Holocaust: The TV Miniseries Available on YouTube

It's no Schindler's List!

Elie Weisel was not pleased…

Tracy Samantha Lord has holocausts—

Meryl chews the scenery even at a young age.

I only thing I know about this is that Elie Wiesel hated it.

Credited with popularizing the term "Holocaust" to refer to the WWII genocide of European Jews. Don't google the definition of holocaust.

Why did Elie Wiesel hate it?

I imagine because it was like Roots and several of those other 1970s TV movies. It popularized a dark time in history in a way that made it fashionable.

WHET the Bottoms brothers?

Well, I guess it's better than Holocaust: 80's super soap.

[Quote]Untrue, offensive, cheap....

[Quote]Full of lies...

[Quote]...the film is an insult...

well, I can see how someone who actually lived through a real life horror would resent the event being trivialized in a "movie of the week" type format. If this is the movie I'm thinking of (though maybe it was Winds of War), there was some big kerfuffle over the partial nudity of people in the gas chambers, as if people being slaughtered like cattle would be in casual wear!

It's both sad & ironic that over the years, films & TV now show nudity, violence, foul language, etc., yet it's still impossible to capture just how horrible and inhuman it all was. It's like any art seems trivial & silly in relation to the terrible reality of it all.

That may have been War & Remembrance R11, the sequel to Winds of War, were one of the main characters dies in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

I was a huge ww2 junkie as a young man,who knows why,and I thought this was riveting. I had the video tape for years and years and would watch it every now and then. Elie Wiesel acted like he was the ONLY one who suffered during the holocaust and only HIS story mattered.

[quote] Elie Wiesel acted like he was the ONLY one who suffered during the holocaust and only HIS story mattered.

Then Oprah interviewed him and acted like she had suffered as much as he did.

[quote]Meryl! Rosemary! Michael Moriarity! Creepy James Woods! The most beautiful of the Bottomses, Joesph! And others!

Fuck you, OP!

Didn't Meryl say she did this for the money to pay John Cazale's medical bills and resented being away from him filming as he became sicker.

She also didn't like how "worthy" her character was.

Never saw it! Thanks, I’ll catch up now!

I enjoyed the movie for what it was. I get it. Elie Wiesel has a legit complaint but I think you have to reach people where they're at. A lot of people saw it . It was the fictional story of one family during the war. Fictional. That's the key word.

I saw it when it was on in April of '78, and maybe again when I got a VCR in the '80s. Like War & Remembrance, it makes my stomach get more and more queasy the longer I watch. I just tried on You Tube. I didn't make it ten minutes. I just can't watch it again.

That said, it was interesting seeing James Woods before we knew how hateful he was. I wanted to see a young Tovah Feldshuh, too, but I couldn't make it that far.

[quote] I only thing I know about this is that Elie Wiesel hated it.

I'm sure he did. He thought a tv mini-series out to get ratings "trivialized" the horrors of Nazi Germany. He also thought that it nowhere near depicted how ghastly it really was. But he was taking things way too seriously. It was a work of fiction, not a documentary. And on tv back you simply could not graphically show the evils committed by the Nazis. Actually the presentation some good. It made a mass audience more aware of what happened to the Jews.

It has some really fine acting. The cast included Fritz Weaver, Rosemary Harris, David Warner, James Woods, Robert Stephens, Michael Moriarty and a young Merle Streep. Streep, Moriarty and a young actress named Blanche Baker all won Emmys for their roles.

I saw this mini-series. It was melodramatic but I liked it. Although detractors said it nowhere near depioted how bad it actually was there was a scene I thought was particularly awful. The young Jewish girl Anna impulsively runs out of the apartment where she's hiding with her mother into the streets on New Year's Eve. A group of men see she's alone and they attack and gang rape her. Afterwards she becomes catatonic. Her brother's Aryan wife arranges for her to go what is suppoed to be a sanitarium for people like her. But instead she's taken away with a group of other physically and mentally handicapped people to some kind of shed out in the woods where they are gassed to death. Later her mother gets a letter saying she refused to eat and died of malnutrition and pneumonia; they tell her that times being what they are they have taken the liberty of cremating her body and burying it on hospital grounds. The scene of the handicapped people being herded into a dwelling and watching the so called "doctors" turn on the gas is horrifying.

