War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

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    What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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    And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now

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      Toward the end of “A Real Pain,” a movie written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg coming to theaters on Nov. 1, two first cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin approach the house in a Polish town where their recently deceased grandmother had lived before the Holocaust.Eisenberg’s character, David, the more reserved of the pair, proposes the two leave stones on the doorstep, riffing on the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.“She’s not buried here,” says Culkin’s cousin, Benji.“Yeah, I know, but it’s the last place she was in Poland,” says David. “It’s the last place any of us were.”The improvised remembrance, the interruption of self-awareness, the confused sense of duty — all are characteristic of how American descendants of the Holocaust’s victims two generations removed today commemorate an event that, nearly 80 years after it ended, can feel like something that still governs their lives, not to mention the lives of Jews and everyone else.This cohort is known as the third generation of Holocaust survivors, and “A Real Pain” is representative of their output. Which is to say: It is often not about the Holocaust at all. The cousins go together on an organized tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in Poland, but much of it — excepting a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp — is lighthearted. David and Benji grieve mainly not for the Holocaust but for their grandmother, who survived it. They struggle with their own problems, including the dissipation of their relationship. They question why they are even there.Jesse Eisenberg on the set of his new movie, “A Real Pain,” about the grandsons of a Holocaust survivor visiting Poland.Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Politics of the Gaza War Engulfed the Melbourne Symphony

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      The orchestra faced criticism for canceling a performance by a pianist who spoke about the war. Now a top leader has departed and the ensemble has opened an inquiry.The pianist Jayson Gillham was performing Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata and Ligeti’s études at a concert hall in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month when the concert took an unexpected turn.When Gillham, 38, returned to the stage after intermission, he announced that he would depart from the printed program and play a world premiere: a piece called “Witness” by his friend, the composer Connor D’Netto, dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza.Speaking to the audience, Gillham blamed Israel for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinian journalists over the past 10 months, and said that “the killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.”The next day, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which had presented Gillham’s solo recital, informed him it was removing him from a planned concert with the orchestra a few days later, replacing his Mozart piano concerto with a Beethoven symphony. The ensemble said in a letter to audience members that Gillham had made “unauthorized statements” that represented an “intrusion of personal political views” on a piano recital.“I was really surprised,” Gillham said in an interview. “It felt like an overreaction.”A backlash followed: Artists, journalists and music fans in Australia denounced the Melbourne Symphony for canceling Gillham’s performance and defended his right to free speech. The orchestra backtracked, issuing a statement saying it had been wrong to cancel Gillham’s appearance and that it would work to reschedule it. It wound up canceling the Beethoven performance, citing “safety concerns.”But the fallout has continued.On Monday, the Melbourne Symphony announced that its managing director, Sophie Galaise, was departing. The ensemble said it was commissioning an outside investigation into the incident, to be led by Peter Garrett, the former lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, who has also been a government minister.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Met Commissions an Opera About Abducted Ukrainian Children

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      The work, by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets and the American playwright George Brant, is inspired by the accounts of mothers whose children were taken during the war.The Metropolitan Opera announced Monday that it had commissioned a new opera about Russia’s abduction and deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children, the latest action by the company to show support for war-torn Ukraine.The work, which will be written by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, with a libretto by the American playwright George Brant, tells the story of a mother who makes a long and perilous trip to rescue her daughter, who is being held at a camp inside Crimea.While the characters in the opera are fictional, the story is based on real-life accounts by Ukrainian mothers who have described making the harrowing 3,000-mile journey from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory, and back again, to recover their children from the custody of the Russian authorities.