One and a half million dead: the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

They had been ridiculed and spat upon for hundreds of years.  The ultra-nationalists in power launched dehumanizing propaganda against them.  Their semblance of official protection had been stripped away and made them relegated to a class of life undeserving of life.  Their property was confiscated.  And in the end they were beaten and butchered and starved and raped and shot and crucified and whoever was left were herded onto railroad cars to be sent off to concentration camps stretching from border to border.

And it took place nearly thirty years before the Nazis implement their "final solution".  But it was not a Germany frenzied by the mad ravings of a failed artist, or any other European nation.  It was instead the Ottoman Empire.  The time was World War I.  And the target for extermination was Armenian Christians as well as many other minorities that did not fit the criteria of existence by the Muslim government.

It was one hundred years ago today, on April 24th, 1915, that the Armenian Genocide began, starting with the arrest and eventual murder of nearly three hundred ethnic Armenian leaders and intellectuals.  Very soon after, the government widened its scope to include all of the predominantly Christian minorities: peoples who had enjoyed some measure of toleration since the days of the fall of Constantinople.  But no more.

By the end of the war, one and a half million Christians, Jews, and racial minorities had been killed by the Ottomans.

Armenians being evicted by Ottoman soldiers

Nearly three-quarters of the Armenian people were wiped out.  To this day, the Armenian Christian community is still reeling from what can only be described as the first genocide of the Twentieth Century.  A genocide that  for one reason or another, the rest of the world for the large part seems entirely ignorant of or else consciously denies that it was nothing more than a "mass deportation", if there is any acknowledgement at all.

Naked Christian girls, crucified during the Armenian Genocide

Today, the modern nation of Turkey refuses to address the facts of the genocide.  I can't understand why.  Even Germany acknowledges that it was her own people... if not itself as a modern state... who perpetrated the Holocaust.  In Turkey there is outright disavowal of any responsibility altogether.  It would be wrong to lay the blame on the Turkish government for something that happened under Ottoman rule but even so: this is and will ever remain a very dark spot on Turkish history.  And it's past time that there be some owning-up to that.  By Turkey and by the rest of the world.  Including the United States.

The Armenian Genocide Museum has a vast amount of material about the genocide, including much photo documentation of the atrocities.  It is well worth reading, if for no other reason that because it is a vivid chronicle of the situation and events that led up to the slaughter.

May we learn from it.  May such a thing as this never happen again.

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THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED footage found! Behind-the-scenes of Jerry Lewis' unreleased Holocaust film

Jerry's Kids, circa 1972:
You won't hear "You'll Never Walk Alone" the same way again...

It might be the cinematic coup of the decade: a seven minutes-long clip of behind-the-scenes footage from The Day the Clown Cried has been posted to YouTube.

Perhaps the most infamous movie never released, The Day the Clown Cried is the 1972 film directed, co-written and starring Jerry Lewis which ended up in a legal mess about ownership rights which kept it from being finished and distributed.  That was more than forty years ago.  Maybe it was for the best.

What was The Day the Clown Cried about?  Here's the synopsis as I first heard it: "Jerry Lewis is a clown in a Nazi concentration camp".  Lewis was playing a washed-up German clown named Helmut Dork (?!) who gets drunk one night and bad-mouths Hitler in earshot of some Nazi officers.  Dork gets sent to a prison camp, then winds up at Auschwitz where the kommandant uses Dork as a "Judas goat" for herding Jewish children into the gas chambers.  In the final scene, Dork chooses to walk with the kids into the chamber and die with them: making the children laugh as the Zyklon-B canisters drop through the chutes.

It was supposed to have been Lewis' first "serious" motion picture: something he had pinned Oscar hopes on.  He wanted to try something which wasn't comedy for a change.  So he went with a tragic story about the Holocaust.  It didn't end well.

(If you're interested, I wrote much more about The Day the Clown Cried on this blog four years ago.)

To this day nobody apart from Lewis himself and a few favored individuals have seen the entirety of The Day the Clown Cried.  Lewis purportedly has kept the only copy locked up in his office all this time.  Where he once was passionate about finishing and releasing it, he is now adamant that it will never be shown.

So this might be the most we'll ever see of The Day the Clown Cried, courtesy of YouTube user "unclesporkums"...


