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Review
Survivors: Portraits of the Holocaust, review: unbearable at times, but a necessary insight into history
BBC Two produced a moving documentary about Holocaust survivors being painted as part of a Prince of Wales-commissioned project
If you were able to watch Survivors: Portraits of the Holocaust (BBC Two) without weeping, you are a sturdier person than I am. The subjects of this film endured the Nazi concentration camps as children. The stories they told, of being separated from their parents and witnessing endless horrors, were almost unimaginable. Yet as Jenny Saville, one of the artists in this profoundly moving programme, said: “It would be history’s mistake to think that we won’t do this again.”
The Prince of Wales commissioned portraits of seven survivors who made their lives in Britain. The paintings
will become part of the Royal Collection, on display in The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. The Prince explained: “I think we owe it to these remarkable people to remember them in this way. There is something very special about the portrait, and about the artist’s eye, in bringing out the real underlying character, personality and meaning of a person.”
Manfred Goldberg, one of the participants, put it another way. “Everything that is in short supply goes up in value. Holocaust survivors are very few now, so we’ve become a sort of precious commodity,” he said. “It may sound a strange way of putting it, but I think that’s what it boils down to: people realise that it won’t be very long before there will be no first-hand witnesses who can stand up and say: ‘This is my experience.’”
Goldberg’s experience was heartbreaking. His younger brother Herman, aged only nine, was considered too young to work as slave labour, and was permitted to stay behind in the camp. Goldberg and his mother returned one day to find that Herman had been taken away by the SS. They never saw him again. “I can still hear my mother’s wails at having lost her little boy,” Goldberg said.
These testimonies were interspersed with film of the survivors – Goldberg, Helen Aronson, Lily Ebert, Arek Hersh, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Rachel Levy and Zigi Shipper – sitting for their portraits. The artists were also interviewed, and spoke of feeling a great sense of responsibility. But there were lighter moments, as when Ebert – whose age was not mentioned here, but she is a sprightly 98 years old – jokingly asked to be painted as her 18-year-old self. She was determined, she told her portraitist, to be painted smiling. As with all of the others, she was possessed of an indomitable spirit.
The finished portraits captured something of that essence.