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said the aim was to “support Ukraine culturally in its fight for freedom.”“I can’t think of a better way of doing that,” he said, “than having an opera that actually documents an aspect of the war that underscores the individual heroism of the Ukrainian people in the face of the most dire and horrible atrocities and circumstances.”Kolomiiets, 42, a composer and oboist who has written two operas and an array of orchestral, chamber and solo works, said that he felt “a responsibility to create something great and to show something very dignified about my country.”Brant has been conducting research that will help him write the libretto.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times“The objective is not only to draw attention to Ukraine but also to shed light on similar situations around the world where mothers endure immense suffering while trying to protect their children,” he said. “I want people to empathize with this pain and use any opportunity they have, at various levels, to prevent this kind of pain from happening.”Brant, who is known for “Grounded,” an acclaimed Off Broadway play that the Met is also turning into an opera, said that he hoped to “contribute in a small way to Ukraine’s cause as it faces this staggering challenge to its existence.”Writing and staging new operas takes time. The Ukrainian opera, which the Met hopes will come to its stage by 2027 or 2028, is the latest display of the company’s support for Kyiv. The Met was one of the first cultural organizations to announce after Russia’s invasion that it would not engage performers or institutions that supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and it cut ties with one of its biggest stars, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko.Since then, the Met has helped create the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an ensemble of refugees who fled the war and artists who stayed behind, which has led two international tours. The company has also staged concerts in support of Ukraine and hung banners forming the Ukrainian flag across the exterior of the theater.The opera is being developed as part of a joint commissioning program by the Met and Lincoln Center Theater, which began in 2006.The idea for commissioning an opera by a Ukrainian composer came during a meeting last year between Gelb and Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska. The Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is married to Gelb and leads the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, was also present. Ukrainian cultural officials spread word of the opportunity and received 72 applications from composers, which were vetted by the Met.The Met draped the opera house in the Ukrainian flag in February when it held a benefit concert for Ukraine.James Estrin/The New York TimesGelb said that the Met had selected Kolomiiets because of his experience in opera as well as his deep understanding of Ukrainian musical traditions. Zelenska praised the project, saying in a statement that “the pain of Ukrainian mothers that the world should hear will be heard.”Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children has received wide attention, especially after the International Criminal Court earlier this year issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes, saying he bore criminal responsibility for the children’s treatment. The court also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, who has been the public face of a Kremlin-sponsored program in which Ukrainian children and teenagers have been taken to Russia.Brant said he had been moved after reading news reports about Ukrainian mothers. The opera will feature workers from Save Ukraine, one of several charity groups helping mothers make the trek to find their children.“I feel like there’s thousands of stories that could be told and should be told about this conflict, but this one seemed to convey both the scale of the horror that the Ukrainians face and the courage and resilience of its people,” Brant said.Kolomiiets, who has been living in Germany since last year, said he expected his score would be “gentle, naïve, emotional and even dramatic.” He said that he tries to envision a peaceful and thriving Ukraine.“The story has a happy ending,” he said of the opera. “And it’s really important for us to have a happy ending right now.”Anna Tsybko contributed research. More

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      ‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ Review: A Patchwork Record of the Armenian Genocide

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      This standout documentary combines archival footage and animated re-enactments to share one survivor’s memories.The documentary “Aurora’s Sunrise” shares the great and terrible story of Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian survivor of the genocide that began in 1915. Aurora was 14 years old and living in a small town in the Ottoman Empire when the violence started. Her peaceful life was obliterated when her father and brother were rounded up and murdered by Ottoman Turk soldiers. Aurora was then forced into a death march across the desert of what is now Syria. She survived weeks of the march and two years of subsequent violence. Aurora witnessed unimaginable atrocities: rivers teeming with corpses, children begging for their lives, bandits pillaging the caravans of