Television: Reliving the Nazi Nightmare

HOLOCAUST NBC, April 16 through April 19

At first it seems like an obscene idea: a network mini-series about the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. American television has a tendency to trivialize almost everything it touches, and, of all important subjects, the Holocaust should be immune to such treatment. But about an hour into Part 1 of Holocaust's four installments, it is clear that this NBC Big Event is far from the same network's Loose Change or King—or just about any other TV movie. Not only is Holocaust faithful to the facts of a horrific historical episode, this show also has the power to keep fickle TV viewers riveted to the tube. It is an uncommonly valuable achievement: Holocaust is likely to awaken more consciences to the horrors of the Third Reich than any single work since Anne Frank's diary nearly three decades ago.

What makes Holocaust particularly fascinating is that it is an orthodox product of network television. The creation of veteran TV showmen, it is splintered by commercial breaks and loaded with soap-opera plot devices designed to make the audience tune in each night. Yet Holocaust demonstrates that TV's built-in limitations can become assets: they can make difficult material more accessible to a mass audience. It is hard to imagine Holocaust being so effective in another format. Were the show exhibited in movie theaters, no one would sit still for its 9½-hour running time. Were it produced for PBS, Holocaust would probably be drowned in a sea of historical minutiae. By creating their show for NBC, the authors have forced themselves to be equally responsive to the demands of both prime-time show biz and historical accuracy. They prove that such a marriage of commerce and art can bear remarkable fruit.

Like Roots, Holocaust is neither documentary nor docudrama, but a fictionalized interpretation of real events. Its dramatic structure is simple: Writer Gerald Green has invented a bourgeois family of assimilated Jewish Berliners and then propelled its members through the events of 1935-45. Shortly after the show opens, the head of the Weiss family, a doctor played by Fritz Weaver, is exiled from Berlin to the Warsaw Ghetto. His wife (Rosemary Harris) soon follows, and eventually the couple end up in Auschwitz. The oldest Weiss son (James Woods), an artist, marries a Roman Catholic (Meryl Streep), only to be sent to Buchenwald, then to the "privileged" camp of Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz. His brother (Joseph Bottoms) goes on the run, meets and marries a Czech Zionist (Tovah Feldshuh), and later joins the underground Jewish partisans fighting in the Ukraine. As Green traces the stories of these and many related characters, the audience gradually takes in the panorama of the Holocaust. It stretches from the first major anti-Jewish riot in Berlin (the 1938 Kristallnacht) to the early stages of the postwar struggle to create the state of Israel.