First Films Of The Holocaust

Winner of the 2013 Vucinich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of the horrors of Nazi rule. He recovers much of the major film work in Soviet depictions of the Holocaust and views them within their political context, both locally and internationally. Overwhelmingly, wartime films were skewed to depict Soviet resistance, "Red funerals," and calls for vengeance, rather than the singling out of Jewish victims by the Nazis. Hicks examines correspondence, scripts, reviews, and compares edited with unedited film, to unearth the deliberately hidden Jewish aspects of Soviet depictions of the German invasion and occupation. Additionally, he details the reasons why Soviet Holocaust films have been erased from collective memory in the West and the Soviet Union.