The Windermere Children (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Auschwitz Untold: In Colour (Channel 4) | All4
Belsen: Our Story (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Stranger (Netflix) | netflix.com
Forty square kilometres, more than 15 square miles: that’s a footprint of more than three miles by five. We can too often forget the enormity of Auschwitz, and for once “enormity” can be taken as both the modern (wrong) sense of size and the dictionary meaning: something terrible and frightening. So often are we fed the images, of the train sidings, the high chimney, that railway arch, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” ironwork sign – and why not; every syllable of each image thrums with an insidious intent – that we might think then of compact sidings, a single gate, and thus forget the sheer blithering scale, the char-flecked skin-flecked expanse of this doom briefly sprawled across the flat fields of Poland.
At least three programmes managed this last week to remind us of the so-called Final Solution with a visceral power. The cumulative effect of watching them back-to-back, was, oddly enough, not deadening; rather I felt privileged, again, to be in at the last days of the dwindling band of Holocaust survivors, most of whom chose not to speak of events for 40, 50 years or more. We are in at that small window between their speaking and their departing. I know some fear that their story will be soon forgotten. Yet as long as there is an International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the liberation of the camp, 75 years ago on 27 January 1945, was why last week was especially marked – and as long as someone somewhere is there to speak for them, and provide programmes of such quality, I have unusual stirrings of optimism as to the future, even as tiny squalid whirlpools of “revisionism” bubble and grow.
The most “gulp” moment came possibly towards the end of The Windermere Children, a dramatisation not without its fair share of similar moments, when the actual survivors were brought together with the largely untested Polish actors who had so superbly portrayed them as teenagers. Teenagers wandering blinking, unknowing, off coaches in the dark of a wet scratchy brambled Cumbria, lining up warily, ready at the first hint of betrayal to throw themselves into the guns, barbed wire, whatever – their confusion shone so palpably. To be met with nothing but warm fresh beds, a bedroom each, and warm fresh bread.
They had been effectively rescued by kindness after the liberations of Belsen and Auschwitz. Leonard Montefiore successfully lobbied for returning empty RAF cargo planes to be deployed to bring youngsters from the camps: 305 were taken to the Calgarth estate, near Windermere. At many times it seemed impossible that they could ever get their young minds back. There was, above all, an (understandable) obsession with finding out what had happened to families, near and extended, split apart with such random savagery. Yet, impossibly, within a short matter of a few months’ therapy, art and sport and kindness, they began to grin, to cheek, to believe in good again; to sneak fags, and to fish. And suddenly, one sunny day, the actual survivors crested a little ridge and joined the actors. And told a little of their lives since: valuable lives lived with OBEs and MBEs and scores of grandchildren. Demonstrating so winningly that the very best, perhaps the only, revenge is to live well.
Oddly, almost the most affecting of the more factual documentaries last week was Belsen: Our Story, about Bergen-Belsen, not specifically designed as an extermination camp. It had none of the mechanised apparatus of Auschwitz. Typhus and starvation and cold did the job well enough. “They didn’t need any machinery. You just perished.” Belsen, now noted for Richard Dimbleby’s arrival in 1945, when the world through his report should have been alerted to the atrocities – in fact it was glacially and unforgivably slow – is now razed entirely. Allied soldiers when they entered fainted at the sights and at the smells.
This programme also featured such survivors as the ragingly articulate Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, she who played the cello in Auschwitz, and the noted sculptor Maurice Blik. He confided gently in this programme that for years afterwards he had one recurring dream only: that of seeing his father from a bus. Indeed, so many “goodbyes” between parent and child consisted, in those years, of simply being told to run.
Auschwitz Untold: In Colour, over two nights, had similar heartbreaks and shockers. Most shocking, perhaps obviously, was the skilful colourisation of black-and-white footage, though only in bits: the too-white bodies thundering into mass trenches with their red and blue rags; the carts being brought out from ghetto walls such as Lodz, white skin on dirty brown wood and the green rough serge of clothing on the shivering carters – and my God it seemed, in colour, hardly even a generation ago. Yet no less the stories: of the Dutch section, driven to cannibalism. Of industrial giant IG Farben, which “borrowed” labour from Auschwitz to produce Zyklon B poison, to kill their friends. I’d forgotten, or blanked, just so many details.
Given the furious culture war over the BBC it’s perhaps worth remembering that part of its contractual remit is being a “public service broadcaster”. This means having the freedom to make programmes that deserve to be made, rather than are wildly popular or turn a pretty penny. (Occasionally it’s the BBC itself that seems most in danger of so misremembering.) Channel 4 has a similar remit. And I’d tentatively suggest that in all three offerings last week, never mind the news coverage and associated radio programmes, both have delivered with a certain magnificence of quiet flair, and of taste. L’chaim.
The Trial of Christine Keeler ended, and I think it entirely right that this glowing series wasn’t abridged to fewer episodes. “There’s the story, then there’s me, and they’re not the same, they’ve just got the same name,” she said at the last. Amanda Coe’s adaptation has at last allowed Keeler to emerge with her own voice, a voice not without its small failings, but a brave and life-loving one, way more sinned against than sinning. And the tale it told, of a time in which the world – government, courts, press, police, simply closed ranks to sell and tell the easiest lie, whether against Keeler or Stephen Ward, somehow also of a class deemed just de trop – is one of perpetual relevance.
The Stranger, which debuted on Netflix, will have you binge-watching though the night. That’s what Harlan Coben’s books were designed to have you do, under the bedclothes: have an intriguing hook on the first page and let you flail till dawn and sweaty bedclothes. It’s loopy, but also rather terrific, and features the ever-watchable Siobhan Finneran, Richard “Thorin” Armitage and a surprisingly straight, and classily straight, Jennifer Saunders. Binge it. You know you want to.
Mrs Brown’s Boys walked off with “best comedy” at the National Television Awards. What can I say … other than it must soon be time to rename the NTA the WTF?
