The story of Harry Haft is more than just a gruesome fight for survival in the boxing ring. It is also about the struggle to survive after the fight and the intergenerational trauma that proceeds Nazism decades later.
The new film by Barry Levinson, which premiered on Holocaust Remembrance Day (יום השואה) on HBO Max, centers around Polish born Haft–an Auschwitz survivor taken under the wing of a Nazi and used as a fighting pawn for Nazi entertainment.
At Auschwitz, Haft faced a nearly impossible decision: fight his fellow prisoners to death or die.
The loud thumping sounds of punches hitting the bloodied flesh of gaunt, corpse-like survivors forces viewers to remember the lifetime of suffering and trauma for survivors.
“The Survivor” was made in association with USC Shoah Foundation archivists who provided the film’s creators with Harry’s testimony and ensured that all Holocaust sequences were as accurate as possible.
“It’s not an exact rendering of Harry’s life, but they do a wonderful job of reflecting the experience of the physical crisis, the emotional crisis, but also just the banality of evil and the cost of this on human beings,” said Kori Street at Shoah, who consulted on the film.
Actor Ben Foster, who plays Haft, has gone above and beyond in his portrayal. He dropped 62 pounds while filming his scenes at Auschwitz, took five weeks off and gained another 40 pounds for the portrayal of his fight against Italian-American boxing legend Rocky Marciano. For the third segment, the actor transformed yet again to play Harry as an out-of-shape middle-aged man. Foster, who declined to use digital weight loss, lost so much weight that he is at first unrecognizable to the point the audience would question if he is a different actor altogether.
The film premiered just as the Anti Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high in the United States in 2021– an average of more than seven incidents per day and a 34% increase since 2020.
Global antisemitism has been on the rise, too. The premiere of “The Survivor” coincides with the war in Ukraine and President Putin’s antisemitic rhetoric, promises to de-natzify Ukraine and the uncovering of mass graves, which are reminiscent of the Holocaust.
“It would be almost trite to evoke the old adage about people repeating history…but here we are,” said Matti Lashem, a producer of “The Survivor” in an email. “As the son of a survivor, I have to say that seeing images of war from Europe and specifically from Ukraine is shocking, traumatizing and something I never could have conceived of. The absolute perversion of Putin trying to paint the Ukrainians with the brush of Nazism is Soviet-style agitprop at its best.”
Lashem hopes that the next generation understands that Nazi genocide didn’t stop at the murder of Jews. It also put them in morally compromising situations, such as when Foster was faced with the choice of dying or killing his friend in the boxing ring. He also says it is important to remember that these intergenerational traumas continue today.
Lashem says the film shows us how Germany, one of the most civilized nations on the planet—and the home of Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller—could en masse commit themselves to the destruction of a people and allow the perversions of power to run steadfast and unchecked.
The film also highlights the long-term guilt and hell that came with surviving a concentration camp for many.
Haft’s story shows us that there is no possible way to overcome the mental toll of being forced to brutalize his own people and continue professional boxing after his liberation.
The story follows the later years in Harry’s life as he retires from boxing, starts a family, battles nightmares and tries to find his childhood sweetheart.
One scene portrays Haft haunted by one of these hellish nightmares from his time in the camps. Another scene on his wedding night illustrates this when he was unable to embrace his wife. He is extremely hard on his son and keeps him at a distance. “He would have never survived the camps,” Haft said about his son in the movie.
“The truth is that in order to survive, every survivor had to make a choice that they would live with for the rest of their life,” Lashem said. “A film that focuses on a survivor’s post-trauma was something we hadn’t seen- we wanted to see the price Harry and subsequently his family paid.”
“The Survivor” is now streaming on HBO Max.