Survivor's Guilt

Survivors Guilt, the latest effort by Columbus-based filmmaker Sheldon Gleisser, has provoked responses ranging from enthusiastic approval to hostile denunciation. The film is barely 13 minutes long, but its strident attack on theories that the Holocaust never happened has stirred up a tempest of criticisms and memories.


"One of the oddest events was when I screened it (earlier this year) at the Cultural Arts Center," says Gleisser, "Afterwards, two guys came up to me and started to get into an argument with each other. They were both old enough to have been in World War Two, and one of them was sort of hedging around about 'Who knows? Maybe it never happened.'


"Then the other guy just cut loose. He said that he had served in an American unit that liberated a death camp. 'We were
shocked,' he said. 'We just rounded up every Swastika-wearing S.O.B. we could find and shot them.' "


The literal and figurative battlelines of history are only part of the controversy generated by Survivor's Guilt. Set at an unnamed Midwestern university, the film begins with a student newspaper editor (Erika Hewitt) choosing to print an anti-Holocaust editorial in the name of freedom of speech. In protest, an elderly Jewish man (local actor Harold M. Eisenstein) takes her hostage at gunpoint and takes her hostage at gunpoint and forces her through a re-enactment of his own first day at a concentration camp.


Survivor's Guilt has been praised by some actual death camp survivors, and it's in the process of being acquired for inclusion in the collection at the American Holocaust  Museum in Washington.  But the film has also been attacked for everything from alleged naivete about the freedom of the press, to its negative presentation of women.

"When I showed the movie up in Delaware a while back," recalls Gleisser, "I got criticized for presenting a stereotypic view of a violence-prone Jew. Personally, I didn't even know that there was such a stereotype."

That criticism may have stemmed from a crucial misassumption on the writer's part: he may have assumed that Gleisser wasn't Jewish. But despite Gleisser's thoroughly Midwestern, white-bread looks, he is Jewish. Survivor's Guilt was his attempt to deal with his Jewish heritage. Ironically, his recent trip to Dresden, Germany — where the movie was invited to a competition screening at the Dresden International Film Festival — reminded Gleisser of just how Midwestern he is.


"All they eat is sausage and bread, and everyone was dressed in black," says Gleisser. "By the second day, I thought I was
trapped in a Saturday Night Live routine. But I've got to admit, you haven't seen Star Trek until you've heard Worf speak in German."


Unfortunately, Gleisser didn't bring an award home from Dresden, but he did receive surprisingly strong verbal support
from some of the independent European filmmakers who attended the festival.


One impression of Dresden that struck home for Gleisser was a photo he found at the railroad station. It was taken during the aftermath of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. In one night, this picturesque city was reduced to charred rubble in one of the greatest massacres of civilians in modern warfare. The photo simply showed a long row of burnt bodies stacked nine-feet high along the railroad tracks.


"See that shot of the railroad station..." said Gleisser, shaking his head as he trailed off into momentary silence.  "These people didn't deserve that.  But the persecution of the Jews started earlier.  The fire-bombing of Dresden was awful, but it was nothing like the Holocaust."