By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — One of the hats I wear is that of the chairperson for the Jewish Film Festival shown in conjunction with the annual Association for Jewish Studies Conference which met last week in Chicago. This provided me with the opportunity to share with my colleagues Numbered, an emotionally engaging and visually stunning Israeli film which I consider the best Jewish documentary I have seen this past year. The comments audience members expressed to me about the film mirrored my opinion. Since I’ve only been writing this column since June and cannot claim to have viewed all of the competitors in this genre, I offer this review as a substitute for the obligatory top ten films’ list that usually appear at the end of the year.
Numbered features interviews with Auschwitz survivors about their memories of being tattooed with an identification number and the meanings they ascribed then and ascribe now to bearing this indelible mark on their arms. It also explores why some of their grandchildren have decided to get tattoos of their grandparents’ numbers. Although these elements might sound like a depressing and even morbid premise for a film, the cinematography, and the diversity of the survivors and their perspectives on their ordeals imbue the film with beauty, humor, and an uplifting message which tempers the sadness and sympathy the audience feels for the losses and suffering these people endured.
Rather than being as succession of talking heads, the film alternates with scenes of Uriel Sinai, a renowned Israeli photojournalist, posing and taking exquisite portraits of his subjects that visually convey their pain, personalities, and perseverance. When he films them in various activities―whether it be a widow carrying an umbrella in the rain to the grave of her husband, a woman sweeping the stoop of her house, a survivor speaking to a class of high-school students, or a granddaughter wincing as the tattoo needle pierces her skin―Sinai creates images that invite the eye and mind of the viewer to peer into the souls of those appearing on screen.
The cast of “characters” co-director Danan Doron has assembled supply observations and recollections as vivid as the film’s visual composition. The granddaughter of a survivor, Doron is a physician. She was inspired to make the film when she treated a woman who complained about chest pain. She displayed her number to Doron and then recounted the details of what had happened to her in Auschwitz. Her daughter confided to Doron the following day that her mother checked into the ER whenever she sensed the need to bear witness about her captivity and survival. Consequently, Doron embarked on a project to film interviews of the dwindling cohort of Auschwitz survivors in Israel whose otherwise random sequence of tattooed numbers symbolize a horrific event.
Even though these survivors overcame the same degradation and dehumanization, how that affected their outlooks on life vary greatly. Dani flaunts his number as a badge of honor broadcasting to those he encounters that he triumphed over a system designed to kill him. After Auschwitz, he revels in every moment he is alive and dreads the prospect of ever being tethered to a life-support machine which would rob him of his freedom. Zoka purchases whatever comforts she desires to compensate for the severe deprivation she experienced. During the month of Yom Ha-Shoah, she goes on shopping sprees. Three men have reunited in Israel after realizing their fates were bond together by virtue of possessing three consecutive numbers. Some survivors initially felt ashamed about their numbers and covered them with long sleeves or had them removed. Others display them as a memorial to those less fortunate than themselves, a reminder that they evaded their executioners, or a relic intended to elicit discussion. Shocked to see that his grandson had his number permanently imprinted on his arm a grandfather wonders if he did it to assure the world would never forget the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry. The grandson answers that he did it so he would never forget it.
Stamping death camp inmates with numbers was the culmination of the attempt to rob them of their humanity. After they had been systematically starved, transported like cattle, separated from loved ones, stripped of their clothing, and shorn of their hair, their numbering completed the process of reducing them to inventory items to be worked to death or disposed of when deemed no longer productive. Whatever psychological and physical wounds these survivors still bear, they reentered the ranks of the living and became citizens of states and the spouses and parents of a new generation of Jews. Numbered restores their individuality in another way by shattering our stereotypes of survivors.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com