‘Shtetl’ Examines Echoes of Holocaust

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is the virtual reality of memorials, a huge cocoon of unthinkable, unfathomable, nightmarish history where you can browse for hours and lose yourself in an environment of doom and genocide, feeling almost as if you’re the one wearing an Auschwitz number.

Evil can’t be isolated like a virus and sealed in by bricks and mortar, however. So you’d hope that impressed visitors would look beyond the museum’s walls and see in its panoramic exhibits and hear in its stereophonic wailings from the 1930s and 1940s a metaphor for a pattern of wickedness even more cosmic. Although there are no museums yet specifically for the murdered multitudes in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia or any of the other killing fields, that in no way diminishes the horror stories there.

You’d also have quite a time persuading the kin of Lebanese civilians killed by those avenging Israeli air strikes that this month’s human carnage wasn’t their personal holocaust. And convincing Israelis shelled by Hezbollah guerrillas and slaughtered by Arab suicide bombers through the years that the holocaust against Jews had ended. And showing Palestinians how “holocaust” does not apply to the 48 Muslims gunned down in a West Bank mosque by an Israeli settler in 1994. Well, you could go on and on.

Body counts matter most to historians. To the victim, however, even a single murder is holocaust enough.

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It’s something to keep in mind as television retrospectives travel the airwaves during National Holocaust Remembrance Week, the best of which ideally note the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of others in ways that sensitize us to additional vile acts in both the past and present.

Marian Marzynski’s remarkable film, “Shtetl,” airing on PBS tonight, is such an echo, a three-hour odyssey that picks up the somber story of Bransk, a tiny Polish village, 50 years after all but a few of its 2,500 Jews--60% of the population--were rounded up by German occupiers. With horse wagons requisitioned from other Poles, Bransk’s Jews were delivered to the train station, where they were sent off to die 24 hours later in Treblinka’s gas chambers.

Marzynski is a Jew who survived the war as a child when hidden by Christians in Warsaw after escaping another Polish shtetl (a Yiddish word for small town), where he says his family was betrayed by other townsfolk and where, in his own mind, the stench of death is still too strong for him to return.

Thus, it was to Bransk that he went in 1992 with fellow Chicagoan Nathan Kaplan to document his American-born friend’s search for his roots in this wee town where Nathan’s parents lived before the Holocaust. “I am touching the places my parents touched; I walk on the ground they walked on,” says the moved Kaplan, a 72-year-old aching to learn about his ancestors before joining them.

In some ways, “Shtetl” is a slenderized, personalized “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s landmark 1985 documentary examining the Holocaust links between oppressed and oppressor.

Marzynski’s and Kaplan’s collaborator in their journey to the near past is Zbyszek Romaniuk, 29, a local Polish Catholic who says his deep interest in Jewish history has angered many in Bransk but who refuses to believe that anti-Semitism was as prevalent in Poland as many have charged.

It is this amateur historian who, admirably, has preserved the tattered remains of a Bransk Torah and, with a friend, has practiced Holocaust archeology, digging up 175 Jewish gravestones and returning them to the cemetery from which the Germans had ordered them unearthed for use as under-pavement for roads and sidewalks. Still readable on these stolen markers are the Hebrew inscriptions that Marzynski titles “a roll call of the dead.”

Here rests a modest woman

who died at a young age.

A lady named Shava

the daughter of Eljer.

“Shtetl” is anything but a nostalgia piece, though. With Marzynski narrating, it cuts a serpentine path through baffling human complexity, seeking answers to the seemingly unanswerable. Wonders Kaplan: “How can a decent man be inhuman at times?” And a decent people be inhuman at times?

Unable to reconcile clashing “revelations of righteousness and evil” in Bransk, Kaplan joins Marzynski and Romaniuk in probing the fading memories of townspeople reported to have collaborated with the Germans against the Jews with whom they once lived amicably. The film’s time travelers do, indeed, hear of anti-Semitism from some of these gnarled, toothless farmers now living with death on their noses, as one of them puts it. Yet it was never them, they insist, but always others, “the people over there,” who were guilty.

“Shtetl” has three distinct parts. After the initial Bransk section, it resumes a year later in Chicago, where Marzynski and Romaniuk confront some withering anti-Semitism on a Polish-language radio call-in program. They also travel to Atlanta, where Evelyne Silverboard’s Southern dialect is incongruous with her photo albums of the Bransk where she was born and which her family fled in 1938.

Then it’s on to Jack Rubin, now a clothing store owner in Baltimore, where he and other “Branskers” meet to hash over their ties to the Polish town. And to Brooklyn, where Holocaust survivor Yaffa Eliach displays photos taken in a shtetl near Bransk where only 29 of 1,500 Jews survived the war (“This is Banjamin Kabacznik. He was killed. He was the father of that little boy. . .”). She also recalls witnessing the murder of her mother and baby brother by the son of their pharmacist.

In part 3, Marzynski and Romaniuk surface in Israel, where the Poles’ motives are challenged by a group of high school seniors just back from touring Poland. Marzynski himself returns to Bransk, this time with Rubin, who was 16 when Germans invaded his community and 19 when he and his family were forced to move from their house on the main street to ghetto quarters on the edge of town.

In Bransk, Rubin not only relives his youth and his escape to the forest with his brother, he also encounters an elderly man whose uninhibited chattiness about Jews embodies the twisted thinking that nourishes centuries-old stereotypes.

It’s an amazing moment in an amazing, highly provocative work that concludes on an intriguing note of disharmony regarding lingering streaks of Polish anti-Semitism.

As the film notes, 11,000 trees have been planted in Israel in memory of “righteous Gentiles” who helped Jews survive the Holocaust at their own peril. Nearly 5,000 represent Poles, seven belonging to families from Bransk, where one of the Jews aided by Christians was Jack Rubin.

Yet “Shtetl” adds this footnote: When Bransk celebrated its 500th anniversary recently, Jews--who for years had been prominent in town affairs and constituted most of its inhabitants--were not mentioned in the ceremony.

* “Shtetl” airs on “Frontline” at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.