holocaust

Director: nan

Actor: joseph bottoms,tovah feldshuh,rosemary harris,tony haygarth

Data Published: Sun Apr 16 1978

Genres: Drama,History,Romance,War

Key Words: one word series title,nazis,nazi,jewish,germany

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077025/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(TV_miniseries)

Description: Holocaust is a TV mini-series starring Joseph Bottoms, Tovah Feldshuh, and Rosemary Harris. The saga of a Jewish family's struggle to survive the horror of Nazi Germany's systematic marginalization and extermination of their...

Plot: A German Jewish family, the Weisses, consists of Dr. Josef Weiss (Fritz Weaver), the father; Berta Weiss (Rosemary Harris), the mother and talented pianist; Karl Weiss (James Woods), an artist who is married to a Christian woman named Inga Helms-Weiss (Meryl Streep); Rudi Weiss (Joseph Bottoms), an independent, rebellious soccer player; Anna Weiss (Blanche Baker), the young daughter; and Moses Weiss (Sam Wanamaker), Josef's brother and chemist from Warsaw. Throughout the series, each member of the Weiss family experiences hardships and ultimately meets a terrible fate, with the exceptions of Rudi and Inga. Dr. Josef Weiss is a respected general practitioner from Berlin. After losing his right to treat "Aryan" patients, he is deported to Poland for being a foreign citizen. There, he becomes a member of the Judenrat (Jewish council) for the Warsaw Ghetto. He is sent to Auschwitz for attempting to save Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto's liquidation process. At Auschwitz, he is assigned to road labor for Erik Dorf's uncle Kurt (see Erik Dorf, below), who tries to save several Jews by having them work for him. Kurt then is punished for using Jews when he should not have done so, and the Jews on his crew (including Josef) are all sent to the gas chambers. Mrs. Berta Weiss, after her husband's deportation, survives with the help of Inga and her family. She is later deported to the Warsaw Ghetto and reunites with Josef, who gets her a teacher job before she is eventually sent to Auschwitz, where reunites again with Josef before ending in the gas chamber. Anna Weiss becomes unresponsive after being raped by German SA personnel on New Years Eve, 1939. Inga sends her for treatment to the Hadamar Clinic sanitarium in Hadamar in 1940, but she and the others seeking treatment there are mass executed by carbon monoxide poisoning as part of the Nazi Action T4. Karl Weiss is arrested and sent to Buchenwald. Later, a friend of Inga's family, Heinz Muller, has Karl transferred to Theresienstadt, to work in the art studio, where he and the other artists secretly make pictures depicting the reality of the concentration camp. One of them sells several of the pictures of horrific concentration camp scenes, which are discovered, and the artists are tortured by the SS. They refuse to aid the investigation, and all but Karl die. Karl hears of his wife's pregnancy, is transferred to Auschwitz, put on the Sonderkommandos, and finds out that both of his parents were taken to Auschwitz. Subsequently, Karl's health deteriorates badly, and he dies in 1945, on the day Auschwitz is liberated. Rudi Weiss, having fled from Germany, goes to Czechoslovakia, where he meets Helena Slomova (Tovah Feldshuh). They escape together to the Ukraine, where they fight for years with Jewish partisans, led by Uncle Sasha, a doctor who lost his family earlier in the war. After fighting against both SS and Ukrainian soldiers, Helena is fatally shot and Rudi is captured and knocked unconscious. He wakes up in Sobibor, where he meets Leon Feldhandler and Alexander Pechersky, and escapes during the uprising. Rudi decides to travel alone back through Europe and find his family. Moses Weiss owns a pharmacy in Warsaw. When Josef and the Lowys are deported from Germany, he finds a place for them to stay. Like his brother, Josef is put on the Judenrat. After hearing that the SS plans to kill all Jews in Europe, he starts a resistance movement. which fights against the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with weapons obtained from Christian Poles. They are initially successful, but the SS discovers their secret hiding places and uses gas to force them to walk out and shot them. Karl's wife, Inga, desperately tries to reach him in various camps, but she can only get letters through to him if she performs sexual favors for Heinz Muller. Threatening to keep her husband involved in heavy, dangerous physical work if she does not acquiesce to his requests, the SS sergeant rapes her. She eventually sacrifices her freedom to join Karl in Theresienstadt where he is commissioned as an artist, and after arriving, she becomes pregnant with his child. At the end of the series, Rudi meets Inga in the liberated Thresienstadt, and later reveals that he found out what happened to his parents and Karl at Auschwitz. Inga discloses that, despite Karl's telling her not to, she had the baby and named him Josef (after her father-in-law). She decides to take her child back to Berlin and reunite with her family. Rudi's fate is unknown at the denouement of the series, but he is offered a job smuggling orphaned Jewish children into Palestine. The series ends with Rudi playing football with Jewish Greek children. Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a lawyer from Berlin, is the focus of the other main storyline in the series. At the urging of his ambitious wife, Marta, the unemployed and apolitical Dorf joins the SS, becoming the personal assistant of Reinhard Heydrich. Dorf rises through the ranks of the SS, becoming famous for developing legalistic justifications and euphemisms for the anti-Jewish campaign. Coordinating mass murder burdens Dorf's conscience at first, but he grows more ruthless as he discovers that ideological fervor gains him prestige. This backfires after a feud with field SS officers, who resent his imperious manner and carrying out the gruesome tasks he mandates in Berlin. Dorf's detractors send an anonymous letter to Heydrich accusing Dorf of having communist sympathies; the accusations stunt his career. After the assassination of Heydrich, Dorf, without his protector and now in disfavour with superiors, is eventually put in charge of major extermination operations at Nazi extermination camps. Dorf continues to follow orders, which require committing further war crimes as well as covering them up, which choice he and his wife justify to protect themselves and their status. After the war ends, Dorf is captured by the United States Army and told that he will be tried for war crimes. Dorf decides to follow the example of many other Nazi officials and commits suicide by taking a cyanide pill.