survivors.Aurora escaped these horrors through the aid of Armenian resistance groups. Her survival already made her a rarity, but Aurora’s most improbable achievement was that she was able to create a contemporary record of her own memories. This film follows Aurora’s story after she resettled in America and starred in the 1919 silent film, “Auction of Souls,” which dramatized the events of her own life. She never stopped sharing her memories, including in interviews that were filmed decades later.Using many of the materials Aurora left behind, the documentary’s director, Inna Sahakyan, crafts a cohesive narrative of the woman’s life. Clips from “Auction of Souls” and footage from Aurora’s later interviews support animated re-enactments of her recorded memories. Despite the presence of material that is more than 100 years old, the parts using cutouts and rotoscoping (redolent of the 2008 war docudrama “Waltz With Bashir) are what feel the most dated. But even with that herky-jerky animation, the effect of Sahakyan’s compilation is still admirably seamless, and she creates a reconstructed, yet still personal record of a long-unrecognized genocide. The film’s coherence is a reflection of both the skill of the filmmaker, and the heroic efforts of Aurora herself to ensure that her view of history would not be forgotten.Aurora’s SunriseNot rated. In Armenian, Turkish, English, German and Kurdish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Movie Confronts Germany’s Other Genocide

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      “Measures of Men” tells the story of the systematic massacre of Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. Its maker hopes the film will bring a debate about Germany’s colonial guilt into the center of society.Germany is often praised for its willingness to confront the darkest moments of its history, but in recent years, activists have pointed to a blank spot in the country’s culture of remembrance. Decades before the Holocaust, Germany perpetrated the 20th century’s first genocide: From 1904 to 1908, German colonial officials systematically killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. This atrocity is little known outside academic circles, and there are few memorials or pop cultural depictions of those events.Now, a new movie, “Measures of Men,” aims to change that and bring a debate about Germany’s colonial guilt into the center of society. The glossy film, directed by the German filmmaker Lars Kraume, tells the story of the killings through the eyes of a German anthropologist. Aside from playing in movie theaters, where it opened last week, “Measures of Men” had a special screening for lawmakers in Germany’s Parliament, and was the focal point for a series of events at the Humboldt Forum, a central Berlin museum housing ethnological items. Its distributor, Studiocanal, said in a statement that it was planning to show the film in school and educational contexts.“Measures of Men” has also prompted a new discussion in the German media about what many see as Germany’s sluggish attempts to come to terms with its colonial past. In recent years, the country has moved to return numerous artworks acquired during the colonial period, but the process of ratifying a reconciliation agreement between Namibia and Germany has stalled, and thousands of African human remains, transported to Germany from its colonies, remain in institutional collections.In an interview in Berlin, Kraume, 50, explained that his movie was partly inspired by the 1978 NBC mini-series “Holocaust,” an early fictionalized TV depiction of the Shoah, which played a key role in spreading awareness of German guilt after it was broadcast here. “You have the possibility through cinematic storytelling to reach an audience that doesn’t engage so much with history books,” he said, adding that he hoped his film would be the first of many, much in the way “Holocaust” paved the way for films like “Schindler’s List.”Lars Kraume, who directed “Measures of Men,” said, “You have the possibility through cinematic storytelling to reach an audience that doesn’t engage so much with history books.”Gordon Welters for The New York Times“Measures of Men,” which was filmed in Berlin and Namibia, focuses on an ambitious German ethnologist (Leonard Scheicher) who develops a fascination with a Herero woman (Girley Jazama) after measuring her cranial features as part of his research. His fixation leads him to travel to German South West Africa (now Namibia), where he witnesses and eventually become complicit in the colonial slaughter.“It’s not just a film about the genocide,” Kraume said, “but also about ethnologists who want to explore foreign cultures, but destroy them.”Many of the scenes were based on real events of the genocide, which took place during a conflict between Germans and Africans known as the Herero and Nama War. After thousands of Herero men, women and children fled into the Omaheke Desert in 1904 to escape the fighting, German troops sealed off its edges and occupied the territory’s water holes, leading many to die of thirst. Lothar von Trotha, the governor of the colony, then issued a proclamation calling for all remaining Herero to be killed.After the Nama joined the fight against the German colonizers, they were also targeted, and colonial officials set up concentration camps, ostensibly to provide labor for German-owned businesses, in which hundreds of prisoners died. The film depicts real facilities in one such camp in which the decapitated heads of Herero and