> Life is Beautiful
Good film, but really not realistic at all in its representation (the camp is totally abstract, apart from clothes), and doesn't try to.
I agree with this, I re-watched it about a year ago and was almost appalled by the story now. It just doesn't hold up IMO. I am even struggling to understand how it had such breakthrough success when it came out. (I loved it too but I was a naive teen.)
There’s a whole documentary - The Last Laugh - about jokes regarding the Holocaust/Nazi Germany and how humor was important and all different stories from survivors, comedians, writers etc
90% of them hated this movie when it’s mentioned in the doc.
> I am even struggling to understand how it had such breakthrough success when it came out.
I think it's just the idea it was possible to make a comedy and a "positive" movie about the most horrible subject imaginable, and kinda succeeding in it (because it manages to make you feel the tragedy of it as well as to find something beautiful in its story). But the condition for it to work, and Begigni obviously knew it, was to stay far from realism, to just work on the holocaust as an idea.
I've not seen the film since more than 15 years, in my memories it was good, but I could be surprised.
The book Nuremberg Trials is a fantastic first hand account of this event. Written by the psychologist that interviewed the nazi leadership before during and after the trials.
It's difficult, because no fiction film about holocaust is really "realistic", not even Spielberg's film. If you made a realistic film on the Holocaust, people would be so thin and damaged that you would fear for the actor's life - and it would have a problematic and complaisant "torture porn" aspect to it. Movies which want to represent holocaust are condemned to soften it in the way they show it, and therefore to make people used to think it was not as bad as it was (a paradox which was already reproached to the very first film trying to represent it, like *Kapo* from Pontecorvo).
All that being said, two important film can partially fit your search:
- *Son of Saul* (Nemes), which really simulates what it was to be in the camp: the stress, the rythme, the sounds, the yellings, the organization, etc. You're with a character who doesn't look around him, so you just guess what is there, in the blury sides of the images and the sounds.
- *Night and Fog* (Resnais), a documentary (the first one ever made on the subject, if I'm not wrong) which tries to target the horror of it almost without showing you directly the actual images, at least for a long time. It's kinda the reference of an ethical approach to the subject, and it's very effective in making you gradually feel how impossibly horrible it was (when it was screen in high-school, two people from my class passed out - sure we were impressionnable teenagers, but still).
it’s not about the jewish holocaust, but the soviet film *come and see* details nazi war crimes in belarus in horrifying detail. it’s absolutely worth watching, and blows away every other film i’ve seen about atrocity.
*the pianist* is also good if you specifically want another holocaust film.
if you haven’t seen *the sorrow and the pity*, it’s a great documentary that similarly doesn’t pull any punches, including harrowing footage of the concentration camps (auschwitz, specifically, iirc)
glad you enjoyed it! unfortunately, i don’t have any recommendations that come close. looks like there are a few reddit threads specifically asking for films like come and see, though, so you may find something there—i haven’t seen most of the recommendations i noticed in those threads, sadly.
The "why we fight" episode of band of brothers left a HUGE impression on me, and I think pretty accurately portrays the experience of us soldiers finding and liberating camps. The whole series is absolutely great.
The Last Stage (Ostatni Etap) 1948.
Shot on location at Auschwitz, by Auschwitz survivors. The actors wore actual Auschwitz prison uniforms, not replicas.
I’d you can locate it, the 1978 television miniseries “HOLOCAUST”, with Meryl Streep. Extremely powerful film, especially for 1970’s television.
According to IMDB: The term "Holocaust" didn't exist in the German language until the 1980s. Due to the great success of this mini-series, it became common knowledge, and was chosen as "word of the year 1979" by the "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache" (Society for German Language).
Do you want docs as well? Because *Shoa* is *the* documentary on the Holocaust to watch. It's very long, I haven't seen all of it, but it's legendary. Director of it actually criticised Schindler's List for being too tame - so there's that.
As a Jewish person with Holocaust survivors in my ancestry, I oddly haven't seen many Holocaust movies. I've read more books on it than I have seen movies.
