Will it be Slumdog or The Reader? Mickey, Sean or Frank? Kate, Anne,or Meryl? While critics post their picks, and enthusiasts debate the merits of contenders for the major prizes--authoritatively because they've seen them at the multiplex, what about those other Academy
Award categories? In New York, the IFC center will present a program of short films beginning on February 6, live action and animated. Having seen them, I say 10 shorts in 2 hours make for a great screening. Among the 5 fine live action films, one from Germany,
"Toyland" illustrates a point I made in my last Huffington posting on the excellent film "The Reader."
Toyland's ironic title comes from the name adults gave children, bothJews and gentiles, disguising a real destination, to calm them into looking forward to the train ride, the deadly deportation East, at least in this fantasy that evokes the kidlike innocence in the feature
film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. What happens finally in Toyland is that a distraught mother takes the neighbors' son off the train as her own, in a spontaneous act of salvation. Do these fantasies of Germans acting morally and ethically in the face of potential personal
danger reflect reality or simply a desire to see themselves too as victims of a lone monster--Hitler and his Nazi spawn?
Last week's Holocaust Remembrance Day at the United Nations, celebrated on January 27, Auschwitz's liberation date, focused on rescuers, ordinary folk who risked their lives to shelter Jews. The moving program had viewers in tears imagining how the untoward history
might have been prevented had more individuals, indeed the world, paid attention to Hitler's slow and steady pronouncement of what he planned for the Jews. The UN event included a staged reading of a new play, "Irena's Vow" to open on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater on March 29. Tovah Feldshuh performs as a Polish Catholic girl whose tale is as dramatic and fraught as any story of this horrific era. Based on a true story of sacrifice and bravery, she plays Irena Gut Opdyke, who by wit and moxie hides 12 Jews in the home of a Nazi commando where she is housekeeper.
In our post-Hitler world, these acts are to be remarked on and rewarded, but not if they obfuscate the more murderous behavior that defined most people's more pervasive response during this historic period. Without diminishing the exceptional heart of exceptional
individuals, for the world to learn anything from World War II history, humane, ethical behavior must be the norm, not isolated acts now warranting recognition. Returning to the films for the Academy Awards, Toyland represents a vision for ordinary Germans to be
regarded as they wish to be seen. "The Reader," for better or worse, in the characterization of unrepentent Hanna Schmitz so beautifully portrayed in all her clueless moral confusion and perplexity by Kate Winslet, shows Germans as they truly are.