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Holocaust touches those inside and ‘Beyond the Fence’
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By CYNTHIA DETTELBACH
Editor
Race and racism in America have been front and center these last few months. Certainly in the presidential election, and also in films.
In the last several weeks alone, for example, Hollywood films about African-Americans have filled movie screens. They include “The Secret Life of Bees,” about three black sisters in the 1960s South; “The Express,” the story of Ernie Davis, the first black Heisman Trophy winner; and “Miracle at St. Anna,” a Spike Lee film focusing on four black soldiers in World War II.
Serendipitously, an hourlong documentary airing on WVIZ-TV, Sun., Nov. 9, also has as a key component an African-American who was a soldier during World War II. His story makes up one of several interlocking tales in “Beyond the Fence at Buchenwald.”
The film was written and directed by Columbus, Ohio, filmmaker Sam Nahem; executive producer was Dr. Herbert Hochhauser, retired German literature professor and former head of the Jewish studies department at Kent State University.
“Beyond the Fence” skillfully interweaves historic file footage of earlier German history and of the liberation of Buchenwald with current interviews of former GIs and survivors who were at the liberation.
More than 60 years ago, admits Leon Bass, he was one angry black GI. In the States during those years, he recalls bitterly, “I couldn’t get a meal in a restaurant, have a seat (where I wanted) on the bus, or drink the water in Macon, Ga. So what was I fighting for? I felt my country was using me.” (Similar sentiments were expressed by black soldiers in “Miracle at St. Anna.”)
On April 11, 1945, Bass had “the shock of (his) life,” which would totally change the course of his life. As part of Patton’s Third Army and a member of an all-black military unit, he helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp, located less than five miles from the city center of Weimar, Germany. Weimar, the home of Bach, Goethe, and Schiller, was now forever associated with Hitler and the mass starvation and murder of some 50,000 inmates, most of whom were Jews.
To his horror, Bass confronted images he would never forget that April day: Dead bodies stacked four feet high and ten feet across, as well as the living dead: skeletal men and boys with glazed, hopeless eyes. In an instant Bass learned that “suffering and persecution were not mine alone.”
Another liberator in “Beyond the Fence” is Ernst Cramer, a German Jew who, by coming to America in 1939, escaped the fate his parents suffered. Cramer describes the stench assaulting him at Buchenwald and the sight of prisoners with “no blankets, no toilets, no water, no nothing.”
On the other side of the fence, we meet some of those who were once part of Buchenwald’s living dead. Articulate, charming Robert Wajsman describes watching his older brother being taken away in a truck because he had been sick and unable to work at a slave labor camp. Soon afterward, he says, he “heard the muffled sound of machinegun fire.”
Sent later to Buchenwald, Wajsman, who had lost both his brother and his father, made friends with fellow prisoner Abe Chapnick. Both agree that their friendship (something unusual in the camps, notes filmmaker Nahem) played a large part in their survival.
As in so many Holocaust documentaries, the most touching parts are the comments of those who lived through that unspeakable time. Wajsman, for example, describes the day of liberation: “We saw, in their (the soldiers’) eyes the horror of what they were looking at. They were upset, moved. There was pity, but also love.”
When one soldier asked him his name, Wajsman blurted out the serial number burned into his forearm. When the soldier repeated his request for his name, “this brought me back to humanity,” recalled Wajsman. “I have a name; I no longer need a number.”
“Beyond the Fence” is the third Holocaust film producer Hochhauser and Nahem made together since they met 10 years ago. Nahem describes Hochhauser as an “important colleague because he knows history and is intelligent and insightful.” Hochhauser, who has won six regional Emmys for his previous Jewish-themed films, describes Nahem as a “genius and a pleasure to work with.”
Asked about the most meaningful element or moment in the film for him, Nahem thinks for a moment before citing a brief scene toward the end: Former GI Bass, who spent his postwar years as a schoolteacher, and former Buchenwald inmate Wajsman, retired from the hotel and restaurant business, speak together at a school before 700 youngsters of mixed racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The two men, who met each other in 1985 and have been friends ever since, says Nahem, helped the kids “connect” with them and with each other. (Not enough of this event appears in the film to give it the emotional resonance it has for Nahem.)
Bass and Wajsman, an African-American and a Jew, by a quirk of history found themselves on different sides of the Buchenwald fence in 1945. (At a different time or in a different place, those sides could easily have been reversed!) More importantly, reflects Nahem, both men “were able, ultimately, to see beyond their (respective black and white) fences” and rejoice in their common humanity and survival.
Or, as Bass says so movingly at the film’s conclusion, “It’s my Holocaust, too.”
cdettelbach@cjn.org
What: “Beyond the Fence” documentary in commemoration of Kristallnacht
When: Sunday, Nov. 9, at 10:30 p.m.
