I just finished watching "Out of the Ashes," the moving and gut-wrenching biography of eminent Jewish gynecologist Gisela Perl as she sought U.S. citizenship after surviving a unique horror among horrors at Auschwitz, where she worked to save lives in the shadow of Dr. Joseph Mengele's cruel and indifferent oversight.
Christine Lahti (Gisela Perl) has made some forgettable movies. This is not one of them. I can't believe I almost never heard of this made-for-tv movie. But that's what happens when you don't have Showtime.
Made-for-TV or no, it is one of the best, if not the best, depictions of the Nazi mindset I have ever seen, and that includes Schindler's List. And I now have a lasting admiration for Christine Lahti as well.
But more than being just a good movie, I couldn't help but think while watching it of how carelessly the term "Nazi" is thrown about these days, and I couldn't help thinking about how we as humans sometimes project our own worst traits on those with whom we disagree, if not outright despise. In particular I thought how labored a juxtaposition one must construct in order to equate the presidencies of Adolph Hitler and Barack Obama, and what it says about those who try.
Take a look at the movie with me from that perspective.
Despite her impeccable credentials as a physician and eyewitness testimony to her humanity, Dr. Perl almost failed to gain U.S. citizenship because of a narrow-minded and ideologically driven misunderstanding of her life in Auschwitz. The INS board considering her case was appalled at the 1,000 or so abortions she had performed in Auschwitz, even after she explained in detail the justification for her actions.
Dr. Perl's reason for performing an abortion was the same in every single case. Any Jewish inmate discovered to be pregnant was immediately executed along with, of course, her fetus. Had any one of those 1,000 abortions been discovered, Dr. Perl herself would have already experienced her last sunrise.
As she explained, the abortions she performed were to save the mothers' lives, and in an oddly optimistic way under the circumstances, the Jewish race itself. You see, Dr. Perl reasoned that if those 1,000 grieving mothers survived until the Russians or Americans overran the camp, they would live to give birth to future babies, and what kept Dr. Perl going was her dogged determination to thwart the Nazi goal at Auschwitz in a way that she alone could accomplish.
As I watched the Nazis at work in Auschwitz, it occurred to me that I could not find one that reminded me in the remotest way of Barack Obama, try as I might. And I tried. Oh, how I tried.
Was it the immaculately dressed German officer who broke into Dr. Perl's home in Sighet, Hungary with his gang of Nazi thugs to deprive her family of their home, of all their possessions, to physically beat them into submission and rob them of their dignity? Does that sound like the man who has struggled to keep people in their homes, and failing that, to extend them as much life-sustaining aid as possible to ease their suffering until they can get back on their feet, all the while being fought tooth and nail by those who live in magnificent homes like this,and this,and this,, holding secure positions with generous retirement, insurance benefits, and handsome salaries who would rather live lavishly, at the expense of their less fortunate countrymen who are desperately struggling to live modestly but decently, with a small share of dignity? Hardly.
Was it the white-gloved and dapper Josef Mengele who whistled the Blue Danube Waltz as he worked, performing a c-section on a Jewish mother without anesthetic, so that he could satisfy his fascination with the twins she carried? The same Dr. Mengele who casually shot the mother in the face, rather than administer his usual pentathol injection to the heart because she "put up such a fuss," and then looking at his blood-spattered smock with revulsion, muttered "what a mess?"
The Dr. Mengele who summarily and randomly shot unlucky inmates who asked a question at the wrong time or who failed to respond to his own in a timely fashion? The Josef Mengele who provided world-class medical care to the camp's Nazi elite, but who gave inmate Jewish doctors rolls of scrap paper to use as "bandages" in a futile attempt to splint bones broken by blows from Nazi guards?
Somehow I had difficulty imagining the eighth president who tried, but the first who succeeded, if only in a limited way, to wrest some real bandages from the elite to wrap the wounds of the discarded detritus of the insurance companies, I had difficulty imagining that man as Josef Mengele. Just didn't seem to fit at all.
Could it be one of the Nazis driving a truck with a Red Cross on it, pretending to take the sick to the infirmary, but instead taking them to the gas chamber, because only the healthy - not the sick - were profitable to the Nazis? The Nazis who before gassing them, took every possession they owned, including their hair, the gold in their teeth, and finally, their very human dignity?
Somehow that did not sound like the man who has insisted that the sick be cared for, no matter how profitable it might be to just let them die, all the while fought and to some extent thwarted by those who have grown fat on the profits of denying life-saving medical care.
One group in the movie did seem eerily familiar. They were the Jewish kapos, wretched inmates who did the bidding of the Nazis - dragged the condemned to the gas chambers, carted off their lifeless bodies splayed out on carts like so much cordwood, dumped them into the ovens, and carried away their ashes, even beating the weak until they could not stand up, verbally deriding their own people, and for what? For the security they imagined they received from siding with the strong against the weak - when in fact the all-powerful Nazis had the same fate in mind for their Jewish minions as they had for the inmate population at large, delayed only by their temporary usefulness to their clever benefactors.
No one was more spiritually wretched that the deluded kapos who thought their interests were served by joining forces with their mortal enemy to deny aid and comfort to their own flesh and blood laboring just to stay alive another day. The hapless mindset of those people sounds very, very familiar today.
But no, I could not imagine Barack Obama as any of these people. The only person in this movie whose moral and ethical values I could find in line with Barack Obama's was Gisela Perl herself. And that required no mental gymnastics at all.