior. A few protests were good for business because, in your
words: “controversy’s publicity, and vice versa.” A television series
would provide free “entertainment.” And the more some Jews and other caring
people protest, the greater interest they stir up — with lots more
advertising.
Of
course, there may not be that much torture in the planned miniseries, if it is
built only and exclusively on Flory A. Van Beek’s memoirs, Flory:
Survival in the Valley of Death. That book’s main theme is the way two
Jews were sheltered by Dutch Christian families and saved from deportation to
one of the Nazi death camps in which 97% of their fellow Dutch Jews perished. I
have the highest regard for the wonderful “Righteous Gentiles” who saved
many Jews all over Europe, but that is only one, very small part of a horrendous
picture. Who will handle the overall framework of that picture, and how? That is
the question you and members of your staff will have to determine at some stage.
It
is possible that Mr. Gibson and his Con Artists Productions could come up with
the right approach. But, for all the earlier mentioned reasons, I doubt it. You
may say that one does not look a gift horse in the mouth, and as long as the
memory of the Holocaust is kept alive, we Jews should be satisfied. But, as soon
as I read that Mr. Gibson would provide the “gift horse,” an entirely
different saying came to my mind. It appears in the famous Latin poet,
Virgil’s Aeneid. When the Greeks, who besieged Troy, offered a horse to that
city’s inhabitants, Laoco’on begged them not to accept it: “Do not trust
the horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even when they bring
gifts.”
Dear
Mr. Taylor, there are so many worthwhile themes your network may consider for a
TV series. If, for whatever reason, you still decide to go along with the
Holocaust, find someone else to handle it. He, or she, may not bring as much
profit to your company as Mr. Gibson could, but the right person would be far
more knowledgeable, and certainly more honest in handling such a delicate
subject than Mr. Gibson would ever be.
Yours
sincerely,
Yehuda
Shabatay
Dr. Yehuda Shabatay received rabbinical training in Budapest, a master of jurisprudence degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his doctorate in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He was engaged in Jewish educational administration over most of his career and now teaches Jewish studies and history at Palomar College and San Diego State University.