I'm gonna reiterate what I said four years ago: there's no doubt that The Day the Clown Cried would have been a box-office horror and likely would have upended Jerry Lewis' career for all time had it been released.  But even so, it demonstrates how Hollywood was trying to deal with the subject of the Holocaust: something that happened a quarter-century earlier and which people were still trying to grasp.  So it can't be said that Jerry Lewis can be faulted for trying.  If anything, he made an effort that should be appreciated.  A failed and flawed effort, but in retrospect it wasn't one that many others could have attempted.  Lewis' heart was in the right place.  He just lacked the proper pathos for the project, and I wonder if anyone at the time had it.

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Antoni Dobrowolski, the oldest survivor of Auschwitz, has passed away

During my lifetime, I have met six survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Each of them Jewish. Some were at Treblinka. Some at Bergen-Belsen. Some at Auschwitz.

Hearing only them tell his or her story would remain as one of the most humbling and heartbreaking and in the end most inspirational tale of human hope that I have ever listened to. To hear the tales of six such people leaves a far greater impression upon one's mind of the sacredness of even one human life. These people and many more went through Hell on Earth... but not one of them came out of it with affirmation that in spite of the evil that mankind is capable of, there is also a far greater potential for good. Every single survivor of the camps is, has been and forever will be a victory against those who sought their extermination. For all that was done to them, they yet lived to see their children and their children's children be born.

Born in 1904 in Wolborz, Poland, Antoni Dobrowolski saw more of that unbridled evil and final triumph than most could ever claim. A teacher by trade, he was 38 when he was arrested by the Nazis for educating the children of Poland.

That's all that he had to do to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He taught children. The Nazis believed that the Poles were a sub-human race regardless of whether they were Jew or Gentile. For this "crime", Dobrowolski was sent to Auschwitz: the very worst of the German death camps.

Dobrowoloski was one of the lucky few: chosen to live and work and not to perish in "the showers". He held onto life in a place "worse than Dante's hell", until the Allies liberated the camp in 1945.

After the war, Dobrowolski returned to the career that was his passion: teaching young minds. He eventually became a principal at an elementary school and then a high school. Teaching about his experience in the Holocaust as much as about the Polish language to children.

I think it can be said that many, many generations were taught and encouraged and influenced for the better by this man, who courageously defied the edicts of his nation's conquerors and then defied them again in a place of ultimate darkness.

Antoni Dobrowolski, the oldest survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, passed away yesterday.

He was 108 years old.

Rest in peace, Mr. Dobrowolski. You taught well that most important lesson of the human condition: you taught hope.

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Miep Gies, protector of Anne Frank's family, has passed away

The second bestselling nonfiction book of all time - surpassed only by the Bible - owes its publication to this fine lady...

Miep Gies and her husband Jan were the Dutch couple who hid Otto Frank and his family in an Amsterdam office building's secluded annex from 1942 to 1944. For more than two years, Miep and Jan Gies smuggled food and other provisions to the Franks and other Jews, protecting them as they could from the Nazi regime that was controlling the Netherlands.

In August of 1944 (not long after the invasion of Normandy) the Gestapo discovered the hiding place and captured everyone. Not long afterward Miep Gies was allowed to return and while there she gathered up numerous personal belongings in hopes of returning them. Scattered on the floor were pages of Anne Frank's diary. In 1947 it was published and became a worldwide sensation for all time.

For her heroism, Miep Gies was decorated by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and declared a "Righteous Gentile" by the Israeli government.

Miep Gies, last surviving protector of Anne Frank and her family, passed away yesterday at the age of 100.

If only more people had the courage of this woman, this would be a far better world.

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The only existing film footage of Anne Frank

From the Anne Frank House channel on YouTube...

Here's the clip's description...

July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor.

This would have been about a year before Anne and her family went into hiding.

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"Jerry Lewis as a clown in a Nazi concentration camp!"

Ahhh, Labor Day. The holiday consecrated to the common working stiff. The traditional end of another summer. The start of the final stretch of the year. And as most people know it's also the occasion of the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Two things I'm compelled to say from the getgo: first, Jerry Lewis is one of the all-time greatest performers of stage and screen. And second, the Muscular Dystrophy Association is one of the finest charitable groups in the land. All of the money that's raised locally remains local and helps people in your own area. MDA has some of the least overhead of any organization of its kind. I've had a number of friends over the years that MDA has been there for, and has allowed them to know opportunities that they otherwise might never have enjoyed. So if you've some coin to spare, I'd like to urge y'all to donate to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Okay well with that said, let me take advantage of this Labor Day to enlighten you, Dear Reader, of an aspect of Jerry Lewis' career that you might have never known... until now. Because for good or ill that's the sort of thing we do here at The Knight Shift.

