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Book Review
Comparative/World
| The Holocaust Experience. Written and directed by Oeke Hoogendijk. English subtitles. 2002; color; 50 minutes. Distributed in the United States by First Run/Icarus Films.
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| This fifty-minute film, directed by Dutch filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk, deals with an important and topical subject: how the Holocaust is commemorated in three sites, the Polish state museum on the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp, the Beit hashoah Museum of Tolerance of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It contrasts the personalized (some might say sensationalized) way young people are introduced to this complex and perplexing topic in Los Angeles with the more sober treatment of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The way the issues are presented at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum falls somewhere between these two poles. The film's comparative treatment would have been greatly enhanced had it included a discussion of how the issue is handled by the two principal Israeli commemorative institutions, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the museum at the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz (Kibbutz lohamei hageta'ot). |
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