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Well, did it happen quite that way? The series accomplished much, mainly in transmitting information about events that must never be forgotten. But it raised many questions, both trivial and profound. Scriptwriter Green, an intelligent and indefatigable craftsman, author of The Last Angry Man, designed an epic that follows a bourgeois German Jewish doctor, Josef Weiss, and his family through the stricken, incomprehensible years 1935 to 1945. Dr. and Mrs. Weiss die at Auschwitz, as does their oldest son, Karl. A daughter, Anna, becomes autistic after her rape by drunken Nazis; in a procession of the retarded and aged, she is gassed at the euthanasia center at Hadamar. A younger son, Rudi, joins Jewish partisans fighting in the Ukraine; he survives to depart for Palestine after the war—the rebirth of European Jewry. Parallel runs the story of Erik Dorf, a prissily murderous family man and SS officer around whom nearly all the horrific deeds of genocide have been densely crowded. In these characters Green embodies the story of history's most evil episode.
In the presentation of Holocaust there was a lot of banality quite different from the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt described in her controversial 1963 book on Adolf Eichmann. The commercials, for example, were ridiculous and outrageous intrusions. Viewers drawn back into the most painful darknesses of the century would suddenly, repeatedly, find themselves jolted into clusters of ads that seemed almost deliberately designed to offend: the viewer's mind was forced to make the transit from Auschwitz to Bottoms Up pantyhose—one for those women who want the fanny rounded, the other for those who want it smooth. In one grotesque juxtaposition, the audience saw Dorf sitting with Eichmann and a couple of other SS officers in their dining room at Auschwitz. Eichmann sniffs the air and disgustedly remarks that the stench of the chimneys keeps him from enjoying his meal. We cut then to a Lysol commercial, in which a woman character named "Snoopy Sniffer" arrives at a housewife's kitchen and informs her that she has house odors. From her ovens? Can the mind swivel so wildly? Some of those watching gave up and turned off their sets.
The drama itself was cunningly comprehensive, deploying its characters to arrive always at the right time for major events, like figures in 19th century novels heavy with coincidence. But for all its worthy exertions, the series at its core was curiously passionless. An accumulation of small anomalies diminished it. Dr. and Mrs. Weiss behaved with such genteel forbearance down to the last horror of the Zyklon B showers that their journey seemed like Mr. and Mrs. Miniver Go to Auschwitz. The lovers, Rudi and Helena, romped in the Ukraine wearing clothes that looked like peasant chic from Bloomingdale's.
The sometimes garish colors seemed to produce a falsification. If any world needed to be filmed in black and white, it was what French Writer David Rousset called I'univers concentrationnaire. All that obscenity transpired in an absence of color: ashes and smoke were gray, the SS uniforms black, the skin ash white, the bones white. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor, used to greet the trains wearing a white riding costume.