Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  It is not only my poor mother who is portrayed as drab and unloving. The whole Helfgott home is painted with dull colors and the mood is always somber, transmitting a feeling of pervading darkness with little communication among its occupants. The action that takes place in the house is accompanied by doom-laden music and fearful glances, especially when my father enters—quite the opposite of how it really was. In the essay printed at the end of the screenplay, Hicks talks of the lighting in the film. He says: “We had to take the film into some very dark places, and chart the character’s journey through that darkness, and out into the light again. And we agreed—let’s not be frightened by shadows, dark corners, and corridors.”

  In addition to more direct methods of character definition, visual imagery is much used in Shine. It is often raining in the scenes involving my father or scenes when David has been abandoned. This is in spite of the fact that in reality Perth has a very sunny climate.

  After the false scene in which David collapses upon completing “the Rach 3,” the film moves straight into showing David receiving ECT treatment. (“His glasses are put on a metal tray. Electrodes are placed on his temples. The ECT dial is turned up.”) To the best of my knowledge, David never actually received ECT. The film then shows a pale and gaunt David calling my father from a phone booth. When I saw the film in a theater in Perth, the scene in which Peter puts the phone down on David without replying after David says, “Daddy, I’m home. Daddy, hello, Daddy,” induced a member of the audience to shout out “bastard.” Peter then draws the blinds down sharply, symbolizing his rejection of his son. As I have explained, in reality we had no phone, David moved straight back home and actually wrote to all kinds of people, such as Professor Callaway. Many of them would have talked to Hicks to confirm this.

  But Hicks isn’t done with my father yet. He continues to insult him even after he is dead. I have already discussed the offensive graveyard scene in Chapter 13, when David says he feels “nothing.” In the screenplay, this scene (194) ends with Gillian saying “Bravo” and then “laughing” before the joyous singing of “Funiculi, Funicula” in the background. All this, of course, contrasts starkly with the tribute David actually paid his father in the local newspaper, in letters, at the funeral, and in person to myself and others.

  There is a further point I would like to make on behalf of my former sister-in-law, Claire. One of the malicious things said about her in Gillian’s book is that she stole the medal David won in London. This is complete nonsense—David himself told us when he arrived back in Perth almost a year before he married Claire that he left the medal in London. But in the film, there is an unexplained and surreal scene in which my father visits David one last time, after David has already started playing at Riccardo’s/ Moby’s. The real David began performing there in 1983, eight years after my father’s death. In the film, “Dad” places a gold medal around David’s neck (scene 184), before he walks away, a lonely figure swallowed up by the night. This not only falsely suggests that we still had the medal, but also implies that my father had been alive all this time and had not visited David, who has previously been referred to as a “stray dog.”

  There are further scenes in the screenplay, which don’t appear in the film, that reinforce the idea that David didn’t care for his father. In scene 193, David says he can’t shed “any tears for the man of steel” (which is how my father is referred to earlier in the screenplay). In scene 190, David is dreaming, then sees his father and wakes up “in a sweat.”

  Another scene that appears in the screenplay (scene 48) but not in the film, shows Peter smashing a milk bottle before hitting my mother. In real life, there was an incident in Suzie’s youth when she dropped a milk bottle and it smashed, and another occasion, outlined in Chapter 3, where I used a milk bottle to put out the fire I accidentally caused in our Melbourne flat. Is Hicks playing around with the facts of our lives to create his own little fantasies? And then passing off these fantasies as the truth, regardless of whose lives are damaged in the process?

  17

  CHEAPENING THE HOLOCAUST

  Although Shine is ostensibly a film about music, family relationships, and the struggle against mental illness, the Holocaust lurks in the background like a dark shadow. For those sensitive to it, the references to the Nazi genocide of European Jews that Hicks and his screenwriter, Jan Sardi, have embedded in the film are unmistakable. My parents lost family members in the Holocaust and this aspect of the film has affected me very deeply.

