Remembering the Holocaust

Survivors and historians recount stories from this tragic period
By Abigail Esten

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance month, WHYY TV12 is airing a week of special programs that recall the plight of the Jewish people during the Holocaust and explore its painful legacy:

Actor Hal Linden narrates America and The Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, an American Experience film that explores the complex social and political factors which shaped America's response to the Holocaust, from Kristallnacht in 1938 through the liberation of the death camps in 1945. The film contends that, for a short time, the United States had an opportunity to open the country's doors to the Jews, but instead erected a bureaucratic maze that prevented all but a few Jewish refugees from entering the country.
Sunday, April 7 at 2:30 p.m.

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans This quietly powerful film highlights the heroic stories of the Jewish Partisans fighting the Nazis in World War II, honoring the young men and women who dramatically fought for survival in the unforgiving forests of Eastern Europe. Surviving partisans tell of the circumstances that enabled them to make a decision that not every Jew could -- the decision to fight back.
Sunday, April 7 at 4 p.m.

Daring to Resist WHYY presents this program, produced by local independent filmmakers Martha Lubell and Barbara Attie, that follows three teenage girls who had never met but were nonetheless bound by a common concern -- how they would defy Hitler's "final solution."

The film profiles Faye Shulman, a photographer and partisan fighter in the forests of Poland; Barbara Rodbell, a ballerina in Amsterdam who delivered underground newspapers and secured food and transportation for Jews in hiding; and Shulamit Lack, who acquired false papers and safe houses for Jews attempting to escape Hungary.

Actress Janeane Garofalo narrates this portrait of three teenagers taking risks they never dreamed possible, who, despite losing their own families to the Nazis, chose resistance rather than submission.
Sunday, April 7 at 5 p.m.

Daring To Resist The Genocide Factor: The Human Tragedy This four-part series explores the history of genocide. Since 1900, over 169 million civilians throughout the world have been killed and countless other victims of "ethnic cleansing" have been raped, tortured, starved or otherwise oppressed in an attempt to eradicate their ethnic groups.

Scholars, experts and survivors discuss the complex dimensions of the horror of man's inhumanity to man, from the earliest documented examples in the Bible through contemporary times.
Monday, April 8 through April 11 at 11 p.m.

NOVA "Holocaust on Trial" The special centers around a libel action suit filed by British author David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

In her book, Lipstadt characterized Irving as a "Hitler Partisan" who manipulated the historical record to deny the reality of the Holocaust. Dramatized sequences that recreate the courtroom testimony and arguments are interwoven with documentary segments that explore evidence of the Holocaust, featuring historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Robert Harris and Auschwitz authority Robert van Pelt.
Tuesday, April 9 at 8 p.m.