A Search for Meaning Beyond Their Personal Histories

In deeds and words, the twin holocausts of hatred and war continue to be woven into the literature of television and film. Healing also can be found there, too, even after more than half a century of memories and reflection.

So we have the movie, “A Midnight Clear,” opening Friday and veteran actor Curt Lowens, himself once a Jewish-German child in flight and hiding from “the camps,” playing again . . . credibly but incredibly . . . what he seems so often to do: a Nazi, a sort of Superman in temporary control.

And we also have Sunday night’s Hallmark Hall of Fame on NBC, the gentle and deceptively named “Miss Rose White” and relative Hollywood newcomer, writer Anna Sandor. The Hungarian-born child of Holocaust victims is doing what she believes she can do best, taking on and developing a deeply moving theme, in this case denial--ethnic and personal--of who we are and where we came from.

For Lowens, there is a certain symbolism in the World War II German officer role that he plays in A&M; Films’ “A Midnight Clear.” The defeat of Hitler’s forces seems certain and he and his men are near despair when they come upon an American patrol. Fearful, neither side wants to fight, yet no one knows the language that would connect them. When a lone Jewish G.I. speaks in Yiddish, Lowens the officer coldly rebuffs the attempt, an action he can recall so well from his experiences. But then a human yielding occurs, something else he can recall.

It is difficult to separate this actor from his roles. He is usually cast when a slight European, mature accent is required of an actor. Or when spoken German is called for, as in the portrayal of Nazi officials.

Lowens, born in East Prussia, saw his parents arrested after they moved to Berlin in the ‘30s as they attempted to emigrate to the United States. It was the time of Kristallnacht and the wanton hunting down of Jews. Eventually released and in possession of documents that bore an earlier but life-saving imprint, “postponed for deportation until further notice,” Lowens’ parents were able to leave with him and his older brother for Holland. Germany invaded a day after their arrival. The family scattered, the brother sent to England. Lowens’ mother was arrested and taken off in a cattle car that for Lowens remains a terrible and continued memory. Separately, he and his father were hidden in Dutch farms and homes.

Despite his youth, he joined the Dutch resistance of “righteous Gentiles” where he helped transport escaped prisoners of war, downed Allied fliers and refugees like himself.

Lowens enlisted in the British army and as a 17-year-old sergeant-interpreter was assigned to a Capt. Fox and his intelligence unit, which hunted former Nazi officials in northern Germany. It was then that he recalls “two British officers and a teen-age Jewish soldier” made a most significant find inside a castle, the remnants of the German high command.

Along with his intelligence work, Lowens also became involved in E.N.S.A., the British equivalent of the American USO, putting on entertainment for the occupation forces. In 1947, he left the army, joined up again with his father and brother in England and went to the United States where he eventually decided that after all of that turmoil a normal job or career would not be for him. He would continue to live close to the edge. He would become an actor.

While he studied English and acting he worked for the Voice of America, broadcasting 50-minute German-language programs. Then he tried out for his first acting job . . . on Broadway . . . the Jose Ferrer production of “Stalag 17,” a play about a prisoner-of-war camp.

The young actor-refugee made his Broadway debut as a German prison guard. Speaking German. In German military uniform, a role he played for a year in New York and then went on tour.

He would continue to play the Nazi, in theater, in the so-called golden age of live television and eventually in Hollywood films and television.

A friend tells him he plays these roles as a form of revenge, of getting back at those who pursued and persecuted him and his family. The actor as devil.

It is more than that. “It’s important to remember that period and what happened. But I don’t want to be remembered just for playing, say, Dr. Mengele, as I did in the play ‘The Deputy.’ The actor has to explore his character and his justifications. Why, I try to examine, did a Dr. Mengele become what he was?

“I do not want to play a stereotype. We are long past that. Now we have to portray what has made that person do what he did.”

He says his history helps him in his roles. So “In Midnight Clear,” he can remember Germans who predictably and heartlessly lashed out at him years ago but he can also remember German officers who believed him and his documents, who perhaps believed in his humanity and did not react to him as a stereotype.

He cannot play the role of victim, he says. Looping the soundtrack for television’s “War and Remembrance” a few years ago and seeing death camp scenes again tore at his emotional scars. To be victim again would be a personal terror and one he doesn’t want to visit upon an audience.

Still, there is terror in that uniform. He saw it in the eyes of Yugoslavian extras in a recent location shooting. He sees it in his own eyes as he studies even an innocent movie prop like a boxcar, and remembers his mother’s departing face.

“I have to fight the boxcars,” he says.

It is also this coming to terms with the past before moving into a future that is at the heart of Anna Sandor’s work in Sunday night’s “Miss Rose White,” which stars a melting pot only Hollywood can concoct: Maximilian Schell, Kyra Sedgwick, Maureen Stapleton and Amanda Plummer as refugees.

A Hollywood writer for only three years, Sandor earlier established herself in Canadian television. “Rose White” is her first major American television script and is based on Barbara Lebow’s play “A Shayna Maidel.”

The movie’s subject--the denial of who we are and of our ethnic origins and traditions in that most American of institutions, the melting pot--is not often a subject for Hollywood, where family names and even histories are changed at the whim of an agent’s career advisories. The assimilating Miss Rose White of the television play is Rayzel Weiss to her remaining family, trapped as she is in her own idea of Americanization.

It is an experience close to Sandor. Born in post-World War II Hungary of parents who had survived the Holocaust but who had in a sense been assimilated and had adopted a new family name, she eventually came to Canada where, she says, she began to “come to terms with who I am. I lived with the specter of what my parents had gone through, of my mother escaping a camp. I was only 8 when I left, but the memories were strong. In Canada, I began to feel Jewish. I began to make discoveries about myself and my background. I took back the family name Sandor. I became Anna Sandor.”

Actor Lowens and writer Sandor do not know each other. They have been drawn to the greener fields of Hollywood to work different arbors.

But a common, separate thread runs through their lives. It’s about the present, of where we came from and where we are going. Of how we deal with our pasts, and how much of that past we carry. Of who we really are. And where we all fit in this diverse and changing social fabric with all of its common and human and possibly enduring threads.