Nama were boiled and cleaned for export to German ethnological institutions. Thousands of skulls of unclear origin remain in German collections to this day.Kraume long wrestled with how to tell the story as a European filmmaker, and said he had decided to depict it from a German perspective for fear that centering it on African protagonists would represent a form of “cultural appropriation.” At one point in the development, he hoped to structure it similarly to Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, such as “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now,” that center their plots on conflicts between “good” and “bad” American soldiers. “But there were actually no good Germans,” Kraume said.Girley Jazama, who plays the movie’s female lead, discovered that her great-grandmother has been born in a German-run concentration camp while researching to play the role.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesJazama, an acclaimed Namibian actress who plays Kezia Kambazembi, the film’s lead female role, learned German to play her part. In preparation for the role, she spoke to relatives about her family’s connection to the genocide and discovered that her great-grandmother had been conceived in a German-run concentration camp. “My ancestors need to be at peace,” she said in an interview. “That’s why I became a part of this story.”Jazama said that, though the film had largely been made to spur discussion in Germany, it had also been a talking point in Namibia, where the events of the genocide had often been passed down via family members. “A lot of people are grateful,” she said, recalling that one audience member had shared appreciation that “now there is a visual representation of what happened, versus just it being told orally.”The reaction in Germany has been more mixed. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, the critic Bert Rebhandl wrote that the film focused too much on “German self-understanding” while pushing African perspectives to its edges. A writer in the Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that the film depicts too little of the genocide to transmit the scope of the killing and it does not do “justice to the horror.”Henning Melber, a political scientist who has written extensively about German colonialism, said that criticism of the film shouldn’t distract from its potential role in remedying what he described as Germany’s “colonial amnesia.” He said that the film “triggers a debate in a wider German public in a way that none of us academics can achieve.”Kraume emphasized that, although “Measures of Men” was meant to appeal to a mass audience, it was an explicitly “political film,” and that its rollout was partly engineered to spur a discussion. He hoped the screening for lawmakers would drive politicians to work harder at compensating the Herero and Nama, he added.A scene from “Measures of Men.” In 1904, thousands of Herero people fled from German soldiers into the Omaheke Desert, where many died of thirst.Willem Vrey/Studiocanal GmbHAlthough Namibian and German authorities agreed in 2021 on the terms of a reconciliation agreement, including around $1.1 billion in aid that Germany would pay over the next 30 years, the process has since come under fire from groups representing victims’ descendants, who argue that amount is too low, and say they were unfairly left out of the negotiation process. The Namibian government has since backtracked on plans to ratify the agreement, and the German authorities have resisted calls by the Namibians to reopen talks.Kraume said Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, should travel to Namibia and officially apologize for the genocide, and that all human remains still held in Germany should be returned. “Europe has done far too little to reconcile with victims,” he said. “I think cinema allows us to awaken emotions, and implant images that can let you see events differently,” he said. “But this is only the beginning of the discussion.” More

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      Trial in ‘Argentina, 1985’ Began Quest for Justice That Continues Today

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      “Argentina, 1985” has resurrected the country’s military rule, which ended 40 years ago. The quest persists to hold those accused of crimes against humanity accountable.BUENOS AIRES — The bones of a man, brought into light in a laboratory, had spoken.For years, he was kept inside a blue plastic box on a shelf with hundreds of other boxes containing unidentified human remains believed to belong to victims of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.Lying on a table in the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, his skeleton told a story: He was about 25 years old and stood 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet tall. Five gunshot wounds, one to the head and four to the pelvis, had killed him.And now, more than 30 years since his discovery in a mass grave, he is on the verge of being identified.“When they pass from having a number to having a name, it’s wonderful,” said Patricia Bernardi, a forensic anthropologist and a founder of the team, a nonprofit that works on cases related to abuses committed under military rule.“When they pass from having a number to having a name, it’s wonderful,” said Patricia Bernardi, a forensic anthropologist, seen among bins of human remains.Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York TimesThe identification of victims is part of a broader effort to deliver justice and accountability 40 years after the end of the dictatorship, a traumatic chapter that is in the spotlight again because of “Argentina, 1985,” a film that has earned an Oscar nomination for best international feature.A historical drama, it depicts a real landmark case that a team of lawyers pressed against military leaders in a trial that ended with the convictions of five members of the military junta, including the dictators Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, who received life sentences. Four others were acquitted.The military unleashed a wave of repression to eliminate so-called subversives, a category that came to include political dissidents, student activists, labor organizers, journalists, intellectuals and clergy members. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during the dictatorship.Ricardo Darin, background center, and Peter Lanzani, right, in a scene from “Argentina, 1985,” an Oscar-nominee for best international feature.Amazon Studios, via Associated PressIn a pivotal scene in the movie, a character based on a real-life prosecutor tells a panel of judges that the trial can help forge a peace based on justice and memorializing the atrocities.“This is our opportunity,” he says. “It may be our last.”Rather than an end, those words, taken from the real closing arguments, were a beginning. To this day, in courtrooms across Argentina, roughly 180 former military officials, police officers and civilians are being prosecuted for crimes against humanity.With more than 300 open investigations and 14 trials, the process is “permanently alive,” said Estela de Carlotto, the president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization started by women searching for their grandchildren who were born in captivity to political prisoners and then given to other families.Some investigations are focused on crimes committed in clandestine detention centers where hundreds of people were tortured and killed. In one case, a former marine captain is on trial for orchestrating the illegal adoption of his brother’s daughter, who was born in a detention center and raised by another member of the military. Her parents are still missing.Jorge Videla, center right, was sworn in as president in Buenos Aires in 1976, accompanied by Emilio Massera, second from left.Eduardo Di Baia/Associated PressIn total, more than 1,100 military personnel, police officers and civilians have been convicted of crimes against humanity since 2006, including 58 last year.Argentina’s reckoning with its past has been far more extensive than that of neighboring countries also scarred by repressive military rule, including Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Amnesty laws in Brazil have blocked military trials, while a small number of trials have occurred in Uruguay. Many top officials convicted of dictatorship-era crimes in Chile received reduced sentences.“These trials are right and necessary,” said Maria Ángeles Ramos, one of the lead federal prosecutors of dictatorship-era crimes in Argentina.“These trials are right and necessary,” said Maria Ángeles Ramos, one of the lead federal prosecutors of dictatorship-era crimes in Argentina, seen last month.Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York Times“We made this decision that what happened is unforgivable and Argentina cannot afford to ignore its past,” Ms. Ramos said. “That is a very big self-critique as a society. It’s a value that puts us in a distinctive place in the world.”The pursuit of justice has not been easy. After the 1985 trial of leaders of the junta, the government enacted laws that blocked most other prosecutions. A former president also pardoned the convicted military commanders.In the 1990s, victims and relatives of those who had disappeared staged protests outside the homes of former military rulers and others believed to have violated human rights.Teresa Laborde’s mother, Adriana Calvo, a physicist and university professor, was a key witness at the 1985 trial. She described having been handcuffed and blindfolded and calling out for the baby she had just delivered in the back seat of a Ford Falcon as she was moved from one clandestine detention center to another.Teresa Laborde in the arms of her mother, Adriana Calvo, in a family photograph. Ms. Calvo and her daughter were held in clandestine detention centers.Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York TimesThe newborn was Ms. Laborde, now 45. She and her mother were eventually released.“That trial that everyone says was an example, in my house we lived it as the gateway to impunity,” Ms. Laborde said, referring to the acquittal of four of the leaders and light sentences for some others. “Justice meant holding the last torturer responsible.”A pivotal moment came in 2003, when the Argentine Congress, responding to mounting public pressure, abolished the laws that had halted prosecutions of dictatorship-era crimes. In 2006, a court handed down the first sentence under a relaunched prosecution process.