  There is one particularly appalling remark in Shine that relates to me personally. Shortly after one of my father’s fictional beatings of my brother, my character, Margaret, says: “This house is like a concentration camp” (scene 54). Although cut from the film, it remains in the published screenplay. Even Hicks and Sardi appear to have had last-minute jitters about putting it on screen—no doubt fearing that it might cause me to take out an injunction against the film. Yet they have had no such compunction about leaving it in the screenplay to be analyzed and devoured by unwitting students of film, drama, and Holocaust studies throughout the world. The notion that anyone who lost relatives in the Holocaust, or who has relatives who are concentration camp survivors, would say such a thing is repugnant.

  I spoke about this to Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University and of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Jerusalem, who is arguably the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust. In his words: “Anyone who could write such a line, who could make such a comparison to a normal or even to a seminormal household, obviously has no idea what a concentration camp is.”

  To make it clear just what an odious comparison was put into my mouth, and to demonstrate the vileness of the way in which Hicks and Sardi play with the Holocaust at many other points in Shine, I want to explain a little of the background of what did happen to my family in Czestochowa, Poland. Jews have lived in Poland for almost a thousand years and made an enormous contribution to the development of industry, commerce, and the arts throughout the country, as well as establishing social, educational, and charitable institutions. Czestochowa, with its flourishing Jewish community, was no exception.

  When World War II broke out, on September 1, 1939, there were 28,486 Jewish men, women, and children living in Czestochowa. Two days later, on September 3, the German army entered the town and the very next day—later referred to as “Bloody Monday”—a pogrom was organized, in which many hundreds of Jews were brutally murdered. A second pogrom was carried out on Christmas Day 1939, and Czestochowa’s great synagogue was set ablaze. But worse was to follow for the town’s Jews. In August 1940, about 1,000 young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were sent to a forced labor camp in Cieszanow, near Lublin. Practically all of them perished. Many Jews from other parts of western Poland were uprooted from their communities and forced by the Nazis to move—temporarily—to Czestochowa, and the city’s Jewish population swelled by several thousand. On April 9, 1941, the Nazis established a ghetto in the town, an area into which all the Jews were herded. On August 23, after it was filled to bursting point, it was sealed off and the population was left inside to endure starvation and disease.

  In 1942, Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, fell on September 22. The Germans chose this day to launch a large-scale “aktion” against the ghetto. By October 5, around 39,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka concentration camp, fifty miles northeast of Warsaw, where they were murdered in gas chambers.

  Originally built as a forced labor camp for political prisoners, Treblinka had been rebuilt in June 1942 and fully equipped with gas chambers and crematoria in preparation for its role in the genocide. In Treblinka, the Jews of Czestochowa joined Jews transported from all over Poland and Nazi-occupied Europe. Upon arrival in this hellhole, the vast majority were stripped naked and gassed. By August the following year, when a mass escape took place in which inmates overpowered and killed their SS guards, about 900,000 Je
ws had been killed at Treblinka. After Auschwitz, Treblinka is the second largest site of mass murder in history. Following the uprising, there were severe reprisals and the camp was dismantled in October 1943. Today the only trace that remains of Treblinka are thousands of shards of broken stone that lie on the spot where the camp once stood.

  The Jews remaining in the camp at the time of its dissolution were moved to other camps where most were killed by shooting, gassing, hanging, electrocution, and lethal injection, or simply left to rot through disease and exhaustion. Others were used as slave labor, or subjected to sadistic torture dressed up as “medical experimentation.”

  Most people nowadays have some idea of the Holocaust from books and films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But even Spielberg’s film fails truly to convey the depths of depravity of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews. As one of the survivors of the real Schindler transports said of the film: “Schindler’s List had no hangings. The dogs wore muzzles; audiences didn’t see them gnawing men’s genitals and women’s breasts. Spielberg’s storm troopers refrained from swinging infants by their feet into brick walls, smashing their skulls like melons.”

