thu 28/03/2024

Holocaust

Rose, Hope Mill Theatre online review - a performer at her peak

Solo plays and performances are, of necessity, the theatrical currency of the moment, whether across an entire season at the Bridge Theatre or last week at the Old Vic in the too briefly glimpsed Three Kings, starring a rarely-better Andrew Scott....

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'I loved being a dresser': Sir Ronald Harwood, Oscar-winning writer, dies at 85

Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to the needs of the larger-than-life actor-manager Donald Wolfit. The Dresser, adapted by Harwood, went on to become a great film success starring Tom Courtenay...

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Alex Halberstadt: Young Heroes of the Soviet Union review - a familial history of the twentieth century

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a collective examination of its past, with Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich at the helm. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union looks back at the USSR through the lens of the personal, much like...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Distant Journey

Czech director Alfréd Radok’s Distant Journey (Daleká cesta) has an unprecedented place in the history of cinema of the Holocaust. Initially released in March 1949, it has been called the first fictional treatment of the Jewish experience during the...

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'You’re Jewish. With a name like Neumann, you have to be'

It was during my first week at Tufts University in America, when I was 17, that I was told by a stranger that I was Jewish. As I left one of the orientation talks, I was approached by a slight young man with short brown hair and intense eyes. He...

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Confronting Holocaust Denial with David Baddiel, BBC Two review - grappling with the incomprehensible

It’s all in the timing. Here was David Baddiel beginning a stand-up turn at a gig in Finchley. A Holocaust survivor gets to heaven, and God asks for a Holocaust joke. God says that his joke isn't funny, and the survivor replies “Well, I guess you...

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Leopoldstadt, Wyndham's Theatre review - Stoppard at once personal and accessible

It’s not uncommon for playwrights to begin their careers by writing what they know, to co-opt a frequently quoted precept about authorial inspiration. So it’s among the many fascinations of Leopoldstadt that Tom Stoppard, at the age of 82, should...

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Belsen: Our Story, BBC Two review - inside the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust

The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz reminds us once again of the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust. The revival of anti-semitism in our own country and elsewhere is why it’s worth telling these terrible stories again and again....

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The Man Who Saw Too Much, BBC One review – death camp in the clouds

Boris Pahor is the oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In this program, the 106-year-old recounts his experiences as a political refugee and prisoner to the Nazis during their rule in his native Slovenia. As a study of one...

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Werewolf review - post-Holocaust horrors

There used to be this myth that we knew nothing about the concentration camps until the victors opened their gates in 1945, and that the survivors were then nursed back to health. The Russians put out newsreels filmed weeks later of nurses tending...

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Transit review - existential nightmares for a German refugee

If you’re looking for escapism from anxieties about Brexit, the worldwide refugee crisis and rising authoritarianism, Christian Petzold’s Transit is not going to provide comfort. Adapted from Anna Segher’s 1944 novel about a Jewish writer fleeing...

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CBSO, Volkov, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review - Mahler goes Bauhaus

Just over a decade ago it was predicted by those supposedly in the know that Ilan Volkov would succeed Sakari Oramo as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the event, the gig went to Andris Nelsons, and it was probably for...

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