"The Holocaust in the Courtroom" - September 2007

Overall, the vast majority of SS and various other personnel who had served at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex were never brought to justice. Only sixty-three of the approximately 7,000 SS personnel who served at Auschwitz, including Birkenau, Buna-Monowitz, and satellite camps were tried after the war. The first Auschwitz trial took place in Cracow, Poland, in November and December of 1947. Forty-one SS personnel were tried by the Polish authorities. The second trial of twenty-two SS officers took place in Frankfurt, Germany, between December, 1963 and August, 1965.

IntroductionMichael Goldman-Gilad was born in 1925 in Katowice, Poland. After the outbreak of the war, he escaped with his parents, brother, and eight-year-old sister to Przemysl. From there, he was deported to Szebnie and later, in November, 1943, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After a month-and-a-half in the camp, he was transferred to Buna-Monowitz – Auschwitz III – where he worked in the I.G. Farben factories until the evacuation of the camp in January, 1945. He was then forced on a death march, from which he managed to escape and hide with a Polish family. In February, 1945, after liberation,...

"Music Box"
Costa Gavras
USA, 1989 / English and Hungarian / 194 minutesRecommended for grades 10-12
 The FilmMusic Box, released in 1989, was directed by the French-Greek director Costa-Gavras. Joe Eszterhas, who wrote the script, was born in Hungary in 1944. His father Istvan, a newspaper editor, collaborated with the pro-Nazi Hungarian regime and wrote antisemitic literature.Music Box was produced against the background of the unfolding trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel, and the film bears some striking similarities to it. As we shall see, questions arising from the...