The Holocaust

Latest Articles

Review: The Names of Love

Softcore sex and politics
Child abuse, genocide — those French have a way with romantic comedies.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 16, 2011

The psyche of Hitler
In La Rafle , director Rose Bosch boldly tackles the psyche of Hitler, showing the Führer enjoying the high life with Eva Braun as he instructs his minions to pressure France to hand over its Jews so he can sate his genocidal bloodlust before the Allies fully catch on to his heinous mission.
By TOM MEEK | July 19, 2011

Performing words written en route to Auschwitz

Poetic collage
It is barely conceivable how one woman, at a way station en route to Auschwitz, wrote so ardently of purple lupine.
By BY MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 06, 2011

Review: A Film Unfinished

Documentary reassembles footage discarded by the Nazis
Some realities even the best propagandists can't spin.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 21, 2010

The horror

‘The Armenian Genocide: 95 Years Later’
In April 1915, Turks of the Ottoman Empire began killing the Armenians in their midst.
By GREG COOK | April 22, 2010

Life after Pi

Yann Martel’s next allegory
In contemporary literature, the Holocaust is the okapi in the room: looming and somehow irresistible.
By CLEA SIMON | April 13, 2010

Hidden letters from the Holocaust

Dispatches
Thirteen years ago, a carpenter demolishing an old tenement in Amsterdam found 86 letters and postcards and one telegram hidden in the attic floor.
By ELIZABETH RAU | April 08, 2010

White-supremacist code printed nationwide

One man's death spread the numeric code for "Heil Hitler" across the world.
While von Brunn survived to face federal criminal charges and may yet die slowly in federal prison, he did manage to get newspapers around the globe to print a white-supremacist code praising Adolf Hitler right next to his name.
By JEFF INGLIS | June 17, 2009

Crucibles

The Wrestling Patient at the BCA; the Lyric's Speech & Debate
There was room for more than one young Jewish diarist in the occupied Amsterdam of World War II. Anne Frank, who died as a teen, is a 20th-century icon. But until recently, her feisty innocence hid Etty Hillesum's fire.
By CAROLYN CLAY | March 31, 2009

Review: Defiance

Perfectly coiffed actors in the unforgiving woodland setting is a poor choice
Edward Zwick directs the true-ish tale of the Bielskis.
By BRETT MICHEL | January 13, 2009

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

A stirring glimpse at Europe's darkest hour
The performances never falter, and even James Horner's heavy-handed score can't dim the film's unfathomable, unshakable ending.
By PEG ALOI | November 17, 2008

Film on the fringe

Jewishfilm.2008 explores the frontiers
Virtually every major city in this country hosts at least one “Jewish Film Festival” each year (even Baton Rouge and Dayton).
By MICHAEL ATKINSON | March 25, 2008

‘Beings’ there

New exhits at the Stairwell, Bannister, and URI galleries
In the front window of Stairwell Gallery sit Leif Goldberg’s life-sized coyote-man marionette and some of Erin Rosenthal’s Garbage Dancers .
By GREG COOK | March 19, 2008

A child of Hitler

Growing up in the Third Reich (a memoir)
This article originally appeared in the February 1, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
By ALFONS HECK | January 30, 2008

Diamonds in the rough

Holocaust survivor Meyer Hack kept a special collection of jewelry secret for 60 years
In 1941, 27-year-old Polish Jew Meyer Hack was deported to Auschwitz along with his mother, two sisters, and brother.
By IAN SANDS | January 17, 2008

History as melodrama

Jewishfilm.2007
Nations lie about the past.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 13, 2007

Right turns

Truth and reconciliation at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
Maybe things are getting better.
By PETER KEOUGH | January 10, 2007

Eternal returns

The Boston Jewish Film Festival celebrates life as usual
When film festivals are programmed as extensions of life, not merely celebrations of cinema, commerce, or hype, everybody wins.
By MICHAEL ATKINSON | October 31, 2006

Africans suffer while the world stands by

Despite the efforts of student activists, it’s hard to get Americans to care about death, rape, and disease in Sudan
Raised on a steady diet of “Never Again,” members of Brown University’s Darfur Action Network found it infuriating to watch the international community stand idly by as murder and rape in Darfur continued unabated.
By ALEXANDER PROVAN | June 07, 2006

Fateless

Holocaust account paints picture of the human condition
Like many harrowing Holocaust accounts, Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész’s Fateless , an autobiographical novel about his captivity in Auschwitz and other camps, poses the experience not as a special case but as a metaphor for the human condition.
By PETER KEOUGH | May 25, 2006

Democracy and distaste

The Phoenix Editorial: What we can learn from the case of a Nazi apologist
David Irving is a British historian who has spent his professional career first denying that the Holocaust took place, then saying that it had been grossly exaggerated. He is a deeply unsympathetic character.
By EDITORIAL | February 22, 2006