  After many of their number had been sent to Treblinka, only around 6,500 Jews remained in the Czestochowa ghetto, which was then allocated smaller borders. On January 4, 1943, about 300 men in the ghetto, calling themselves the Jewish Fighting Organization, unsuccessfully tried to launch an uprising. The next day the Nazis shot 250 children and old people as punishment. In June, the remaining Jews were transferred to two slave labor camps set up at the Hasag factories in Czestochowa that were privately owned by a German industrialist. On July 20, 1943, some 500 prisoners from these camps who had “served their purpose” were taken to the town’s Jewish cemetery and executed. Before evacuating Czestochowa on January 17, 1945, the Germans managed to deport almost 6,000 prisoners from the Hasag camps to the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and Ravensbrueck. (One of those, then aged seven, who worked at Czestochowa’s labor camp and subsequently survived Buchenwald, is Yisrael Lau, now Israel’s Chief Rabbi.)

  By the end of the war, only about 2,000 of Czestochowa’s prewar Jewish population of almost 30,000 remained alive. Among those who had been murdered were my mother’s two sisters and all my father’s immediate family, including his sisters Miriam, Na’acha, and Rivka and his brothers Zelig and Abraham. Among those who survived were my mother’s brother Johnny (liberated from Buchenwald) and her stepmother Bronia (liberated from Bergen-Belsen). Zelig Lewcowitz, a cousin of my father (whom I used to visit at his home in Tel Aviv until he passed away a short time ago), went back to Czestochowa in 1945 and could find no one else of our family alive. Today, when nearly all other Polish Jews have left Poland, there are still small organizations of Czestochowa-born Jews active in Israel, the United States, Canada, Argentina, and France. In Czestochowa itself hardly any signs exist that a half century ago Jews comprised 30 percent of the population. The Jewish museum, for example, is now a school; and a big industrial factory has been built around the Jewish cemetery, making it impossible to see it from the street without going through the factory.

  Incredibly, some of the Jews who managed to survive the death camps were killed in Poland in the two years after Germany’s surrender. For example, in the town of Kielce, not far from Czestochowa, 42 Jewish concentration camp survivors were killed by a Polish mob in July 1946.

  A whole world had been destroyed. Clearly, for the survivors, Poland was no place to rebuild their shattered lives, and the vast majority fled the country, going mainly to Israel (or Palestine, as it was known before independence was declared in 1948). Bronia and Johnny came to Melbourne in 1946, part of an estimated 18,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who moved to Australia at the end of the war. Even now, the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who visited Australia in May 1997, is still negotiating over compensation payments for survivors living there.

  After the war, Franz Stangl, the Austrian commandant who ran Treblinka (and before that Sobibor) escaped, aided, unbelievably, by the Red Cross and the Vatican. He went first to Syria and then moved to Brazil in 1951, where he registered at the Austrian consulate under his own name and worked as an engineer for Volkswagen in Sõo Paulo. In 1967, he was tracked down by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, extradited to Germany, and convicted in a Düsseldorf court of the murder of 900,000 people—including my mother’s two little sisters and most of my father’s family. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in 1971.

  The Holocaust was “the most horrible crime committed in the whole history of the world,” as Winston Churchill described it, and it traumatized Jews and many others. But neither my father nor my mother had personally experienced the hell of the concentration camps—contrary to what Scott Hicks implies when playing around with my family’s lives. To portray my father as a brute and then explain this behavior by insinuating that he was a concentration camp survivor is not only a terrible slur on my father but highly insulting to all Holocaust survivors and their families.

  The very idea, so strongly suggested by Hicks, of my father, the supposed Holocaust survivor, adopting the manner of his persecutors, is grotesque. In the film, the Holocaust is strongly evoked by the use of images—barbed wire cuts across my father’s face as he nails shut the garden fence to keep his children’s friend out; scrapbooks are burned, there is a mark on Peter’s forearm. To add insult to injury, Hicks cast a German actor with a strong German accent to play my Polish father. In the eyes of many, my father thus became a German Jew: “David Helfgott’s mind was knocked off-kilter by a despotic German-Jewish father,” said the Financial Times of London, January 2, 1997.

  This undercurrent of Holocaust themes has deeply hurt me both personally and publicly. Without exception, after they saw Shine, friends and acquaintances of mine presumed that they “knew” from the film that my father was a concentration camp survivor. They were astounded when I said he wasn’t. For those with even a little knowledge of the Holocaust the signs in the film are obvious.

