ENTERTAINMENT
MUSE MAGAZINE
By Isobel Gibson
HUNTERS AND HOLOCAUST DEPICTIONS: AN ANALYSIS CONTENT WARNING: THIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES THE HOLOCAUST AND MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR ALL READERS. Two and a half years ago I went to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. It was moving, and utterly disgusting. The most striking aspect of the entire day spent learning about the Holocaust and Auschwitz was a glass display filled with human hair. It is difficult to express the profundity of this particular part of the exhibit; giant swathes of human hair, some braided, others stuck in a tangled knot, sit in silence as a marker for those who were murdered. The reason why I talk of this specific instance of the physical remains of the Holocaust, and learning about it, is to highlight the sheer horror involved. Significantly, the Holocaust is a horror that is still a lived experience – tears slowly rolled down the cheeks of my classmates who recognized family names among the records displayed in the Museum. So, how do we, as a society, approach depicting the Holocaust? The 2020 television show 30
JAN 2021 - APRIL 2021
Hunters, produced by Amazon Prime, has raised significant questions regarding the ethicality of portraying the Holocaust, and especially taking certain artistic liberties to do so. Hunters is based on an unlikely team of vigilantes coming together in 1970’s New York City to hunt down and kill former Nazis. The television show also portrays direct accounts of the Holocaust through flashbacks. These scenes are highly disturbing, and a strong part of the plot features Nazi’s forcing prisoners to play a game of human chess, which ultimately results in death and is, of course, a form of mental torture. Notably, Hunters does not claim to be documentary, but rather inspired by true events, including Operation Paperclip, as well as what the horrific reality was of being a victim or survivor of the Holocaust. This is where the controversy lies. By fictionalizing experiences of the Holocaust, such as the existence of the human chess game, several significant risks are taken. First, it has been said by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum that the sensationalizing and fictive nature
