World War II (1939-45)

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      Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

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      A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Spirit of ’45’ Review: Here Comes Nationalization

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      A documentary from Ken Loach sees the end of World War II as a brief moment of possibility for socialism in Britain.“The Spirit of ’45” is, atypically, a documentary from Ken Loach, whose tireless chronicles of Britain’s working class (“Kes,” “Sorry We Missed You”) have generally been dramas.It is also not new. The documentary had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2013 and opened in Britain shortly after that. Released for the first time in the United States, it is relevant in a perennial sense but somewhat dated. The people interviewed in this movie could not know that their despised Tories would still hold power today. (The 2016 Brexit vote — indeed, any mention of the European Union — is also conspicuous by its absence.)The film’s central idea is that Britain had reached a rare moment of possibility after World War II and the general election of 1945, when the Labour leader Clement Attlee became prime minister with an avowedly socialist agenda. Loach charts the nationalization of Britain’s health service, transportation sectors and coal mines. Britons who remember the changes share stories of how those shifts and new plans for quality housing almost universally improved their lives (although there is mention of some missed opportunities with the mines). “The Spirit of ’45” then flashes forward to show how the conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her successors rolled those policies back.As in much of his recent fiction work (including the Palme d’Or-winning “I, Daniel Blake”), Loach largely ignores counterarguments. Even viewers sympathetic to his politics may roll their eyes at how infrequently the film acknowledges trade-offs and price tags, except when the costs relate to the inefficiencies of privatization. There is a powerful historical case to be made here, but it requires engaging with nuance, not merely expressing conviction.The Spirit of ’45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Friedrich Cerha, 96, Who Finished Another Composer’s Masterpiece, Dies

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      His skill in completing Alban Berg’s “Lulu” almost 40 years after Berg’s death was considered one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century.Friedrich Cerha, an Austrian composer and conductor who was best renowned for taking on the arduous task of completing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu,” and whose skill in the effort confirmed that work as one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Vienna. He was 96.His death was announced by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause.Mr. Cerha wrote several stage works, of which three — “Baal,” “Der Rattenfänger” and “Der Riese vom Steinfeld” — were produced by the Vienna State Opera. He composed orchestral, chamber and other music that found rare stylistic range within the broad confines of postwar modernism. He was a crucial figure in the rebuilding of the Viennese new-music scene, cofounding and then conducting its leading ensemble, Die Reihe. And he was a dedicated teacher to his students, who included the composer Georg Friedrich Haas.But at least outside Austria, Mr. Cerha was known less for his own work than for his celebrated contribution to another composer’s masterpiece.Berg had not quite finished orchestrating “Lulu” when he died in December 1935, although the opera, a successor to his earlier “Wozzeck,” had already become a cause célèbre for critics of Nazi cultural policies. He had set “Lulu” aside earlier that year to write his Violin Concerto and returned to it in the fall only to be struck down, partway into its third act, with an infected abscess.From its Zurich premiere in 1937 on, “Lulu” was staged in a two-act form that offered evidence of the work’s stature yet disfigured the composer’s theatrical and musical design. But by the early 1960s, scholars led by George Perle had become convinced that Berg had considered “Lulu” all but complete, and that the available materials, including a short score, made a realization both possible and necessary. Berg’s widow, Helene, banned any such thing, and his publisher, Universal Edition, publicly followed her lead. Privately, it did not.Mr. Cerha, meanwhile, had long been interested in the Second Viennese School, of which Berg was a part. Mr. Cerha had studied with former members of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle and had programmed a work by Anton Webern for the debut concert of Die Reihe, in March 1959. In June 1962, Mr. Cerha saw Karl Böhm lead “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and found the two-act truncation painful to watch. The next day, he went to the offices of Universal Edition, asked for whatever documents they had and set secretly to work.A scene from Mr. Cerha’s completed