  As a columnist in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent wrote to his great surprise in the March 20, 1997, issue: “A recent article in the New York Times revealed that the real-life Helfgotts were not Holocaust survivors. They left Poland before Hitler’s invasion. This is not a trivial detail to Holocaust survivors, who are rightly sensitive about comparisons between their memories and those who watched from a distance.”

  My friends, presuming like everyone else that Shine was true, had trouble believing me. “What about when he showed the concentration camp number to one of his daughters?” was a constant refrain. “What about the barbed wire?” Some shuddered when they recalled the “nighttime burning of the documents, the flames,” just like Nazi Germany purging itself of Jewish “influences.” The nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine was right when he said: “Where books are burned, human beings are also destined to be burned.” To make sure we get the point, we see the photo of “young David” surrendered to the flames. When Peter throws David’s material into the stove, the reflection of the fire flickering across his glasses, an image of the crematoria where the bodies of Jews—including many of my relatives— were incinerated is conjured up.

  Friends also say: “I remember when your father beat David in the bath in the first part of the film—so it gave me shivers when David looked up from his bath in a later scene and saw clouds of steam emanating from the shower nozzle head.” It is no accident that in this scene the camera lingers for a moment too long on the shower nozzle and on the steam. It bears a close resemblance to the beginnings of gassing scenes in Holocaust films.

  These powerful visual images are combined with many suggestions in the dialogue. The word “survivor” is used repeatedly throughout the film. For example, the character of David says: “To survive, to survive undamaged” in scene 2; Peter says: “In this world only the fit survive.” It is the dialogue put in David’s mouth that essentially also rei
nforces the Holocaust theme. He declares: “You see, Daddy’s daddy was religious, vee-eery religious, very strict; and a bit of a meanie. But he got exterminated, didn’t he, so God didn’t help him. Whooahhh” (scene 4); or “The Pole-popolski. Like Daddy and his family before they were concentrated” (scene 18). Even in the halfway house David’s character is muttering: “The weak get crushed like insects, like grasshoppers.”

  Another example of Hicks and Sardi mixing dialogue and visual imagery is scene 25 when my father says: “You are very lucky to have a family,” and then immediately his face appears over the corrugated iron fence with a strand of barbed wire running across the top.

  We can see, by comparing the screenplay with the film version, that Hicks is deliberately changing the facts as he goes along. Scene 30 of the screenplay says my father had a SCAR on the palm of his HAND (“Peter extends his hand … to reveal a scar”). But in the film he rolls up his sleeve and my young sister looks goggle-eyed at a MARK on my father’s FOREARM at exactly the place where concentration camp inmates were tattooed with their identity numbers. Then, having muffled his next words that refer to the scar, so as to render them barely audible (a point picked up by a reviewer for the New York Times), my father regains his normal clear voice: “No one can hurt me! Because in this world only the fit survive. The weak get crushed like insects.”

  The director was fully aware that my father was not a concentration camp survivor, yet created a film with the aforementioned imagery. Not surprisingly, newspaper commentators and film critics were misled by Hicks’s hideous Holocaust implications. “Scott Hicks tells a true story and tells it deftly … Darkness enters with Armin Mueller-Stahl’s father… a concentration camp survivor” (London Times, January 2, 1997); “The real-life Helfgott … was for more than a decade lodged in mental institutions and kept from playing … Peter drives his son relentlessly … fueled by his Holocaust experiences” (Chicago Tribune, November 27, 1996). The most awful things were written in reviews, reaching an audience that may not themselves even have seen the film. The critic for London’s influential newspaper, the Evening Standard (January 2, 1997), described my father as “a character only slightly less lovable than Himmler: yet he’s suffered and survived the death camps … [he comes out] a mental and physical bully … and I can’t forgive him because of his morally privileged status as a Holocaust survivor.” On the other side of the Atlantic, reviewers were drawing much the same conclusions. Time magazine (December 2, 1996) said my father speaks to his son in a “führer-knows-best-tone.”