In Children Remember the Holocaust excerpts from actual diaries and letters written by young Holocaust victims, some who perished, some who survived, are read over pertinent black-and-white images culled from film and photographic archives. These match-ups of visuals and voiceover haunt; the technique is fluent, as pans and zooms are delicately applied to stills and, in addition, slow motion and freeze frames are applied to moving images. The film is a marvel of tone, still, sad and poetic; and although it covers a range of time (from the hopes of European Jewish children, to the dashing of those hopes in the Nazi inferno, to the feelings of young survivors upon rescue), the film seems instead to project an elongated moment, as though time had been given illimitable depth.
Children Remember the Holocaust somehow seems both immemorial and a shared part of our memory. In this, it’s closer in spirit to Chris Marker’s great science-fiction film La jetée (1962), in which a man’s image and disembodied voice time-travel across a series of stills from his past and future experience (Georges Sadoul has described the film as “Bergsonian in its concern with memory and the philosophy of time”), than it is, say, to something by Ken Burns, whose literalism holds such a thing as The Civil War (1990) tightly within the bounds of history. Perhaps it’s the difference between poetry and prose—although, let me add, Children isn’t at all “poeticized,” that is, tinged with selfconscious lyricism.
The film gazes and gazes at beautiful young faces that become, for us, repositories of searing experience, while the variety of these faces, additionally, becomes correlative to the different thoughts and feelings of these painfully articulate girls and boys. In this solemn testament, even upon being liberated one matter-of-fact girl informs us: “I had no reason to be glad. I was all alone, without a living soul to call my own.” How can a child mend without her family? Such faces, such voices. Although the film is meant for children, images of corpses and death are exacting—and given fresh import by the film’s voices. “Our deliverance was long overdue,” one says; another asks whether the world is coming to an end.
These voices command attention—voices interwoven to illuminate various facets of a common ordeal. These voices reflect on finding oneself torn from happy, ordinary life and imprisoned in a German death camp: “Was I in Hell? Was I being punished for my sins?” “I was someone else.” “I was no one.”
This variety of voices helps distinguish Children Remember the Holocaust from a stylistic antecedent, the indigestible Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987), whose numerous letters, read aloud, become repetitive because the filmmaker, Bill Couturie, rather than attempting to bring into focus the humanity of the soldiers, pursues (and with what effectiveness!) the single goal of reducing his audience to tears. Therefore, while Children is something that is being shared with us, Dear America is instead something with which we are being assaulted; it’s awash with self-pity in which we are encouraged to wallow. Chilled by subject matter it has no interest in exploiting, Children offers a breadth of human response from the children that holds and absorbs us; the focus doesn’t shift to us the audience, to our ready capacity to suffer along with the victims of history, but instead stays with the children and the enormous situation that enveloped them. Children is spellbinding, enchanting, not voluptuously cathartic. Too, while Couturie employs dozens of famous actors to read his Letters Home, their celebrity a distraction for those attempting to identify their voices, the maker of Children uses only five young actors who pose no such problem: Kirsten Dunst,* Cynthia Nixon,* Gabriel Olds, and Casey and Nina Siemaszko, all of whom perform indelibly.
Carter Burwell’s tactful music, Ned Bastille’s fine editing, and D. Shone Kirkpatrick’s writing all contribute to the splendid result. Kirkpatrick and Mark Gordon, the film’s maker, co-produced. It is above all Gordon’s film—and proof there’s life, even art, after Speed (1994), which Gordon produced, giving him (in both senses) the currency to pursue this more interesting project. Moreover, Gordon brought with him from Speed his immensely gifted star, Keanu Reeves, who appears onscreen periodically to introduce the film’s different segments. To his everlasting credit, Gordon allows Reeves to appear before us in the full splendor of his richly golden complexion; devious lighting or (as in The Matrix) makeup to mask Reeves’s skin color would have dealt the film’s credibility a gratuitous blow. Reeves as Reeves should look like the real Reeves if his words are to be believed; and, indeed, there is no actor on earth better equipped to reach out to the young. This is because of Reeves’s remarkable humanity—his righteousness absent all taint of self-righteousness. When at the end he beseeches his young audience, “Open your heart,” it’s hard to imagine a soul so churlish as to resist Reeves’s dignified, gentle command.
* Well, times change. At least when Gordon’s film was first shown on daytime American television in 1997, Kirsten Dunst’s and Cynthia Nixon’s were more or less unfamiliar voices—and, indeed, as voices go, they may still be.