edition of Berg’s “Lulu,” staged by the Paris Opera in 1979. Colette Masson/Roger-Viollet, via Granger The task was considerable. Nine hundred or so bars of one of history’s most complex scores were left to orchestrate, and although Berg’s intricate structure meant that material from the first two acts could be reused in the third, some imagination was still needed. It took Mr. Cerha until 1974 to finish it, before making further revisions after Mrs. Berg died in 1976.There was pressure, too — far more than most composers faced in their own work. “Lulu” already had a towering reputation, and its effective banning by the Nazis had kept it a political symbol after the war. When the Paris Opera finally staged Mr. Cerha’s edition, on Feb. 24, 1979, it offered “perhaps the most important and glamorous operatic premiere since the end of World War II,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a front-page review in The New York Times.Mr. Cerha’s contributions were so successful that he became almost a ghostwriter: He revealed “Lulu” at its full greatness, while shying away from the spotlight.His fellow composers were impressed. Pierre Boulez, who conducted the premiere, said Mr. Cerha had worked “with great care, competence and mastery.” Mr. Perle wrote that “nowhere does one have the impression that a hand other than the composer’s has had to take over.”Gyorgy Ligeti went further, saying in 1986 that Mr. Cerha, a friend, had a “total lack of vanity, which enabled him to enter wholeheartedly into the way of thinking of a congenial yet nevertheless different composer, and to sacrifice thousands of hours, and days, of his own composing.”“No one else,” Ligeti added, “could have done that.”Friedrich Paul Cerha was born in Vienna on Feb. 17, 1926, the only child of Paul and Marie (Falbigel) Cerha. His father was an electrical engineer. Friedrich learned the violin from about age 6 and had written a few compositions by the time of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.Like his parents, young Friedrich despised Nazism, but was conscripted first to aid the Luftwaffe in air defense and later, in 1944, into the Wehrmacht. He deserted, was caught, was sent to the front and deserted again, this time walking hundreds of miles south from Göttingen, in the middle of Germany, through the Thuringian Forest and into the mountains of Tirol, where he hid at high altitude in a hut at Lamsenjoch.The experience of fascism, and of his freedom from it, left Mr. Cerha with a lifelong reluctance to adhere to aesthetic dogmas, or even to focus solely on music; he painted, and sculpted a stone chapel in woods near his second home in Maria Langegg. After studying in Vienna at the conservatory and the university, from which he earned a doctorate in 1950, he spent three summers at Darmstadt, Germany, the hothouse of the European avant-garde, but did not lastingly embrace a single compositional school over another.“I have never fanatically advocated artistic goals,” Mr. Cerha told Universal Edition’s magazine in 2012. “I always acted from an inner conviction.”The legacy of the war is particularly audible in “Spiegel,” a frightening array of seven soundscapes for orchestra and tape that was arguably Mr. Cerha’s most important work. Dating from 1960-61, its clouds of sound resemble the far shorter, more static works that Ligeti wrote around the same time, like “Atmosphères,” and it made Mr. Cerha famous.But “Spiegel,” which he wrote without regard for practicality and did not premiere as a cycle until 1972, is also quite different, with narrative elements that add up to a terrifying hour-plus portrayal of disastrous force. In “Spiegel VI,” a maniacal march slams into nervous strings and winds, the brass braying grotesquely in the ensuing carnage; in “Spiegel V,” relentless drumrolls herald a consuming darkness — the abyss.“The pieces were invented in a purely musical way,” Mr. Cerha wrote in notes for a recording on the Kairos label. “It was only long after their completion that I understood the degree to which this work was influenced by the horrors of my war experiences and the limitless joy of freedom that I felt as a deserter in the midst of nature.”His wife, Gertraud Cerha, a musician herself, whom he married in 1951, was the keyboard soloist in the 1960 premiere of a serialist piece for harpsichord and ensemble, “Relazioni fragili.” She survives him, as do two daughters, Ruth and Irina, and two grandchildren.For some critics, the “Lulu” experience seemed to draw out a Bergian expressivity in Mr. Cerha’s style, and some of his later works — “Nacht” for orchestra, say, or his “8 Sätze nach Hölderlin-Fragmenten” for string sextet — indeed have a familiar, muted lyricism to them, though others do not. He bridled at the suggestion, however: His own works were his, alone.“That was very strange,” he told Universal Edition of this purported influence. “Before the third act of ‘Lulu’ had its world premiere, nobody ever connected me to Berg, but in the years after, this suddenly happened all the time. People detected a connection to Berg, which is of course nonsense.” More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

