Survivor: Rockman's holocaust animation is a remarkable achievement
Zoom Rockman's animated film tells the true story of Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl, as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old.
In December some twenty years ago, the Royal Opera House staged the premiere of Sophie’s Choice, an opera based on William Styron’s best-selling novel and the subsequent film starring an Oscar-winning performance by Meryl Streep and her Polish accent. I was keen to see it and asked an opera buff friend if he was going. “I don’t see the Holocaust as Christmas entertainment”, he replied quietly. I had forgotten that his mother was a survivor of the camps.
The Holocaust is a subject demanding the utmost sensitivity. Yet, since the end of the Second World War, its awful drama has been the inspiration for many works of art, including hundreds of films. Many in Hollywood were personally impacted by the genocide.
The best movies such as Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful, The Zone of Interest and The Reader have often attracted awards from the motion picture Academy. Other works have been condemned as melodramatic or sentimental misrepresentations of the horrific reality – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas may fall into that category as, perhaps does Sophie’s Choice for all its brilliance.
There was controversy over Art Spiegelman’s Maus graphic novels, in which he told the story of his parents’ experience of the camps, depicting Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs. By the time the comic strips first appeared, Spiegelman was already well-established in the New York artistic underground and the books are now widely considered to be masterpieces of the genre.
So it is a remarkable achievement, and a brave one, that a 24-year-old British self-taught artist called Zoom Rockman has just made an hour long animated film, Survivor, about the wartime experiences of Hungarian-born Ivor Perl. Perl was a 12-year-old boy when he was first sent to the ghetto. Today, he is a forceful 92-year-old.
Survivor had its UK première last week, it had previously only been seen in full at Cannes. After the screening, it was my privilege to interview Ivor and Zoom on stage.
Zoom really is his name. His parents chose it to echo the year in which he was born, 2000. He is already a prodigy. He was the youngest ever contributor of artwork to The Beano and Private Eye. Although the latter relationship ended earlier this year when he felt the magazine did not give him sufficient backing in the face of anti-semitic abuse. Zoom has also illustrated several volumes of Michael Rosen’s Boris Johnson satires.
I knew his work before I met him. He did the brilliant line drawings of The Presidents and The Prime Ministers, two books edited by Iain Dale to which I contributed chapters. Zoom also posted films of the drawings being assembled on social media, which I retweeted.
When the Covid rules permitted, Zoom invited me to visit his studio – and home – in Shoreditch. I was amazed by what I found. He had spent much of the lockdown listening to Sky News and bringing his two-dimensional artwork to life. He had turned his portraits into automata. Turn a wooden handle and their lips and eyes moved in time to a recorded track of their voices. He was also developing two-dimensional puppetry. Me in TV reporter mode, hinged at the joints, was the first puppet he made.
Zoom met Ivor Perl in connection with his “Jewish Hall of Fame” exhibition of automata at the JW3 Centre in London. Ivor gave him a copy of his privately published memoir Chicken Soup under the Tree – a reference to the sustenance his mother was forced to abandon while she, and most of the rest of his family, were being transported to extermination.
Ivor survived because he lied about his age, claiming to be 16, and comrades helped him pass as a member of an adult male working detail, along with his older brother. He is anxious to communicate that the Nazis were not just running a number of infamous extermination camps but a network of thousands of detention centres. During the war, Ivor was deported from the Szeged ghetto in Hungary, interned at Auschwitz in Poland, and then transported to Dachau/Kaufering in Germany, then once liberated to Fedalfing Displaced Persons Camp until he was resettled in England. The UK government set aside 1,000 places for orphaned child survivors but were unable to fill them all. Perl’s wife Rhoda was on the earlier kindertransport to England.
To prepare for the film, Zoom and his mother and screenwriter, Kate Lennard, visited all the main locations still standing in Europe. He recreates them cartoon-style in Survivor and draws on the photographic archive to recreate all characters and many tableaux identifiably.
The film is seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old and the makers want children from that age up to see it. They have shown extracts in schools and get the strongest reaction from the younger children. Corpses, belching crematoria chimneys, and violence are all depicted but gently in a childlike style. Reacting last week after his first full viewing, Ivor seemed almost let down, repeatedly challenging the audience: “Did you understand what was going on?”. We all did but he insisted, “it was much worse.” He also wanted to put the six million Jews murdered in the holocaust into context with the overall violence of the war, asking me: “Do you know the total number of people killed?”. I was able to reply "at least fifty million.”
Some security precautions had to be taken, sadly. But it was an evening in which the words “Israel” and “Palestine” were not mentioned. Survivor is about man’s inhumanity to man, much closer to home on our own continent.
The première was in aid of March of the Living, an educational charity that organises visits to Holocaust locations in Poland. Zoom said he wanted to make the film in his Gen Z style to keep what happened in the memory of rising generations. Ivor Perl has only started going public with his story in his later years in memory of the family he lost and because “The Holocaust happened in broad daylight, in plain sight – with the world watching.”
For all the skill and talent that went into the making of Survivor, this holocaust film tells its authentic story with almost child-like sincerity and simplicity. Worth watching but not really entertainment.