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Rising to the
Occasion
In the new Holocaust
film Uprising, David Schwimmer -- and a slew of A-list actors
-- are going to change the way you watch television. And that’s
a good thing.
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By
Benyamin Cohen
/Jewsweek.com
Jewsweek.com
| Hearing
David Schwimmer speak with an Eastern European accent is something
of an oddity. At the moment, the Los Angeles-bred actor is trying
hard – saliva and all – to master a somewhat bastardized hybrid
of Polish, English, and a sprinkle of “Jewish” thrown in for good
measure. And, believe it or not, he’s doing a good job.
Fans
of Schwimmer’s perpetually kvetching Friends character,
neurotic paleontologist Ross Geller, shouldn't have a hard time
imagining the actor doing linguistic summersaults. In fact, his
command of witty comebacks and comic timing seems almost natural
for the 35-year-old Jewish actor. But while he's no stranger to
angst, he mixes it with equal parts ambition. On this day, it
might have been the setting that had the usually affable Schwimmer
out of character.
The
date is March 27, 2001, and the place (far from Schwimmer’s usual
digs -- an LA sound stage) is Bratislava, Slovakia. Schwimmer
is part of a star-studded cast filming NBC’s new four-hour, Holocaust
mini-series Uprising which will air on November 4th
and 5th. The film tells the true story of Jewish
resistance fighters who battled the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto
during World War II.
In
this scene, a buffed-up Schwimmer is beating a Nazi guard to a
pulp. Yep, the nerdy guy from Friends, is killing someone.
As he continues to beat the Nazi, blood splats on his face and
an evil grin begins to emerge. Schwimmer, you can tell, is actually
enjoying this violent rage.
“I
wanted to work on this film," Schwimmer explains, "because
I felt it was my responsibility to my own heritage and to history
to honor the people that were there, and to try to pass on to
future generations these different stories of the Holocaust so
that it never happens again,” says Schwimmer, who, believably,
transforms into Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the resistance
movement.
BIG
SCREEN POTENTIAL
The
term “made-for-TV” does not begin to do this film justice. For
starters, there’s the A-list cast that would make even a cool
casting director drool: Besides Schwimmer, the film’s four hours
feature the talents of Donald Sutherland, Jon Voight, Hank Azaria,
Cary Elwes, Mili Avital, and Lelee Sobieski to name a few.
Even the director, executive producer
and co-writer Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Red Corner),
doesn’t belong on the small screen.
What’s
more, the meticulously detailed set design -– it reportedly took
more than ten weeks to build -– spanned the size of three football
fields and was four stories tall. “There was painstaking attention
to detail in recreating what really happened,” says Azaria, who
plays the leader of the band of rebels, Mordechai Aniclewicz.
The size and scope of the production was enormous, with 125 speaking
roles and a total of 20,000 extras used.
One
of the biggest challenges that Avnet faced was attempting to realistically
recreate the Warsaw Ghetto. Three separate construction crews
worked side-by-side through the cold Slovakian winter to recreate
the ghetto in central Bratislava. Even the cobblestones in the
streets were meticulously laid down by hand -– one-by-one.
So
authentic was the set that when Simha “Kazik” Rotem, a real-life
Warsaw Ghetto survivor, saw the set for the first time, he pointed
to an apartment on the third floor and said “I lived there.”
Avnet’s
determination to realistically recreate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
extended far beyond the creation of the film’s set. The director
carefully handpicked the extras portrayed in the movie -- which
proved to be a little difficult. Slovakia was once the home of
90,000 Jews, but almost nine in ten were murdered during the Holocaust.
The community that remains is but a shadow of its former self.
THE
HISTORY OF THE GHETTO
When
the Germans invaded Poland and forced the Jews to live in a cordoned
area known as the Warsaw Ghetto, they issued daily decrees that
restricted the crowded inhabitants from going about their day-to-day
existence. With little, if any, food being rationed, one in ten
of the almost a half million Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto died even
before the first bullet was fired or the first transport was sent
to the death camp. When the Nazi’s diabolical plan to eliminate
the Jews didn’t work fast enough, they began deporting 300,000
Jews to the Treblinka death camp.
