The story of Jews who fled Nazis on a ship down the Danube River is told in a new exhibit. Benny Goren, the son of the man who organized the trip, was at The Jewish Museum for the opening. Eric Herschthal
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
The stories told in “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River,” the new film exhibition at The Jewish Museum, do not fit neatly into any Holocaust narrative. Take this one: in 1939, 1,200 Eastern European Jews, fleeing an imminent Nazi invasion, boarded a ship. After a two-month journey down the Danube River, the ship made its way to the mouth of the Black Sea, where passengers boarded another liner headed to Palestine. No one ended up in Auschwitz. Everyone survived. Here’s another: 600 German farmers boarded that same ship a year later, headed in the opposite direction. The farmers lived near Germany’s border with Russia, and were supposed to be resettled within mainland Germany after Hitler gave their land to Stalin. Unwanted Germans,
many Bessarabians were ordered to live in the homes of evicted Polish families. They lived in stolen homes, but they had little choice. Is it fair to compare the two? The artist Peter Forgacs — a much-admired Hungarian filmmaker whose work is held by the Museum of Modern of Art, the Centre Pompidou, among others — won’t say. “My role is to pose this question,” he said, sitting in front of two small touch-screen monitors just outside the main exhibit space. If he had an answer, “I would be doing a book,” he said. He’s not. He is making a film that refuses to tell the bigger picture — laws declaring Jews stateless, roundups, deportation, execution. Instead, Forgacs wants viewers to weigh the singular experiences of individual human beings whose lives were disrupted by war. The goal is to approach something closer to history’s true aim: to show the past how it really was. “The project is a quest for the private history and not the grand history,” Forgacs said. “I’m interested in the micro, not the macro.” At the heart of the exhibit, a collaboration with artist collective The Labyrinth Project, is a dark room in which five movie screens are lined up side-by-side. One of five short films starts by the press of a button, with visitors controlling which one they watch by using a touch-screen panel in the center of the room. The stories of Jews, Germans and the Hungarian captain who steered both voyages, are interwoven across the five screens. “It’s a comparison of the incomparable,” Forgacs said, but that’s what he wanted the work to encourage. Each film heavily relies on the original eight-millimeter footage filmed by the ship captain, Nandor Andrasovits, which Forgacs discovered decades ago. Since the late 1970s, Forgacs has made traditional documentaries based on these kinds of lost home videos, which he’s spent a lifetime hunting down. “Living in a communist country taught me how to understand the doublespeak,” said Forgacs, who still lives in Budapest. He grew up in Soviet-controlled Hungary and says that the official story of what happened during the war years was always suspect. Much like the recently released Polish film “Katyn,” about the suppressed Soviet massacre of Poles during the Second World War, “The Danube Exodus” is Forgacs’ search for truth. “This is a project to get past the doublespeak,” he said. Forgacs has made several probing documentaries before, but in a traditional format: the widely admired “The Maelstrom – A Family Chronicle” (1997), based on home videos of Dutch families deported to Auschwitz; “El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War,” which won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. But he said traditional documentaries limited his ability to tell the breadth and complexity of the actual past. “I had to leave out so many of the stories it was burning,” he said, referring to his documentary “Danube Exodus,” from 1998, which became the basis of the new exhibit. As he spoke, his eyebrows rose to the crown of his head, like a bridge parting for the mast of his nose. “I knew that the [interactive] format would open up many more possibilities.” They were realized with the help of Marsha Kinder, head of the Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. When she heard what Forgacs wanted to do, she knew she could help. She had the resources of a major university, and with the additional support of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles the interactive approach became a reality. “Our challenge was, how do you retain, even enhance, the emotional impact of this art?” Kinder said, recalling her first thought after seeing Forgacs’ 1998 documentary. Forgacs and the Labyrinth Project thought that a series of five interactive documentaries would jumble the natural inclination to tell one coherent story. That each film takes up five screens spread across a single long wall, each showing different images, further disrupted the picture. This is how it works: when you press “The Orthodox Jews” icon on the control panel, for instance, the 18-minute film begins with a man rocking over a prayer book, his fringed shawl swaying a half-step behind him. Two other screens flank him, at times showing grainy images of dark running water. Another screen airs footage of Germans leaving a Sunday mass, while the last screen might show typed sentences from one of the passenger’s diaries. Each video has its own audio too, interspersed with music composed by Tibor Szemzo or piped-in sound effects, like the deep brassy honk of a steam ship. One gets an overall sense of poetic cohesion, if not quite a clear-cut narrative. “Whichever one you choose, you always have to see glimpses of the other,” Kinder said at the exhibit, during a recent visit to New York. “They’re invading each other’s space.” Benny Goren is familiar with this story. His father organized the exodus of the Jews, and was in New York for the exhibit’s opening. “The Czechs didn’t let them in because they [worried that if they did] they would drop in more Jews,” he said. But eventually the Czechs relented: “They gave them a wink,” he said, and let them dock before sailing off to Palestine. One image is particularly transgressive. In a scene taken from the captain’s own film, a Hungarian official is seen signing a pact that would annex more land from Eastern Europe. The official peers up from the document he is signing and stares straight into the lens. It is a jarring image that feels as though we are not only staring back at him, but right through to his conscience. One wonders if he, or even the captain filming him, were merely the banal bureaucrats and dutiful soldiers that one narrative of history holds them to be, or something more troubling. Were they willfully blind accomplices in the 20th century’s greatest crime? Forgacs again had no answer to this question, but he wanted viewers to ask it. He was sure of at least one thing: the captain, Nandor Andrasovits, is suspect to no crime. He sailed 1,200 Jews to safety, even though he also shipped unwanted Germans back to a then uncertain fate. “What he had was an eye,” Forgacs said. “He was very brave.” Forgacs went on, “Without him none of these stories would have ever been told.” “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River” runs at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through Aug. 2.
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