To some, setting any genre fiction against the background of the Holocaust diminishes that horrendous experience. This film manages that powerfully by presenting two complex investigations in one.
The very orthodox Jewish scholar Yoel doggedly searches for evidence of a massive slaughter of Jews in a small Austrian town in the last days of the war. Here Lansdorf stands in for the historic Rechnitz.
The film uses actual interview clips from Austrian witnesses. Indeed their tapes carry the most colour in the film. Yoel's real life plays out in scenes of black and white with occasional hues — books, the fruit bowl, some furniture — providing fleeting relief. That's because, as we will see, this orthodox Jew lives in a black and white world.
The Holocaust's massive presence is imaged in the warehoused files and the shots where the characters shrink against the landscape and its buried memories.
Yoel's campaign is urgent because he's trying to prevent the town's paving over the graveyard site to expand the town. He wants the Jewish bodies found, identified and properly buried first.
While the orthodox Jew feels compelled to remember the past, the modern city developers want to forget it and move forward with their development. The Austrians refuse to admit the slaughter happened.
This narrative has a happier ending in the film than in reality: Yoel finds the grave and the list of the 200 victims. The Rechnitz grave has not been found.
Equally compelling is Yoel's personal discovery — that his mother was not Jewish. So — because of the maternal line of Judaism —he isn't. She was the daughter of a Jewish family's maid. When her mother ran off they raised her. Because she loved those Jews she went with them to the concentration camps. On the eve of her gas chamber death she married a Jew. Her new religion brought her peace and strength as she entered the chamber. Miraculously, the gas failed to work. Two days later the Americans came. Her new husband gave her Yoel.
This discovery rips Yoel's identity apart. His entire sense of himself is based on his identity as an orthodox Jew. His Lansdorf campaign is based on his orthodox integrity and his commitment to uncovering the absolute truth. Not his truth or someone else's, but The Truth. He admits no alternative "narrative."
In fact this orthodox Jew is not that good a human being. Being orthodox does not always mean being a mensch, unfortunately. His broken marriage attests to his failure as a husband. His harsh criticism of his bar mitzvah son shows him not a sensitive father. And as a son? His mother dies from his brutal exposure of "the truth." He is also callous towards his assistant and cruel toward the elderly woman who might know where the grave is. (She proves right.)
But he's an Orthodox Jew — until he discovers he's not.
He is so committed to orthodoxy that he cannot continue to live as an orthodox Jew. Hence his clip and shave and shuck of ID. The discovery disturbs only him, not the others. The rabbi tells him not to change because of his mother's true identity. His secular Israeli boss agrees, because his skills and service don't depend on his faith. His sister is outraged because admitting their mother's non-Jewishness would also disqualify her, her children and her grandchildren. His ex would never let him see their son again.
But Yoel's integrity — shaped by his orthodoxy — also compels him to stop being what he has believed himself to be and now thinks he's not. As it happens, as soon as he sheds his orthodox identity he finds the mass grave. Whether that's God's approval or a mark of his clearer thinking, once disencumbered of his rigid religiosity, or just coincidence, it doesn't matter. He solves the case when he comes clean.
But his integrity comes at a huge cost. In addition to his sister's family, he himself is now deracinated. Having defined himself exclusively as an orthodox Jew, what is he now? His discovery has erased him. Where his mother warmly embraced Judaism on her own volition, without outside redefinition or confirmation, Yoel finds that accident of his birth disqualifies him from his lifelong self.
His dilemma speaks volumes in the continuing Israeli debate over the qualifications for being a Jew. Indeed, despite his heroic achievements in research Israel's orthodox can no longer accept him.
But you don't have to be Jewish to find this film's pertinence. Really, who are you? What you feel you are or what others say you are? And what purpose does religion serve if it is not to enhance the community of man instead of fragmenting it and causing bloody divisions?
So here's a film that manages to survey the horrors of the Holocaust, to address the modern age's attempts to deny, to conceal, even to perhaps repeat it —as the witness compelled to hide from today's resurgent antisemitism. And yet the film reaches further, to challenge the impositions and constraints by which any religion — or any other system, social, political, economic, etc. — reduces our common humanity.
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