I had thought myself fairly well educated on the subject of the Holocaust in cinema. And my breadth of knowledge has not only covered Schindler's List, Europa Europa and the like but also the very real propaganda films of the Nazi government. I have seen Triumph of the Will. And I have also seen Jud Süß ("Jew Suss"): one of the most evil things ever committed to film. Along with very nearly every other movie and documentary pertaining to the Holocaust.

But it wasn't until about two and a half years ago that I first heard about The Day the Clown Cried.

It is a film that you have never seen and probably never will (unless you happen to be Jerry Lewis himself or one of those among his closest circle of friends and associates). The past few years has brought word that legendary "lost" movies like London After Midnight and the original cut of Metropolis may have been re-discovered and could soon see the flicker of light once again.

But that is not likely to be the fate of The Day the Clown Cried. Produced in 1972 and since mired in international litigation regarding ownership issues, it will perhaps forevermore remain the most legendary movie never seen by a public audience.

Maybe it's for the best. I'll let you be the judge. So what's The Day the Clown Cried a movie about?

It's the synopsis that I'll never forget as long as I live: "Jerry Lewis as a clown in a Nazi concentration camp!"

(Feel free to clean the coffee or Coca-Cola or tea from your screen after reading that.)

The Day the Clown Cried is about a washed-up circus clown named Helmut Dork (I swear, this is not a joke people) living in Germany at the height of the Nazi regime. One night while drunk in a bar he begins railing aloud against Hitler and the Nazis, and Dork is promptly arrested by the Gestapo. Poor Dork spends the next few years languishing in a camp for political prisoners, until he winds up making some Jewish children laugh with his antics. The prison commandant eventually puts Dork to work loading children onto train cars headed out of the camp. And then one day Dork accidentally gets locked inside one such car headed to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival Dork is employed by the Nazis as a "Judas goat"/"Pied Piper": entertaining the Jewish children even as he leads them straight into the gas chamber. At the end of the movie, overwhelmed with guilt and grief, Dork accompanies a group of children into the chamber and does his best to make them laugh. Their final moments are as happy as could be expected, before the Zyklon B lulls them into quiet death.

(Again, I swear, I am not making any of this up.)

This was supposed to have been Lewis' first "serious" movie. The script was first written by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton in the early 1960s. Lewis was approached with the project and initially turned it down, believing it was beyond his abilities: "My bag is comedy... and you're asking me if I'm prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber? Ho-ho. Some laugh... how do I pull it off?"

In the end Lewis fully committed himself to the production, winding up not only portraying Helmut Dork (as Jerry Lew-ish a character name as there's ever been) but also directing the film and co-writing the script. And then just before filming wrapped the money ran out and a very vicious fight over ownership arose (turns out that Lewis hadn't fully secured the rights to produce The Day the Clown Cried in the first place). And so it is that the movie has been tied in up legal limbo for almost forty years.

As for how good a movie The Day the Clown Cried is supposed to be, there is obviously little to go on since so few have seen it. One of them is Lewis' friend and fellow comedian Harry Shearer, who watched a cut of it in 1979. As Shearer put it...

"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" — that's all you can say."

But of course, as with such things, there is no dearth of information to be found about it on the Internet. So if you are interested in learning more about The Day the Clown Cried I would recommend checking out Subterranean Cinema's VERY thorough collection of resources about the film (including an exhaustively researched article from Spy Magazine in 1992), as well as FilmBuffOnline's review of the script (which can be found quite easily across the Intertubes).

Personally, having read the script: I don't see how The Day the Clown Cried would have been anything but a box office calamity. The screenplay is a very tired and tedious read, and the best editing isn't apt to salvage an outstanding product from the material. It's all just... irredeemably... wrong.

But in spite of how taken aback and even a bit horrified I was after reading this, I do also believe that there might be a unique place for The Day the Clown Cried in the chronicles of cinema. Having been produced barely a quarter-century after the Holocaust, it's very obvious from the script that the arts and entertainment industry was still struggling to understand how to approach this most delicate of subjects. It would be several more years - many would say that 1978's television miniseries Holocaust began the trend - before Hollywood would start to fully grasp with sensitivity the scope of the Shoah.