Where: WVIZ-TV
This program is preceded at 9 p.m. by “God on Trial”
In the last several weeks alone, for example, Hollywood films about African-Americans have filled movie screens. They include “The Secret Life of Bees,” about three black sisters in the 1960s South; “The Express,” the story of Ernie Davis, the first black Heisman Trophy winner; and “Miracle at St. Anna,” a Spike Lee film focusing on four black soldiers in World War II.
Serendipitously, an hourlong documentary airing on WVIZ-TV, Sun., Nov. 9, also has as a key component an African-American who was a soldier during World War II. His story makes up one of several interlocking tales in “Beyond the Fence at Buchenwald.”
The film was written and directed by Columbus, Ohio, filmmaker Sam Nahem; executive producer was Dr. Herbert Hochhauser, retired German literature professor and former head of the Jewish studies department at Kent State University.
“Beyond the Fence” skillfully interweaves historic file footage of earlier German history and of the liberation of Buchenwald with current interviews of former GIs and survivors who were at the liberation.
More than 60 years ago, admits Leon Bass, he was one angry black GI. In the States during those years, he recalls bitterly, “I couldn’t get a meal in a restaurant, have a seat (where I wanted) on the bus, or drink the water in Macon, Ga. So what was I fighting for? I felt my country was using me.” (Similar sentiments were expressed by black soldiers in “Miracle at St. Anna.”)
On April 11, 1945, Bass had “the shock of (his) life,” which would totally change the course of his life. As part of Patton’s Third Army and a member of an all-black military unit, he helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp, located less than five miles from the city center of Weimar, Germany. Weimar, the home of Bach, Goethe, and Schiller, was now forever associated with Hitler and the mass starvation and murder of some 50,000 inmates, most of whom were Jews.
To his horror, Bass confronted images he would never forget that April day: Dead bodies stacked four feet high and ten feet across, as well as the living dead: skeletal men and boys with glazed, hopeless eyes. In an instant Bass learned that “suffering and persecution were not mine alone.”
Another liberator in “Beyond the Fence” is Ernst Cramer, a German Jew who, by coming to America in 1939, escaped the fate his parents suffered. Cramer describes the stench assaulting him at Buchenwald and the sight of prisoners with “no blankets, no toilets, no water, no nothing.”
On the other side of the fence, we meet some of those who were once part of Buchenwald’s living dead. Articulate, charming Robert Wajsman describes watching his older brother being taken away in a truck because he had been sick and unable to work at a slave labor camp. Soon afterward, he says, he “heard the muffled sound of machinegun fire.”
Sent later to Buchenwald, Wajsman, who had lost both his brother and his father, made friends with fellow prisoner Abe Chapnick. Both agree that their friendship (something unusual in the camps, notes filmmaker Nahem) played a large part in their survival.
As in so many Holocaust documentaries, the most touching parts are the comments of those who lived through that unspeakable time. Wajsman, for example, describes the day of liberation: “We saw, in their (the soldiers’) eyes the horror of what they were looking at. They were upset, moved. There was pity, but also love.”
When one soldier asked him his name, Wajsman blurted out the serial number burned into his forearm. When the soldier repeated his request for his name, “this brought me back to humanity,” recalled Wajsman. “I have a name; I no longer need a number.”
“Beyond the Fence” is the third Holocaust film producer Hochhauser and Nahem made together since they met 10 years ago. Nahem describes Hochhauser as an “important colleague because he knows history and is intelligent and insightful.” Hochhauser, who has won six regional Emmys for his previous Jewish-themed films, describes Nahem as a “genius and a pleasure to work with.”
Asked about the most meaningful element or moment in the film for him, Nahem thinks for a moment before citing a brief scene toward the end: Former GI Bass, who spent his postwar years as a schoolteacher, and former Buchenwald inmate Wajsman, retired from the hotel and restaurant business, speak together at a school before 700 youngsters of mixed racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The two men, who met each other in 1985 and have been friends ever since, says Nahem, helped the kids “connect” with them and with each other. (Not enough of this event appears in the film to give it the emotional resonance it has for Nahem.)
Bass and Wajsman, an African-American and a Jew, by a quirk of history found themselves on different sides of the Buchenwald fence in 1945. (At a different time or in a different place, those sides could easily have been reversed!) More importantly, reflects Nahem, both men “were able, ultimately, to see beyond their (respective black and white) fences” and rejoice in their common humanity and survival.
Or, as Bass says so movingly at the film’s conclusion, “It’s my Holocaust, too.”
cdettelbach@cjn.org
What: “Beyond the Fence” documentary in commemoration of Kristallnacht
When: Sunday, Nov. 9, at 10:30 p.m.
Where: WVIZ-TV
This program is preceded at 9 p.m. by “God on Trial”
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