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“…
I felt it was my responsibility to my own heritage
and to history to honor the people that were there
...”
--
David Schwimmer
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It
was then, out of the unfathomable depths of human cruelty, there
rose a story of human courage -- the creation of the Jewish Fighting
Organization (JFO). Despite the overwhelming obstacles –- organizing
a resistance with no arms, no food and no communication with the
outside world – a group of idealists were determined to fight
back and decide their own destinies. “Mordechai always said, ‘There’s
only one thing we can control in this terrible Nazi situation,
and that is how we die,’” says Azaria. “Their deaths were all
they had.”
Director
Avnet agrees: “They wanted to live with honor, and if necessary,
die with honor – and that’s the heart and soul of the movie,”
Avnet says. The film was the realization of a dream seven years
in the making to tell a story he felt had never really been told.
“Part of why I wanted to tell the story,” explains the 52-year-old
Avnet, “is because the people whose story it is aren’t alive to
tell it. It’s been 58 years since the uprising and no one has
told this story.”
Avnet’s
passion for the story was contagious, fueling a dedicated quest
among cast and crew to pay tribute to little-known heroes ignored
by history far too long. “Jon has been living with this story
and these characters for many years, and he’s been driven and
determined to tell this story,” says Schwimmer. “And any time
you have a leader like that who is so inspired, it just brings
everyone up and makes you want to work even harder to help him
realize his vision.”
Accents
aside, portraying Zuckerman proved difficult for Schwimmer. “The
guilt of having survived what he did almost destroyed him emotionally
and psychologically,” says Schwimmer. “He could never recover
from having survived it as a moral man. His words still haunt
me when he was asked, basically, ‘Can you sum up your experience?’
and he replied, ‘If you could lick my heart, you would die of
poison.’”
For
real-life Warsaw Ghetto survivor Kazik Rotem, who detailed his
experiences in the book “Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter”,
the ghetto rebels’ determination to resist wasn’t really about
survival. “I knew that we were going to die,” says Rotem, who
spent weeks on the film’s set as a consultant. “All we wanted
was to choose our way of dying. The question was only when
are we going to die, not if we are going to die. I never
dreamed that I would survive.”
Cary
Elwes, who plays Nazi propaganda filmmaker Fritz Hippler, was
touched by the ghetto Jews’ poignant heroism. “It was so heroic
because really, they knew the fight was futile,” says Elwes. “In
the end they knew that the overwhelming force of the German war
machine would have eventually won over. But that wasn’t the point.
“That’s
really what’s unique about this story,” he adds. “Suddenly, out
of this terrible, bleak atmosphere grew this strong fighting force,
these incredibly brave people who knew they were going to die.
But they were determined to fight and resist to the very end.”
PASSIVE
AGGRESSIVE
Mili
Avital, who plays Devorah -- Kazik’s girlfriend and one of the
resistance fighters -- was eager to join the cast because of her
own connection to Holocaust survivors. “This story was very close
to my heart because I was born in Israel, so the spirit of resistance
-– it’s very much something that I connected with of course,"
she says. “The fact that not a lot of Jews survived does not mean
that they didn’t put up resistance. And I think that’s a very
important point to make.”
Throughout
history, the Jews have been erroneously labeled by some as acting
passive during the Holocaust, a myth Schwimmer and the others
involved hope to dispel with Uprising. “I had heard very
little about active resistance and revolt by Jews during the Holocaust,”
says Schwimmer, “so I was inspired to read a story about such
a great movement and armed resistance. I think people will be
surprised, and maybe it will dispel the notion that 6,000,000
Jews just kind of walked meekly on to a train and to their deaths
at the camps.
“It
was inconceivable that there was a calculated effort to actually
wipe out an entire race of people,” says Schwimmer. “There are
no words, really, in the human vocabulary to describe it because
it’s inhuman.”
There
may not be words, but for Schwimmer an accent will have to do
for now.
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{
Benyamin Cohen
is editor of Jewsweek.com. }
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Jewsweek.com
