Shai GinsburgAssistant Professor of Hebrew
Jess Schwartz Professor of Modern Hebrew Languages
Department of Languages and Literatures
Arizona State University
In the summer of 1944, Karl Rham, the commander of Theresienstadt, the Nazi “model” ghetto, ordered Kurt Gerron to make a film about the ghetto to be distributed in neutral countries. Rahm could not have picked a more suitable man for the job: Gerron was a well-known German cabaret artist, actor, and director. Yet Gerron was also a Jew and an inmate of the ghetto. While conditions in the ghetto were horrendous—tens of thousands lost their lives to hunger, epidemics, and deportations to the infamous death camps in the east—the Germans intended to present the ghetto as a “model Jewish settlement” and as a proof that Hitler was providing Jews with the opportunity to create new, productive lives.
What motivated Gerron to orchestrate such a project and to invest his energy in helping the Nazi propaganda machine? Could he have decided differently? Had he refused, would it have mattered? These are the questions that stand at the center of Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender’s film, Prisoner of Paradise, which follows Gerron’s life and career from his early success in the 1920s and early 1930s in Berlin to his death in Auschwitz.
Gerron’s story reveals the tragic paradoxes that shaped the fate of Jews in Europe in the years leading to and during the war. Forced to flee Berlin after the Nazi rise to power, Gerron struggles to revive his career in the local film industries and theatrical scenes of France and the Netherlands; achieving what turns out to be only a short-lived success, he declines invitations from his friends, now living in Hollywood, to come to America. Preoccupied with his film projects and his own self-import, he even rejects tickets for a boat ride to America because they are not first class. Only when he discovers that, because of growing anti-Semitic sentiments, he can no longer make films in the Netherlands, does he decide to pursue the American option, though, by then, no one can guarantee him work in Hollywood. Under such prospects, Gerron decides once more to pursue his luck in Europe.
After the German occupation of the Netherlands, Gerron is no longer permitted to entertain a general audience, and he moves to the Jewish theater in Amsterdam. In the Fall of 1942 he is interned and deported to Westerbork transit camp. In the camp, he is singled out, along with other famed Jewish talents, by camp commander A. K. Gemmeker to take part in the vibrant cultural scene of the camp. The 100,000 Dutch Jews that pass through Westerbork on their way to camps in the east, have the opportunity on the night before they sent to their death to enjoy concerts, recitals, and cabaret shows of some of the best-known European performers. As a leading figure of the German stage, Gerron is thus able to escape the fate of other Jews, at least for a while.
A decorated WWI hero and a stage celebrity, Gerron is not deported to a death camp but to Theresienstadt, presented as a refuge for privileged Jews, where they could wait for the war’s end. In Theresienstadt, he finds his way to the theater, directing and performing in cabaret shows. Ironically, he also becomes part of a larger performance for which the ghetto itself is the stage. Attempting to dispel rumors about the fate of Jews in the Nazi ghettos and camps, the Nazis invite representatives of the Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt. In preparation for the visit, thousands of Jews are deported to Auschwitz to reduce congestion, the ghetto walls are torn down to incorporate a nearby park, gardens are planted, and counterfeit cafés, banks, kindergartens, and schools are constructed. The ghetto is temporarily “beautified” to the finest details and the Red Cross delegate is duped.
The success of the visit prompted the Nazis to make a propaganda film about the ghetto, and Kurt Gerron was ordered to direct it. His refusal would have meant immediate death. Moreover, it was already known that the tide of war had turned against Germany. Would an act of defiance under such circumstances have been significant? When Gerron consulted with the Jewish Council of the ghetto he was told to do whatever was necessary to survive. Still, it seems that for Gerron, the opportunity to make another film meant more than mere survival; he embraced the opportunity to direct again and was thrilled to revive himself as a star. He thus put all of his creative energy into transforming images of human misery into those of blissful life, and despite his realization that his fellow inmates were victims, he furnished the Nazis with images of the paradise ghetto they demanded.
Gerron’s film did not save him. He was deported to Auschwitz soon after completing the film and murdered upon arrival. In a last strike of irony, the following day the operation of the gas chambers ceased.
The disturbing images of Theresienstadt created by Kurt Gerron testify not merely to the numerous ways Jews found themselves co-opted by the Nazi extermination machine, helping in their own destruction. It also raises unsettling questions regarding the nature of documentary filmmaking in general. If it is possible to completely mask and transform the horror of Jewish life in the ghettos under Nazi control, one’s faith in documentary reality might prove to be not merely misguided, but also dangerous and even deadly.
Prisoner of Paradise airs April 13 at 9 p.m. and midnight on Channel 8.