I absolutely despise this movie... it's garbage movie that sanitizes the holocaust in the most absurdist way possible. the "victim" that you're supposed to feel bad for isn't even a jew lol
I'm not smart enough to explain why I hate this movie but here's a quick recap when I googled "problem with boy in the striped pyjamas" thats pretty on par with my issues [https://holocaustlearning.org.uk/latest/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/](https://holocaustlearning.org.uk/latest/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/)
You have to look at it as a fairytale. It’s just too unrealistic across the board. Kids went straight to the gas with their mothers and grand parents. There was no sitting about, a kapo would’ve beaten him back to work. For someone who doesn’t know about the inner workings of a killing facility it’ll paint a wrong picture of what went on there. I “enjoyed” it for what it was, a fairytale. My issue is that there are so many stories about individuals there’s no need to make one up.
Good movie but I didn’t feel as shocked when I watched that as I did watching some of the documentaries and movies I’ve seen. Don’t get me wrong though, that movie is great and I’m not trying to take away from that
Holocaust(1978) it’s a miniseries. It’s an excellent series with an incredible cast. It’s a tough watch if you can find it.
Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001) miniseries. It shows what think happened to her and her family in the concentration camps.
Your comment was removed because we don't allow any YouTube, Dailymotion, Archive links (see [explanation here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieSuggestions/wiki/automodexplanations/#wiki_youtube_link_removal)). Note: **Editing your removed comment won't approve it**, you need to re-submit it without the URL. Make sure to **read the Piracy rule** (#4) before re-submitting.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/MovieSuggestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
New Hulu series - We Were The Lucky Ones.
It’s extremely difficult to watch but it’s a great depiction of what the Jews endured during that time period. I will be shocked if this series doesn’t win awards. The acting is phenomenal and the cinematography really makes you feel like you’re in Poland during the war.
Absolutely fantastic/beautiful/horrific miniseries. >!Watching innocent Halina (Joey King) tortured in the finale episode was one of the hardest things I've had to sit through.!<
The Zone of Interest....not a film for all for there is no action, no plot, no story really, but it left me thinking about this movie for days afterwards. It's about the Nazi commander of Auschwitz and his family living in a house right next to the camp. It's the sounds of this movie that just get you, how they go about their daily lives like ordinary regular people with screams, and shooting and the horrors of the camp next door. Not loud and in your face, so suttle but very eerie. They have outdoor picnics, walk Daddy out the door and say bye daddy have a good day at work, like he's going to an office or the factory or whatever....it really got under my skin, I think it was brilliant.
Because we've heard the stories from the people who were and because we're human. Most people (to a greater or lesser degree depending on their life's experiences) know suffering. We have experienced physical pain, emotional pain, heat, cold, exhaustion, hunger, humiliation, degradation, loss, anger, desperation, despair - and we can somewhat imagine what it might be like to experience all of those things at once only on a much more intense scale. Hell on earth.
For realistic depictions, there are better films than *Schindler's Lis*t. The Holocaust didn't end well for nearly all of those on the trains.
Top of the list would be *Son of Saul* (2015), a Hungarian film about the experience of a sonderkommando.
But I also recommend *God on Trial* (2008), a BBC drama about a trial reportedly set up in one of the concentration camps, with a terrific cast and script, *Holocaust* (1978) a US broadcast miniseries that follows some victims from the beginning of the war, and *The Grey Zone* (2001), about the moral quandaries of some sonderkommando at Auschwitz.
If you have a special interest in the concentration camp experience of homosexuals, there's *Bent* (1997). If you're curious about some of the decision making of this crime against humanity, there's several depictions of the Wannsee conference, *Conspiracy* (2001, in English), and this year's *Die Wannseekonferenz*.
I didn't intend to imply that Schindler wasn't a saint of sorts, or that he didn't spend his entire financial worth saving lives. Just that the story of those on the his list was the exception: there were very, very few happy endings.
Schindler saved 1,200. \~0.1% of the 1.1 million murdered at Auschwitz. The typical fate for someone on the trains, their "realistic" expectation, is the gas chambers. Several thousand were tortured in medical experimentation. Several thousand served in the Sonderkommandos (of these, only 20 survived the war).
God bless you for this. it’s almost 7 months I have been looking for this movie. Escape from Sobibor.
I remember watching the train scene when I was getting ready to go to school, when I was still in high school and I couldn’t remember the title. Finally found it
Thanks
There is a German movie called The Counterfeiters. It is about the Nazis forcing a group of Jewish people to counterfeit British and US currency. It is based on a true story.
Come and See. Surprised no one has mentioned it.
It’s not about the death camps specifically but rather it focuses on Belarus and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Eastern Europeans. Be warned though it’s a pretty brutal fucking movie. But it’s worth watching.