“In some sense, it was all of civil society that built this,” said Natalia Federman, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. “It became impossible for the state to say, We’re not going to do anything.”The forensic team’s work has been a key part of trials. More than 1,400 bodies have been recovered, with around 800 identified — some washed up on beaches after being hurled from planes during so-called death flights. Others, like the man in the forensic team’s laboratory, were discovered in unmarked graves.Ms. Bernardi measuring a bone at a laboratory of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York TimesThe team is keeping details about the man confidential until his identification is confirmed, but he is believed to have been a prisoner of one of the dictatorship’s detention centers. Evidence that emerged in trials involving people he was buried with helped analysts piece together a hypothesis about his identity.It underscores how trials are a crucial part of “building memory,” Ms. Ramos said, “so we all know what occurred and we talk about it.”Argentina’s military generally does not discuss the continuing investigations and trials, and its rank and file are now made up entirely of officers who joined after the dictatorship.“We do everything possible — and the continuity of the trials has to do with that — to ensure that what happened is not forgotten,” said Eduardo Jozami, who works as director of human rights at the Defense Ministry and who was imprisoned during the dictatorship.But time is a looming enemy: More than 1,000 people under investigation have died, and so have victims and their relatives.“There is a slowness, sometimes an indifference,” Ms. de Carlotto said of the pace of justice. “But our permanence and resistance is present.”A view of “Capuchita” (“Little Hood”), the attic of the Officer’s Club at the Naval Mechanics School, where people were secretly detained. Anita Pouchard Serra for The New York TimesAt a trial of crimes at clandestine detention centers, Laura Treviño recalled the early hours of Sept. 11, 1976, when she was 18. Six men in civilian clothes arrived at her family’s home in a city near Buenos Aires and took away her 17-year-old brother.The men claimed to be part of the army and asked about the teenager, Victor Treviño, a left-wing activist agitating for lower student transit fares.The men, some of them wearing ski masks and carrying guns, went to the back of the home, Ms. Treviño testified.She heard a commotion as they ordered her brother to dress. As the men led him out, his mother asked where he was being taken.“‘You’ll find out soon,’ they told her,” Ms. Treviño testified. But they never did.“That’s what we all want: to know what happened to him,” she testified. “To all of them.” More

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      A Balkan Leader Gets the Hollywood Treatment, Starring Kevin Spacey

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      A director cast the beleaguered actor as Franjo Tudjman, the late Croatian leader, whom some call a patriot and others revile as an ethnonationalist zealot.A hagiographic movie about the stiff former leader of a small Balkan country was never going to be a global box-office hit. But its director, a former water polo champion turned darling of right-wing Croatian cinema, found a novel way to generate some buzz: He cast Kevin Spacey as its star.While Hollywood has generally turned its back on Mr. Spacey because of sexual assault accusations against him, purging the 63-year-old from its roster of bankable talent and deleting him from productions already in the works, a new cinematic tribute to a nationalist leader some view as a dangerous bigot puts the “House of Cards” star front and center.The 90-minute film celebrates Croatia’s first president, the late Franjo Tudjman, a leader revered by fans as a Balkan George Washington but reviled by foes as an ethnonationalist zealot. The movie, “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” goes into general release in Croatia in February and will be screened in other countries, including the United States.The director, Jakov Sedlar, 70, conceded in an interview that in Croatia, many people, particularly the young, do not care much about Mr. Tudjman, a highly divisive authoritarian figure whom the historian Tony Judt described as “one of the more egregiously unattractive” leaders to emerge in the early 1990s from the rubble of Yugoslavia, of which Croatia was formerly a part.Warren Zimmerman, who was the American ambassador to Yugoslavia as the multiethnic country unraveled, warned in a 1992 cable to Washington that Mr. Tudjman’s election as Croatia’s president in May 1990 had brought to power “a narrow-minded, crypto-racist regime” that, in tandem with Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, was unleashing “nationalism, the Balkan killer.”But having Mr. Spacey play Mr. Tudjman, the director said last week in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, “will definitely help” break through a wall of what is at best public indifference and at worst fierce hostility toward the man who led Croatia’s battle for independence.“Ask people whether they have heard of Spacey or Tudjman, they will, of course, say Spacey,” he said. The American actor’s fame, no matter the risk of it curdling into infamy, and undisputed acting talent, Mr. Sedlar added, “will certainly attract people to see my film about Tudjman.”The director declared that Mr. Tudjman, who died in 1999, “was not a nationalist, but a patriot, an absolutely positive personality.” And Mr. Spacey, a two-time Oscar winner and a friend of the director for more than a decade, “is the best of the best actors” and “absolutely innocent,” Mr. Sedlar said.Kevin Spacey on the film set of “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” by Jakov Sedlar.Karla JuricBoth men, Mr. Sedlar says, have been unjustly maligned: Mr. Spacey by accusers like Anthony Rapp, a fellow actor whose battery claim against the disgraced star was thrown out in October by a New York civil court, and Mr. Tudjman by domestic political rivals and foreign critics angry over his role in the blood-soaked destruction of Yugoslavia.One of seven states that emerged after the collapse of Yugoslavia, Croatia today is a stable democracy of fewer than four million people, a popular tourist destination and a global soccer power.But the struggle to shape the history of the Yugoslav wars, critical to national identity in each of the countries spawned by the violence of the early 1990s, still rages across the region, particularly among filmmakers in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, the nations that saw the worst of the fighting.