I like "Holocaust" better than "Shindler's List." I never did go for Stephen Spielberg's schmaltz. And God knows I liked it better than the feel good Holocaust movie "Life is Beautiful" with Roberto Benigni prancing and mugging for the camera.

It's true. Do a Holocaust film win an award. Although its just an Emmy. I didn't even bother to attend. Even G has Emmys.

I remember my dad forced our family to watch this when I was about 7, it’s where I first learned of The Holocaust. We also saw Masada but I think that came later.

I was very young when I saw this very well done, and well acted miniseries. I knew nothing of the Holocaust until I saw this series, and I have to admit that I became almost obsessed with studying the Holocaust afterwards because my mind could not fully comprehend and accept that something this horrendous actually happened.

I wonder what the factually inaccuracies were?

Everyone lived at the end, Rose..

IIRC accent-Queen Meryl doesn't use one in this.

R11 You were right about the nudity in this—it’s in the last episode with a gas chamber scene.

By the end of this series, all the characters still looked too healthy and well-fed to have been through the horrors of the Holocaust. But it was a TV miniseries of its time.

[quote] I wonder what the factually inaccuracies were?

There's a scene where Rosemary Harris is gazing at pictures of her loved ones while lying in her bunk in Auschwitz. She also has sheet music; she played the piano. After the barracks has been cleaned out and all the women taken to the gas chamber her husband and a friend of his manage to go the barracks to see their wives. Upon getting there they see everyone is gone; the friend sobs; the husband goes to her bunk and finds the pictures and music sheets there and also sobs. A very moving scene. But I think I remember hearing some holocaust survivor say nobody would have had pictures and sheet music in Auschwitz and the men would not have been able to get into the women's barrack.

[quote] Credited with popularizing the term "Holocaust" to refer to the WWII genocide of European Jews. Don't google the definition of holocaust.

The noun "holocaust" means a great fire.

But the word has been co-opted by one demographic for their own purpose.

Why didn’t Blanche Baker have a bigger career? She was very funny in Sixteen Candles.

Baker was Shelby in the original cast of Steel Magnolias (and was a bit angry she wasn't considered for the film.)

R24 Oh DEAR!

Even though it's probably been done more cinematically other places, I always thought one of the best Holocaust scenes is from Band of Brothers when the discover a camp: starving, staggering people moving towards them, buildings full of barely living humans stacked together like cordwood. Piles of bodies everywhere. All while these GIs just stand their & gape at what they're seeing. That scene always kind of stuck with me as to what it was really like to find these places

This is like one of the old DL threads! Love it.

Never heard of this and must watch it now.

Was anyone in it actually Jewish? (Besides Wanamaker and Feldshuh).

R29 I don't think it was them.

Sadly M and Tovah did not share any scenes together.

That cover screams in-flight magazine.

Three-fifths of the cast of Uncommon Women and Others

California has had the four largest holocausts.

The Dixie Fire in 2021.

The Bay Area Fire in 2020.

The Camp Fire in 2018.

The Tubbs Fire in 2017.

Let's go to the beach and roast marshmallows over the holocaust!

I remember a small uproar when the network chose to run an air freshener commercial shortly after someone in the movie complained about the unpleasant smell of the crematorium.

I am not making this up.

If I recall correctly, it was presented with limited commercial interruption. Possible urban legend, but I do remember reading something along the lines that during the first commercial break, many parts of NYC experienced a noticeable drop in water pressure.

I heard that "Holocaust" actually educated people. Seems a lot of people had forgotten, or were unaware of what was done to the Jews. That seems incredible, but a lot of people seemed to be clueless about it.

many parts of NYC experienced a noticeable drop in water pressure.

What does that mean?

^ They stopped washing.