San Diego International Jewish Film Festival Presents Charlotte Feb. 5; My Father’s Secrets Feb 11
By Laurie Baron
LA JOLLA, California — If Anne Frank had been a painter, she would have been Charlotte Salomon. Compelled by a sense of impending doom as a German Jewish refugee in Vichy France, Salomon drew 1300 gouache paintings between 1941 and 1943 to document her life story. Titling this magnum opus Life? or Theatre? A Play With Music, she devoted much of it to illustrating her discovery of the pattern of suicides on her mother’s side of the family, her fraught relationship with her grandfather, and her evolution as an artist and woman.
The animated feature film Charlotte chronicles the unfolding of her personal and creative development in Berlin between 1933 and 1939 and her temporary haven in France thereafter. While its emphasis remains on her autobiography, the dangers posed by Nazi antisemitism loom in the background with a few paintings depicting a Nazi rally, her expulsion from the Academy of Arts on racial grounds, Kristallnacht, and her father’s return as a physically broken man from being interned at Sachsenhausen after the Nazi rampage in 1938. The film also incorporates her written confession that was made public in 2015. It revealed that she poisoned her grandfather. The film implies she did this because he was so verbally abusive, but the confession discloses that he had been sexually harassing her.
The animation and coloration employed by the illustrators duplicate the vivid palette and expressionistic style of her paintings. Some of the paintings are intercut into the film to emphasize key events in her story. They start as moving lines and saturating hues that gradually coalesce into the images Charlotte painted. The focus on her familial and romantic life and the Mediterranean vistas that served as a muse for her in France contrast with the precarious circumstances she confronted as a Jew in Nazi Germany and a Jewish refugee in a collaborationist country which eventually was entirely occupied by Germany. Nowhere is the discrepancy between happier moments and the grim fate that awaited her more apparent than in a closing scene when shortly after she marries and becomes pregnant, the Germans arrest her. The audience only hears her scream while seeing the otherwise idyllic landscape where it occurred.
Unfortunately, Charlotte omits her traumatic internment with her grandfather in the Vichy prison camp Gurs and the harrowing train trip there which was the subject of one of her paintings. It also fails to capture the totality of Life? or Theatre? “as a play with music.” Charlotte wrote captions on some paintings, superimposed transparencies with dialogue onto others, and filled entire pages of her work with only text. Additionally, she intended to have each painting accompanied by a classical piece of music.
Despite these flaws, Charlotte is simultaneously heartrending and uplifting. Her talent and outlook of loving the world even when it doesn’t love you back are punctuated at the end of the film with footage of interviews with her father and stepmother who escaped from a Dutch transit camp and survived the rest of the war in hiding.
Since many scholars consider Charlotte the first graphic novel, it is fitting that the other animated Holocaust film being screened at the San Diego International Jewish Film Festival, My Father’s Secrets, is based on the Michel Kichka’s graphic novel, Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father. The transition from when animation and graphic novels were deemed inappropriate formats for recounting stories about or related to the Holocaust began with Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Although there were earlier instances of animated films about the Holocaust by the Polish Jewish survivor Yoram Gross, the adaptation of Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was the Child of Holocaust Survivors from 2006 into a short film with the same title in 2010 by Ann Marie Fleming paved the way for similar creations, usually by children of survivors associating and distancing themselves from their parents’ ordeal by rendering it and its secondary impact on themselves in a medium that is not realistic.
My Father’s Secrets portrays the childhood of Kichka and his brother growing up in Belgium in the 1950s and 1960s. Their father is a survivor of Auschwitz; their mother a Jew who hid in a cellar during the Holocaust. The father never wants to discuss what he endured in Auschwitz and forbids his sons from even saying the name of the infamous camp in his presence.
At first the two boys know only that their father was in a prison camp during World War II, but slowly they piece together clues as to what horrors that entailed. They innocently think the numbers of their father’s arm represent a phone number he forgot to erase until they see similar numbers on the arm of a candy store owner who tells them she was in Auschwitz. Then they sneak into their father’s study and discover he has been writing and illustrating a memoir about his incarceration at Auschwitz. It contains sketches of other gaunt inmates and some documentary photos of the atrocities the Germans committed against Jews.
Watching television coverage of the Eichmann Trial gives them more information and motivates their father to speak publicly about his Auschwitz experiences. Nevertheless, he refuses to share his memories with his sons. The death of the younger brother and the father’s silence ultimately prompt the older son to make Aliyah. At an Israeli forum featuring survivors, he encounters his father who finally describes to his son what had happened.
The animation of My Father’s Secrets is not as creative as its counterpart in Charlotte. And its storyline is rather familiar among those knowledgeable about how some survivor parents either suppressed their haunting memories or failed to transmit them to their children in the immediate postwar years. The film’s British rating as being appropriate for twelve-year-olds indicates that My Father’s Secrets is targeted at adolescents to educate them about the Holocaust and how its trauma was passed onto to their offspring of survivors. For older audience members, it provides an example of how a serious topic can be conveyed in a medium traditionally aimed at youngsters.
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Baron is professor emeritus at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via Lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com