“The history of the war is a constant process of remembering and forgetting,” said Dejan Jovic, a professor at the University of Zagreb. Memory wars, he added, are especially active in cinema. Each side, Mr. Jovic said, “remembers only what it wants and forgets the rest.”Mr. Sedlar’s new film makes little effort to give a full and balanced history. It avoids any mention of crimes committed under Mr. Tudjman’s leadership, like attacks on Bosnian civilians, the ethnic cleansing of Croatia’s once large Serb minority and the destruction of a 16th-century bridge in the Bosnian city of Mostar in 1993. It skips his outreach to extreme nationalists linked during World War II to the Ustashe, a fascist group whose brutality shocked even some German Nazis.But, the director insisted: “This is not propaganda. It is just my view.”Croatia, almost ethnically homogeneous as a result of the 1990s violence that drove out many Serbs and members of other minorities, has mostly moved beyond the narrow ethnonationalism of Mr. Tudjman’s era and become a member of the European Union and NATO. While Mr. Sedlar has been promoting his movie, the government had been focusing on getting the country ready to adopt the euro and to enter the borderless Schengen zone, on Jan. 1.The government, though led by the political party Mr. Tujdman founded, wanted nothing to do with Mr. Sedlar’s film and rebuffed his appeals for funding. The director said he raised the 400,000 euros needed — about $425,000 — from private donors.Mr. Tudjman of Croatia, left, and President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia meeting in Belgrade in 1991.Petar Kujundzic/ReutersHe initially hoped to make a full-scale biopic to mark the centenary of the former Croatian president’s birth. But he settled for a more modest production built around Mr. Spacey’s reciting Mr. Tudjman’s stirring speeches.The director said Mr. Spacey had taken the part out of friendship, and had neither asked for nor received any payment. Mr. Spacey’s lawyer, Jennifer L. Keller, did not respond to a request for comment.Whether playing Mr. Tudjman will help Mr. Spacey in his quest for rehabilitation is another matter. It is not his first acting role since accusations against him surfaced in 2017 — he has appeared as a detective in an Italian feature and as a mysterious henchman in an American thriller — but his role as Mr. Tudjman is perhaps his riskiest.Laura Silber, an author of “Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation,” said she was mystified that anyone would want to be associated with a tribute to the former Croatian leader. She had met him several times while covering the Yugoslav wars as a journalist and found him, she said, to be “repulsive” — an unashamed bigot with a “superiority complex” who “could not control his loathing for Muslims,” the largest ethnic group in neighboring Bosnia.“He was like Dr. Strangelove meets Adolf Hitler,” she recalled.Mr. Tudjman had fought against fascism during World War II, joining Communist partisans opposed to Hitler’s puppet regime. But in the 1990s, he refused to condemn the Ustashe legacy and decreed that independent Croatia should adopt a red-and-white checkerboard coat of arms that had been used by ethnic Croats for centuries but that closely resembles the Ustashe’s symbol.Mr. Sedlar, who served for years as Mr. Tudjman’s cultural attaché in New York, comes across as a calm and reasonable man entirely free of the violent, often racist rhetoric that gave Croatian nationalism such a bad name. But he brooks no criticism of Mr. Tudjman.“Compared with his establishment of an independent Croat nation, all the other stuff is absolutely unimportant,” Mr. Sedlar said, adding, “Without Tudjman, independent Croatia would not exist.”Mr. Sedlar delivering a speech before a screening of his movie in May to mark the centenary of Mr. Tudjman’s birth. Karla JuricVesna Skare-Ozbolt, a fan of the former president who worked in his office as an adviser from 1991 until his death of cancer, insisted that while Mr. Tudjman, a former Communist general in the Yugoslav Army, had some unappealing personality traits, “He deserves a film.”“He is the father of the nation,” she said. “He did a great job.”Mr. Spacey’s performance in the film, which includes archival footage of Mr. Tudjman making wartime speeches in Croatian, consists largely of Mr. Spacey intoning the same speeches in English, walking through government buildings in white-soled sneakers and scribbling in a book.Critics in Croatia have been divided along political lines in their reviews, though even hostile ones have praised Mr. Spacey’s performance.One panned the film as “garbage” but described Mr. Spacey as “basically the best part of the movie,” adding, “He had a difficult task: to recite in English verbal sausages from Tudjman’s better-known speeches and give them a certain passion without any clear context.”Despite his legal victory in New York, Mr. Spacey still faces serious legal troubles in Britain, where he is expected to stand trial this year on charges of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty.The jury of history is still out on Mr. Tudjman, and Ms. Silber, the former war correspondent, said it was unlikely to reach a clear verdict any time soon, at least not in Croatia.“He will never be judged by history in Croatia because he delivered their independence,” she said.Julia Jacobs More

