Every film I’ve ever seen about the holocaust shows jews as middle class / wealthy but really the majority of victims were peasants from small villages. Doesn’t this just eat into the stereotype?
Every film I’ve ever seen about the holocaust shows jews as middle class / wealthy but really the majority of victims were peasants from small villages. Doesn’t this just eat into the stereotype?
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Most films about the Holocaust tend to show the concentration camps. I think about movies like The Pianist, Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, or non-American films, such as Son of Saul and The Zone of Interest. This is for several reasons.
First off, iconography is important. Because the concentration camps are very tangible icons, and they are still here and you can visit them, it is much easier to make a film about this. Same goes for showing a tattoo on an arm – we know what it stands for, even if in reality only prisoners of Auschwitz were tattooed.
Because these icons are repeated so much in every film we have seen so far about the Holocaust, it becomes easier for a screenwriter, a film director or a film producer to make a new movie about this. The comparison is may be a bit unjust, but it is the same how it goes with Marvel films or Star Wars – people know those worlds and they just want a new story in it. And in the end, a Holocaust-film is entertainment – it is easier to tell them a new story within the confines of what they already know. So probably more films about the camps get greenlit.
This is important because a lot of the Jewish peasants in Eastern Europe were not killed in concentration camps (read about it in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands). They were killed by the Einsatzgruppen or in the ghettos – before death camps really took off. Peasants were shot in or near their hometowns (read about it in Christopher Brown’s book Ordinary Men) or herded into ghettos, were they were poorly housed, hardly fed and did not have the knowledge or network in the city they were in to survive – which city dwellers did have.
Then the fact that the survivor rate in concentration camps was higher than when the Einsatzgruppen murdered whole towns. This means we have more survivor accounts by people in concentration camps. Add to this that writing a book about your experiences is done much less by lesser-educated people in general, and there is a huge gap in quantity and quality of available source material to even make films about – only a handful of completely fictional films have been made about the Holocaust, most tend to follow at least one survivor account.
So in the end, peasants really drew the short stick in the Holocaust – being murdered in greater numbers by malnourishment or Einsatzgruppen. If they survived, they were probably less likely to produce detailed accounts that could be used to base screen plays on – and then it is uncertain if those screen plays would have been greenlit, because it is simply not the Holocaust the general public knows.
There are films and television series in which the Einsatzgruppen and as such the killing of Jewish peasants is shown. Unsere Mutter, Unsure Vater would be one suggestion, Come and See another. Defiance shows the partisan struggle in the countryside.
There are actually some books about the Holocaust in film too, although I think that some of them have aged a bit – Holocaust and the Moving Image is now 20 years old, and a lot of movies have come out since then, but it is still an impressive work.
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OP, I need more info about your sources stating that “majority of the victims were peasants from small villages” – because regarding Polish Jews it’s false. B
According to Polin Insitute, in 1939 78% of Polish Jews lived in cities and towns and over 25% in five major urban centres.
The impression that Jews were wealthy may play into demograficznego of survivors- according to foreword of “Żydzi. Autobiografia Polska” Urban assimilated Jews had a better change of surviving owning to money and contacts in Polish population allowing them to change the place of residence, getting false papers and passing as Polish christians
Most Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian Jews were killed by the einzatsgruppen, a branch of the SS responsible for the murder of rural peasants. While many American films focus on Polish Jews who were first put into ghettos and then deported to concentration camps, many Soviet films (“come and see”, for example) portray the actions of the SS and the wehrmacht, who would committ mass execution of peasants with bullets on site. This is mostly because American troops liberated concentration camps in Germany, but never saw the murders of the einzatsgruppen. However, the murder of Jewish and non Jewish peasants took place mostly on Soviet territory (see Babyn Yar, for example).