The twentieth century left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, and radical social engineering. The twenty-first century seems to be following suit. This is my attempt to deconstruct it.
29 September 2022 – Over the last 5 years I have been involved in a film project that has been the most challenging of my career. It has been a deep dive into the political uses of dehumanisation, genocide and massacre, with a primary focus on the life of Jacques Semelin, one of the world’s leading authorities on these subjects. Below you’ll find the first trailer we did a few years ago.
But the project was delayed due to COVID, during which time it was also expanded significantly. The movie has been changed a bit to reflect what I have learned from my filming at the Auschwitz death camp, and my visit to the Galicia Jewish Museum located in the historic Jewish district of Kazimierz in Kraków, Poland. The Museum does a marvelous job documenting the remnants of Jewish culture and life in Polish Galicia, which used to be very vibrant in this area, and by putting the Holocaust, Jewish culture and world-wide racism in perspective.
And the movie has been changed by the Ukraine War (how could it not?) which most of you follow via my media team’s coverage of that war.
As far as the expansion of the project, besides the primary movie about Jacques Semelin, we’ve created video essays such as:
– “The coronavirus is not the Holocaust” // “Le coronavirus n’est pas l’Holocauste”
– “A conversation with Serge Klarsfeld: the survival of Jews in France” / “Une conversation avec Serge Klarsfeld: la survie des Juifs en France”
– “Some thoughts on Hanukkah”
– “Genocide begins with dehumanisation”
NOTE TO READERS: you can view all of these by accessing my YouTube playlist by clicking here.
NOTE TO READERS: you can read my Holocaust/genocide blog series by clicking here.
And the movie has brought me full circle. When I became involved in war crime investigation work over 15 years years ago, I was introduced to Jacques’ work. My mentors told me he was the seminal authority on massacre and genocide. This work has involved 100+ hours of interview time with Jacques plus numerous other genocide authorities, and allowed me unfettered access to the two Holocaust memorials in Paris, the Holocaust memorial in Washington DC, a trip to the death camp at Auschwitz, and an upcoming trip to Yad Vashem. But it also includes study of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. What started as one film has now resulted in one major film, plus the videos I noted above – with at least 5 more videos to come.
This work has also included the collection of 1,000s of stories, most of which are impossible to include in the films and videos but which I have begun sharing in a series of posts.
The first was about Heinz Drossel (which you can ready by clicking here). He was a 28-year-old lieutenant of the German infantry, sentenced to death, who would survive and marry the Jewish woman whose life he had saved.
The second was about Cioma Schönhaus (which you can read by clicking here). He was a young graphic artist that had a very special talent that helped many persecuted people to survive the Nazi regime: Cioma Schönhaus was a master forger. He started to forge passports and other documents. He developed his own method to create these documents with masterful precision.
There are more stores and videos to come.
This also led me to add to my media team in order to cover and write about the Ukraine war, all of those stories available at this link.