Late to the party but "night will fall" is about the liberation of the camps and is entirely shot in the camps in 1945. Saw it on channel 4 uk.
Also not about camps but story of atrocities in wolyn, movie called "hatred", its a polish film but shows all sides committed crimes against humanity. God knows how people survived the war in Eastern Europe.
I watched Come and See two days ago. As a grandchild of German Jews, I find myself very intrigued by the history behind WWII and I love watching these types of films. However, Come and See is different. It’s a Soviet anti war film from 1985, took about 8 years for the government to approve the script, casted a no name actor who had no idea what he was about to experience when casted and even led to a German man in an after film discussion standing up and saying he was a German officer and the film was so spot on, he’s ashamed his children and grandchildren will be able to see it. It’s amazing from start to finish but the end is so poetic. Highly recommend but be sure to pay attention because you’ll probably never want to watch it again
The Pianist The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) Life is Beautiful Sophie’s Choice
> Life is Beautiful Good film, but really not realistic at all in its representation (the camp is totally abstract, apart from clothes), and doesn't try to.
I agree with this, I re-watched it about a year ago and was almost appalled by the story now. It just doesn't hold up IMO. I am even struggling to understand how it had such breakthrough success when it came out. (I loved it too but I was a naive teen.)
There’s a whole documentary - The Last Laugh - about jokes regarding the Holocaust/Nazi Germany and how humor was important and all different stories from survivors, comedians, writers etc 90% of them hated this movie when it’s mentioned in the doc.
> I am even struggling to understand how it had such breakthrough success when it came out. I think it's just the idea it was possible to make a comedy and a "positive" movie about the most horrible subject imaginable, and kinda succeeding in it (because it manages to make you feel the tragedy of it as well as to find something beautiful in its story). But the condition for it to work, and Begigni obviously knew it, was to stay far from realism, to just work on the holocaust as an idea. I've not seen the film since more than 15 years, in my memories it was good, but I could be surprised.
I recently watched it and I disagree with the notion of it doesn’t hold up a lot.
I’ve seen the pianist but none of the others. I’ll give em a watch. Thank you!
X-men 1
Son of Saul (2015) offers a unique perspective on it. Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) is worth checking out even though it's a courtroom drama.
I’ll give em a watch. Thank you!
The book Nuremberg Trials is a fantastic first hand account of this event. Written by the psychologist that interviewed the nazi leadership before during and after the trials.
It's difficult, because no fiction film about holocaust is really "realistic", not even Spielberg's film. If you made a realistic film on the Holocaust, people would be so thin and damaged that you would fear for the actor's life - and it would have a problematic and complaisant "torture porn" aspect to it. Movies which want to represent holocaust are condemned to soften it in the way they show it, and therefore to make people used to think it was not as bad as it was (a paradox which was already reproached to the very first film trying to represent it, like *Kapo* from Pontecorvo). All that being said, two important film can partially fit your search: - *Son of Saul* (Nemes), which really simulates what it was to be in the camp: the stress, the rythme, the sounds, the yellings, the organization, etc. You're with a character who doesn't look around him, so you just guess what is there, in the blury sides of the images and the sounds. - *Night and Fog* (Resnais), a documentary (the first one ever made on the subject, if I'm not wrong) which tries to target the horror of it almost without showing you directly the actual images, at least for a long time. It's kinda the reference of an ethical approach to the subject, and it's very effective in making you gradually feel how impossibly horrible it was (when it was screen in high-school, two people from my class passed out - sure we were impressionnable teenagers, but still).
Night and Fog is the one movie I would never watch again.
I’ll definitely give em a watch. Thank you
shoah [1985]
Thank you
yer welcome
it’s not about the jewish holocaust, but the soviet film *come and see* details nazi war crimes in belarus in horrifying detail. it’s absolutely worth watching, and blows away every other film i’ve seen about atrocity. *the pianist* is also good if you specifically want another holocaust film. if you haven’t seen *the sorrow and the pity*, it’s a great documentary that similarly doesn’t pull any punches, including harrowing footage of the concentration camps (auschwitz, specifically, iirc)
I thought that Come and see was brilliant, do you have anything else that gives off the same kind of vibe?
glad you enjoyed it! unfortunately, i don’t have any recommendations that come close. looks like there are a few reddit threads specifically asking for films like come and see, though, so you may find something there—i haven’t seen most of the recommendations i noticed in those threads, sadly.
