Elie Wiesel hated it. NBC'S 9½-hour docudrama, Holocaust, so offended the author and survivor (Buchenwald, Auschwitz) that he wrote: "Untrue, offensive, cheap: as a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived. What you have seen on the screen is not what happened there." But Wiesel has written almost obsessively about the Holocaust; he has a kind of morally proprietary passion about it. He is a keeper of the flame, a visionary who sees the past as intensely as a prophet sees the future. Many more Americans seemed to agree with Mayer Fruchter, a New York cab driver who was imprisoned at Buchenwald at the same time as Wiesel. "He is wrong," Fruchter insisted after last week's series about a German Jewish family and the Final Solution. "I mean, he is right; it can't be shown. But it's better to show close to it than not to show it at all. Already people are saying it didn't happen, they don't believe it. Our children—my twelve-year-old daughter—they don't know. The aim of this showing is not to cry for what happened, nor ask for pity or sympathy, but only this: to look out for it anywhere in the world, so it won't happen again."
The ratings after the four-night documentary fiction were impressive. NBC estimated that at one point or another, some 120 million Americans tuned in Holocaust. It scored 14 points lower than the alltime ratings winner, last year's Roots series, but still ranked second in the category of "entertainment." Author Gerald Green's novel, based on his script, is now in its tenth printing and has sold more than 1 million copies.
Holocaust came at a moment of unusual stirring of old memories, fears and other passions among American Jews. It played last week just before Passover, timed to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Skokie, Ill., 7,000 who survived Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka awaited the promised march by American Nazis clothed in brown shirts and the First Amendment. Some Christian churches around the U.S. distributed yellow Stars of David for members to wear on their breasts; the gesture, sweet enough perhaps, smacked of moral self-congratulation. Displays like that are impressive only when they are risky, as in Holland in 1942.
An evil past and a skittish future gusted around together. Israeli Premier Menachem Begin was due in the U.S. to raise money. What he needed more than that was moral capital to replace what his government has lost in recent months among American Jews and gentiles alike. Television's Holocaust may have done something to restore that fund of good will toward Israel. The past, Israel's raison d'être and validation, the pedigree of its suffering, came crowding back in the series' deadly lists: Kristallnacht, Eichmann, Himmler, Babi Yar, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz—or, rather, television's elaborately imagined approximations of all of them. "It is only a story," the network's ads proclaimed, "but it really happened."