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      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More

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      in Movies

      Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

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      In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More

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      in Music

      Review: ‘The Silent Woman,’ an Opera About Putting on an Opera

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      Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera, composed amid the Nazis’ rise to power.ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — “Ha! A silent woman?,” sings the basso buffo Morosus in Richard Strauss’s “Die Schweigsame Frau.” “You’ll only find her in a churchyard under a stone cross.”The casual misogyny of Strauss’s only opera buffa — a work that unfolds like a love letter to Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti — was hardly a point of controversy when it premiered in Dresden in 1935. But controversy there was: The opera’s libretto was written by Stefan Zweig, a Jew, who submitted it two weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933.On Friday night, Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of “The Silent Woman” at Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College that went some way toward reconciling the featherlight subject and its fraught historical context. The witty staging, engaging cast and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.Much has been written about Strauss’s miscalculations with regards to the Nazi regime, his attempts to stay out of politics while currying favor and protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons.He accepted the presidency of the Reich Chamber of Music, a post he later described as a “tiresome honorary office” in a letter that got him into hot water. In his notebooks, he called Nazi antisemitism “a disgrace to German honor.” Ultimately, he underestimated the National Socialist dictatorship as a political fashion, a nuisance affecting his work with Zweig, who was forced to flee the country.Strauss, who once thought his creativity wouldn’t survive the sudden death of his beloved librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, wrote to Zweig: “If you abandon me, too, I’ll have to lead from now on the life of an ailing, unemployed retiree.”According to a letter from Strauss, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler, presumably finding nothing subversive in “Frau,” approved it. After Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name appear on the program book, the propagandist and his boss skipped the premiere. It was only after Strauss expressed his dim view of Nazism in a letter intercepted by the Gestapo that the opera was banned.In 1942, Zweig, under pain of exile in Brazil, took his own life. Strauss, defeated by the bombing of Germany’s opera houses and the collapse of its culture, nonetheless had music left in him, including his Horn Concerto No. 2 and the “Four Last Songs.”From left, Matthew Anchel, Federico DeMichelis, Anya Matanovic, Edward Nelson, David Portillo, Chrystal E. Williams, and members of the Bard Festival Chorale.Stephanie BergerAgainst this backdrop we have “Die Schweigsame Frau,” an opera about the retired admiral Morosus, whose tinnitus makes him a world-class grouch who can’t bear the tolling of church bells or the idea of a nagging spouse. Zweig supplied an Italianate comedy without psychological underpinning, and Strauss was delighted.When Morosus’s nephew Henry shows up with his theater troupe, Morosus, appalled at Henry’s chosen career, disinherits him and insults his wife, Aminta. The troupe teaches him a lesson recognizable from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”: Aminta, disguised as a demure ingénue, marries Morosus in a sham ceremony and proceeds to throw tantrums and turn his life upside-down until he begs for mercy.For Bard’s delightful production, the director and set designer Christian Räth stages “Frau” as an opera about putting on an opera. Stagehands execute scene changes in full view of the audience, and Morosus’s single-word mantra, “Ruhe” (quiet), glows like an exit sign above the doors of his orderly home.The deception of Morosus becomes a show itself. The theater troupe riffles through clothing racks from other Strauss productions for their costumes. Morosus auditions his three potential brides-to-be on a mini-replica of the stage where “Frau” had its 1935 premiere, presenting the winner with a silver rose straight out of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” (and “The Bachelor”).The troupe — and the cast — fully commits to its roles. Harold Wilson commands a sonorous bass as the proud, endearing Morosus. Jana McIntyre (Aminta) and David Portillo (Henry) sing with bright, earnest lyric voices that hint at stridency under Strauss’s demands. Edward Nelson, sounding handsome and polished, turns the Barber into an unusually compelling factotum. Matthew Anchel, a riot as the impresario Vanuzzi, shows an appealingly compact bass with depth of tone. Ariana Lucas (Housekeeper), Chrystal E. Williams (Carlotta) and Anya Matanovic (Isotta) delve zestfully into their characters.Mattie Ullrich’s funny, dazzling costumes transformed the cast, including a male corps de ballet that never missed a chance to shake their platter tutus.Strauss underscored spoken dialogue with arch instrumental commentary, but the orchestra, at times hamstrung by his sumptuous style and parlando vocal lines, shifts its weight like an elephant in ballet shoes. At Bard, the conductor Leon Botstein, deprioritizing tonal grandeur, showed the opera to be light on its feet. The overture’s quirky doodling emerged fast and clean, and the magical duet-turned-trio that ends Act II lilted, with Straussian wafts of pungent woodwinds.Räth, injecting resistance into a work that was politicized despite itself, turned the chaotic wedding scene into a nightmare sequence: Choristers and dancers swarmed the stage with large face masks of real-life personages (including Mozart, Bach, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Maria Cebotari, the first Aminta). Ominously, the masks of Hitler and Goebbels flanked a mask of Strauss and carted him off by the elbows.The opera closes with a reflection far removed from the prevailing mayhem, not unlike the glorious final monologue from Strauss’s last opera, “Capriccio.”As the strings swelled, Wilson’s Morosus stepped forward, offering a glimpse of peace, sung with touching restraint, from an ailing, unemployed retiree at the end of his life. In his hands he held the masks of Strauss and Zweig, forced apart by murderous bigotry, reunited at last.The Silent WomanThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. More

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      in Movies

      ‘From Where They Stood’ Review: Auschwitz, as Seen by Prisoners

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      Christophe Cognet’s documentary pores over photographs, some of them clandestine, taken by prisoners, inside the Nazi concentration camp.Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” scrutinizes an astonishing record of the Holocaust: photographs secretly taken by prisoners within Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. Cognet’s analytical documentary adopts the stance of an investigating historian to explicate the pictures, which were made and smuggled out at mortal risk.Unlike many documentaries about the Holocaust, this film hinges on still images rather than archival footage or interviews with survivors. Cognet joins scholars to pore over these pictures and their silent testaments; in one clutch of images, women displaying wounds on their legs are revealed to be subjects of Nazi medical experiments. Other portraits catch people in eerily calm-looking repose.But the clandestine pictures known as the Sonderkommando photographs carry the gravest weight of all. These ghostly images depict nude women on the way to the gas chamber and, afterward, corpses left in the open air (both scenes overseen by the cremation prisoner workers known as the Sonderkommando). Shot from a significant distance, apparently through holes in the gas chambers, these figures are small and not greatly defined, but no less devastating.Cognet (who also made a documentary about artworks created in the camps) visits camp sites to re-create the precise positions and sightlines of the photographers and their subjects. His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.From Where They StoodNot rated. In French, Polish and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More