A New Profile in Courage

We all become witnesses through television.

Take last century’s Jewish Holocaust. TV and Holocaust literature began converging as early as the late 1940s, our most pervasive communications medium assuming a crucial role in keeping this dark history--millions of non-Jews also died in Nazi death camps--in the forefront of U.S. thinking.

So many Holocaust dramas and documentaries have been on TV, in fact, that their sheer weight carries backlash potential for desensitizing audiences instead of achieving the desired goal of increasing awareness and stressing a standard for civilized behavior. In other words, repeat a story again and again, however horrific, and the effect may diminish with each telling.

Keeping the memory alive is essential. The scenarist’s challenge, therefore, is to abandon or revise familiar Holocaustspeak and relate this cataclysmic evil in fresh ways--as an MTV documentary for teen viewers did a few years ago--or present material that’s not widely known.

As did this year’s fine “Anne Frank” miniseries on ABC, which extended the doomed young Jewish diarist’s story beyond Dutch Nazis’ discovering that famous attic hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht in occupied Amsterdam. As did HBO’s extraordinary “Conspiracy,” which this year chillingly reprised the sinister 1942 meeting at which Nazi big shots codified the grim fate that Hitler had ordered for “the Jew.”

Joining this elite group is “Uprising,” a highly worthy and moving NBC miniseries recalling the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of 1943, in which several hundred mostly young Jewish fighters temporarily held off a large, heavily armed German force attempting to deport remaining inhabitants to the Treblinka death camp. In 1940 the occupying Germans had packed Warsaw’s 350,000 Jews into this 31/2-square-mile area (where many died of disease or starvation), and less than two years later they deported 300,000 to Treblinka.

Then came the resistance by lightly armed Jews determined to live their final days “with honor,” a courageous last stand depicted persuasively and with a vivid sense of history in this account written by Paul Brickman and Jon Avnet and staged picturesquely by director Avnet in Slovakia with admirable attention to detail.

Although there was an earlier skirmish that had the Germans retreating, the main uprising lasted about a month, the bravery and intelligence driving it yielding an amazing story that is important for this generation to hear and see.

This is not TV’s first brush with this fleeting ghetto war, “Uprising” having been preceded on CBS by a 1982 account based on John Hersey’s book “The Wall.” So regularly are European Jews shown either as living cadavers or being led passively to their deaths during World War II, however, that this particular act of armed resistance (there also were others less notable) plays almost like a revelation.

“For the first time the enemy knows who we are as a people,” proclaims ghetto resistance leader Mordechai Anielewicz (Hank Azaria) after the Germans are initially driven back. When we first meet Anielewicz, his militancy puts him at odds with Adam Czerniakow (Donald Sutherland), the aging head of the ghetto’s Jewish council. The older man does stiffen against German demands to hand over 6,000 Jews a day, but events ultimately sweep him aside, and he loses heart.

Although Azaria is much older than was the 23-year-old Anielewicz, he is very solid, as are Stephen Moyer, Leelee Sobieski and David Schwimmer as other leading ghetto warriors. But there’s a bit of caricature in Jon Voight as Gen. Jurgen Stroop, commander of the German forces that crushed the revolt after being initially thwarted by these ragtag Jewish civilians. His humiliation is captured on film, meanwhile, by noted German propagandist Fritz Hippler.

“Uprising” falters in other spots too. True or not, Azaria’s early escape from custody has that dramatic-license aura, and a couple of the Jews do loud early strategizing in public as if oblivious to the existence of informers. Nor is there much of a sense here of the political and cultural strands making up these young ghetto fighters.

All in all, though, this is very good work. And never more memorable than when depicting the uprising’s dying gasps in the claustrophobic, gaseous sewers beneath the ghetto rubble, this “little group of bandits,” as one German general called them, becoming history’s heroes.

*

“Uprising” can be seen Sunday and Monday nights at 9 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).