All films should be judged according to the period in which they were produced. So it is that for all the problems apparent with it, The Day the Clown Cried... regardless of lack of release... deserves to endure as a noteworthy entry in Holocaust literature and cinema. As much as for how not to make such a film as it is a benchmark of artistic courage to have even considered producing it at all.

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20 years ago tonight came the ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR

For one person to escape from a Nazi concentration camp was daring.

For three to escape was incredible.

For three hundred to escape was impossible.

Nothing is impossible.

So read the tagline of the full-page ad in the April 12th, 1987 issue of Parade that promoted that night's broadcast on CBS of Escape from Sobibor, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer.

Twenty years ago tonight came the premiere of what is perhaps the greatest movie about the Holocaust ever made. Escape from Sobibor is about the only thing of its kind that ever occurred during World War II: a mass escape by Jewish prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp. Sobibor was one of the primary extermination facilities in eastern Poland, with estimates ranging from as low as 250,000 to as high (according to one Sobibor survivor) as one million who were gassed to death there. On October 14 in 1943 several of the Jewish inmates, who had been making clandestine plans for months, secretly murdered most of the camp's S.S. officers without raising any alarm. What happened after that during the evening roll call could best be summed up by what Leon Feldhendler (Arkin's character) screamed to his fellow captives: "God is with you! Now let nothing stop you!" Over three hundred Jewish prisoners stormed the gates, killing many of the German and Ukrainian guards in the process, and escaped into the forests surrounding Sobibor.

It's a very good movie. Made all the more enthralling if you know, based on what the actual survivors who are depicted in this movie have said, that practically everything you see in this movie actually took place. Arkin's Feldhendler is the de-facto leader of the Jewish inmates, trying to encourage his people to keep their spirits up in spite of their surroundings. Several Jews make escape attempts early in the movie. After one such attempt, the Nazi commandant makes a declaration: for every Jew who escapes Sobibor, more will be killed in his place. Thus, if Feldhendler and his associates want to plan an escape, it must be one for every Jew in Sobibor. Everyone has to be given a chance. They are about to abandon any hope of escape, because to pull that off is, without question, impossible. After all, these are but simple people - with no training or experience - that would be setting themselves up against the most elite of the Nazi ranks. If they are to do this, then they are going to need someone with a brilliant military mind to make it happen.

Then one day, as if an answer to their prayers, a contingent of captured Soviet soldiers - all Jews - is brought to the camp. Their leader is Alexander "Sasha" Pechersky (played by Rutger Hauer), a man who wrote music before the war. Feldhendler tells Pechersky of the challenge facing them.

From that point on, Escape from Sobibor is not only an inspiring story about hope and defiance, but a classic tale about leadership in the most trying of circumstances. It is sheer pleasure to watch Pechersky delegate tasks to his fellow inmates ("Can you make knives?" "How many?" "As many as you can make.") in preparation for their day of liberation. When it's found out that the camp commander will be gone for several days, Feldhendler and Perchersky realize that if they are to act, then the time is now.

This is a brutal movie. Definitely a lot more so than most anything else made for TV at that time. Watching these Jews systematically butcher their Nazi captors one by one in various locations throughout the camp is to this day one of the most endearing things I've ever seen produced for television. There's plenty of investment into the story and when the point of no return comes, there's payoff in spades. Indeed, the escape scene may be one of the most thrilling ever put to film. Rutger Hauer went on to win a Golden Globe for Supporting Actor (Television) for his portrayal of Pechersky.

There are two versions of Escape from Sobibor: one is the "standard" edition but there is also one that adds substantially several more minutes to the story. I've seen both, and prefer the longer one more. But to date you can only find the shorter version on DVD. I'm hoping that someday, whoever owns the rights to it will release the longer cut on DVD. Of all the movies about the Holocaust that I know of, this is the one that I would recommend as must-see viewing in a college classroom... and many high school ones for that matter.

You can still find the "standard" edition on Amazon.com and a few other places though. And you can even watch the full movie online in a few places on the Web. Click here to watch Escape from Sobibor on CinemaNow. You must be using Internet Explorer for it to work, and hit "Yes" then "Play" when prompted. It doesn't cost anything to watch it by the way.

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