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      ‘Remember This’ Review: Finding Strength Amid Moral Failure

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      David Strathairn is remarkable in a solo show about Jan Karski, who was profoundly changed by what he witnessed during World War II.There are catastrophes so terrible that the mind struggles to comprehend them. Here is Jan Karski’s description of his visit in 1942 to a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, during which he saw dead bodies lining the streets and starving women nursing their babies from sunken breasts: “This is not a world,” he observed. “It is not humanity.” But this was humanity. And Karski, an agent of the Polish government in exile during World War II, was tasked with reporting it.Theater for a New Audience’s “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” originally produced by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, is a dignified and affecting solo show. Starring a masterly David Strathairn, and adapted from Karski’s own words by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, it brings Karski’s recollections to anguished life. With limited instruments — lights, sound, a table, two chairs, a single suit —the play evokes not only the contours of Karski’s own eventful biography, but also the horrors and privations of the war, with a particular emphasis on the failure of Allied governments to acknowledge and intervene in the murder of Europe’s Jews.A Catholic diplomat recruited by the Polish underground, Karski reported on the changes the Nazis had wrought, entering first the ghetto, and then a transport camp. “I become a tape recorder. A camera,” Strathairn’s Karski says. Later, he elaborates: “I understand my mission. I am not supposed to have any feelings. I am a camera.”The forerunners to “Remember This” are not necessarily or essentially theatrical. (Though Victor Klemperer’s “I Will Bear Witness,” which played Classic Stage Company two decades ago, is a kind of antecedent.) The more significant influence seems to be documentary film. Karski was featured in two documentaries by Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah” (1985) and “The Karski Report” (2010), though Goldman, the laboratory’s artistic director and the director here, also drew on other documents, including Karski’s 1944 memoir and a 1994 biography. Here there is frequent underscoring — the sound design and original compositions are by Roc Lee — which gives the show a cinematic feel, emphasized by Zach Blane’s evocative lighting.Strathairn delivers an expert and unshowy performance as Jan Karski, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhatever its form, “Remember This” serves as a remarkable showcase for Strathairn, who moves fluidly among characters and time periods. He leaps onto a table at one point and off it at others. Throughout, he manages to communicate both Karski’s extraordinary moral strength and his passionate reactions to what he sees. Because Karski has feelings. He is, as Strathairn depicts him, much more than a camera or a stylus — he is a man profoundly changed by what he witnesses.Strathairn delivers an expert performance, but it is also an unshowy one, never calling attention to itself at the expense of the content. This restraint renders “Remember This” perhaps most affecting and effective in the tension between the coolness and expertise of its form and the hot horror of its subject. It is in the space between these poles that the particular evil of the Holocaust is conveyed and understood, that unimaginable suffering is imagined. Allied leaders — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anthony Eden — wouldn’t be convinced of the truth, despite Karski’s efforts. But we in the audience are, which grants us a squirmy moral superiority, even as the show asks us, gently, to examine what we are doing in our own lives to oppose hate.This is most likely the lesson the title refers to. And Strathairn’s Karski articulates it this way: “There is no such thing as good nations, bad nations. Each individual has infinite capacity to do good, and infinite capacity to do evil. We have a choice.”Karski, who became a celebrated professor at Georgetown and received, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died in 2000, which means that he lived long enough to see Holocaust minimization and outright denial come back into vogue. But this doesn’t seem to have worried him. “These voices are weak,” he says in the play. “They have no future. As I tell my students, we have a future because we are speaking the truth.”But truth seems to have become an increasingly fungible concept. Faced with our current culture of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, I wonder what particular advice Karski might have for us now. How would he have recorded this?Remember This: The Lesson of Jan KarskiThrough Oct. 9 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More