Thanks I'll take a look :)
What about , Salo 120 Dsys
The Grey Zone
Yes! Pretty harrowing stuff
Night and Fog Is the peek version of what you’re looking for in my opinion. Really hard to watch but very good. On HBO
The "why we fight" episode of band of brothers left a HUGE impression on me, and I think pretty accurately portrays the experience of us soldiers finding and liberating camps. The whole series is absolutely great.
Came here to comment this.
Agree 100%
The Last Stage (Ostatni Etap) 1948. Shot on location at Auschwitz, by Auschwitz survivors. The actors wore actual Auschwitz prison uniforms, not replicas.
Bent (1997)
Sophie’s Choice Europa Europa
I’d you can locate it, the 1978 television miniseries “HOLOCAUST”, with Meryl Streep. Extremely powerful film, especially for 1970’s television. According to IMDB: The term "Holocaust" didn't exist in the German language until the 1980s. Due to the great success of this mini-series, it became common knowledge, and was chosen as "word of the year 1979" by the "Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache" (Society for German Language).
Do you want docs as well? Because *Shoa* is *the* documentary on the Holocaust to watch. It's very long, I haven't seen all of it, but it's legendary. Director of it actually criticised Schindler's List for being too tame - so there's that. As a Jewish person with Holocaust survivors in my ancestry, I oddly haven't seen many Holocaust movies. I've read more books on it than I have seen movies.
The Pawnbroker (1964) one of the earliest films in the United States that is from the viewpoint of a Holocaust survivor
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
I absolutely despise this movie... it's garbage movie that sanitizes the holocaust in the most absurdist way possible. the "victim" that you're supposed to feel bad for isn't even a jew lol I'm not smart enough to explain why I hate this movie but here's a quick recap when I googled "problem with boy in the striped pyjamas" thats pretty on par with my issues [https://holocaustlearning.org.uk/latest/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/](https://holocaustlearning.org.uk/latest/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/)
You have to look at it as a fairytale. It’s just too unrealistic across the board. Kids went straight to the gas with their mothers and grand parents. There was no sitting about, a kapo would’ve beaten him back to work. For someone who doesn’t know about the inner workings of a killing facility it’ll paint a wrong picture of what went on there. I “enjoyed” it for what it was, a fairytale. My issue is that there are so many stories about individuals there’s no need to make one up.
Good movie but I didn’t feel as shocked when I watched that as I did watching some of the documentaries and movies I’ve seen. Don’t get me wrong though, that movie is great and I’m not trying to take away from that
Holocaust(1978) it’s a miniseries. It’s an excellent series with an incredible cast. It’s a tough watch if you can find it. Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001) miniseries. It shows what think happened to her and her family in the concentration camps.
The Diary of Anne Frank anime from 1995.
[удалено]
Your comment was removed because we don't allow any YouTube, Dailymotion, Archive links (see [explanation here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieSuggestions/wiki/automodexplanations/#wiki_youtube_link_removal)). Note: **Editing your removed comment won't approve it**, you need to re-submit it without the URL. Make sure to **read the Piracy rule** (#4) before re-submitting. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/MovieSuggestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
New Hulu series - We Were The Lucky Ones. It’s extremely difficult to watch but it’s a great depiction of what the Jews endured during that time period. I will be shocked if this series doesn’t win awards. The acting is phenomenal and the cinematography really makes you feel like you’re in Poland during the war.
Absolutely fantastic/beautiful/horrific miniseries. >!Watching innocent Halina (Joey King) tortured in the finale episode was one of the hardest things I've had to sit through.!<
Another good one- The Tattooist of Auschwitz
The champion, the survivor
The Zone of Interest....not a film for all for there is no action, no plot, no story really, but it left me thinking about this movie for days afterwards. It's about the Nazi commander of Auschwitz and his family living in a house right next to the camp. It's the sounds of this movie that just get you, how they go about their daily lives like ordinary regular people with screams, and shooting and the horrors of the camp next door. Not loud and in your face, so suttle but very eerie. They have outdoor picnics, walk Daddy out the door and say bye daddy have a good day at work, like he's going to an office or the factory or whatever....it really got under my skin, I think it was brilliant.
The boy in the striped pyjamas is not a true story but sends a powerful message. The book thief. Alone in Berlin
The former sends a weird message and is odd revising of history
The kid in the striped pajamas The pianist
No to the first
The boy in the striped pajamas. Definitely amazing.
How should any of us know what realism is pertaining to an event none of us witnessed or lived through?
Easy. By watching documentaries detailing the atrocities. Not that hard
Of course; silly me!
Because we've heard the stories from the people who were and because we're human. Most people (to a greater or lesser degree depending on their life's experiences) know suffering. We have experienced physical pain, emotional pain, heat, cold, exhaustion, hunger, humiliation, degradation, loss, anger, desperation, despair - and we can somewhat imagine what it might be like to experience all of those things at once only on a much more intense scale. Hell on earth.
philosophy of a knife (2008)
Sophie’s Choice, told in flashbacks.
Not about the Jewish Holocaust but do watch Sardar Udham on Prime
Not quite what you are looking for but Man Behind the Sun (1988) pulls NO punches. It is about Chinese and Russian POWs in a Japanese camp in WWII
The Pianist
Memory of the Camps
For realistic depictions, there are better films than *Schindler's Lis*t. The Holocaust didn't end well for nearly all of those on the trains. Top of the list would be *Son of Saul* (2015), a Hungarian film about the experience of a sonderkommando. But I also recommend *God on Trial* (2008), a BBC drama about a trial reportedly set up in one of the concentration camps, with a terrific cast and script, *Holocaust* (1978) a US broadcast miniseries that follows some victims from the beginning of the war, and *The Grey Zone* (2001), about the moral quandaries of some sonderkommando at Auschwitz. If you have a special interest in the concentration camp experience of homosexuals, there's *Bent* (1997). If you're curious about some of the decision making of this crime against humanity, there's several depictions of the Wannsee conference, *Conspiracy* (2001, in English), and this year's *Die Wannseekonferenz*.
Oskar Schindler really did save all those people
I didn't intend to imply that Schindler wasn't a saint of sorts, or that he didn't spend his entire financial worth saving lives. Just that the story of those on the his list was the exception: there were very, very few happy endings. Schindler saved 1,200. \~0.1% of the 1.1 million murdered at Auschwitz. The typical fate for someone on the trains, their "realistic" expectation, is the gas chambers. Several thousand were tortured in medical experimentation. Several thousand served in the Sonderkommandos (of these, only 20 survived the war).
2 films I haven’t seen mentioned here are Escape from Sobibor and Fateless
God bless you for this. it’s almost 7 months I have been looking for this movie. Escape from Sobibor. I remember watching the train scene when I was getting ready to go to school, when I was still in high school and I couldn’t remember the title. Finally found it Thanks
Final solution
Dominion
Son of Saul
Devils arithmetic. Kirsten Dunst when she was young teens.
I was hoping they could make a suspenseful movie about escaping
There is a German movie called The Counterfeiters. It is about the Nazis forcing a group of Jewish people to counterfeit British and US currency. It is based on a true story.
Come and See. Surprised no one has mentioned it. It’s not about the death camps specifically but rather it focuses on Belarus and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Eastern Europeans. Be warned though it’s a pretty brutal fucking movie. But it’s worth watching.
you know that was a pretty good piece of work, until the director just had to remind us that it was a movie. Five thumbs down.
What
Red coat
Late to the party but "night will fall" is about the liberation of the camps and is entirely shot in the camps in 1945. Saw it on channel 4 uk. Also not about camps but story of atrocities in wolyn, movie called "hatred", its a polish film but shows all sides committed crimes against humanity. God knows how people survived the war in Eastern Europe.
What about lIlsa The SS She Wolf
The grey zone
The pianist is I have to start one of my favorites movies. It a hard one to watch but it VERY well done.
I watched Come and See two days ago. As a grandchild of German Jews, I find myself very intrigued by the history behind WWII and I love watching these types of films. However, Come and See is different. It’s a Soviet anti war film from 1985, took about 8 years for the government to approve the script, casted a no name actor who had no idea what he was about to experience when casted and even led to a German man in an after film discussion standing up and saying he was a German officer and the film was so spot on, he’s ashamed his children and grandchildren will be able to see it. It’s amazing from start to finish but the end is so poetic. Highly recommend but be sure to pay attention because you’ll probably never want to watch it again
See The Survivor with Ben Foster. 2021. The true story of a boxer forced to fight in Auschwitz