Is Context Everything?

Over the past weeks, there have been two stories that, for me, have been linked thematically - Benedict Cumberbatch’s language when he was discussing opportunities for black actors, and Holocaust Memorial Day

Last week, Benedict Cumbertbatch, while being interviewed on a US chat show, talked about the (lack of) opportunities for black actors in the UK compared to the US. He used the term ‘coloured’ to describe black people and was immediately brought to task on social media, which in turn energised the ‘PC gone mad’ brigade.

Last week also saw the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians. It was an incredibly moving event, with many of the 300 or so survivors of three camps coming together to bear witness to the events that had taken place, and The Holocaust as a whole.

Yet, it is one comment heard on the radio, that has played on my mind more that any of the speeches given during the memorial service - and it is this comment that ties these two stories together.

One of the survivors (and I apologise for not catching her name) talked about a recent experience she had had in a secondary school in England. She had talked to the pupils about her time in Auschwitz and the students were invited to ask questions. One student asked, ‘What did you do for entertainment in the camp?’

It’s a question I find as shocking in its innocence as well as its ignorance.

Both of these stories, in their own ways, hold a mirror up to how we deal with discrimination, how the water that flows between intention and impact in our behaviour is of oceanic size and how - when it comes to how these stories are judged and dissected - context is everything.

A lot has been written about Cumberbatch’s interview, the offensiveness and history of the word used and how the use of that word negates the view he was expressing. What I haven’t really heard discussed in any way was the view he was expressing or the context behind its use. Reading through social media, most comments seemed to fall into two distinct camps - either ‘What a hypocrite, he talks about equal rights and then demeans blacks by calling them coloured’ or ‘It’s PC gone mad’. One of the challenges is that these two opposing views don’t take into account the mass of middle ground opinion that sits in between.

About 11 years ago now, I wrote a play based of the life of two prisoners of Auschwitz, Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Galinski. It was a fascinating experience for me and one I look back on and recognise how much I learnt about myself as much as about The Holocaust. I also made a film at the end, which was a collection of images (photos and sketches) showing the plight of some of the victims of The Holocaust. As with any piece of art, there was criticism and I have to admit that some of this got under my skin. Not necessarily about the play itself, but more around my motivation – particularly around the making of the film.

Did it get to me that the most critical review of the play was in a Jewish paper? I’d be lying if I said no, but maybe not for the reasons that may spring to mind. It certainly wasn’t about approval and respect, but more about the fact that the writer only reviewed the film at the end and not the play itself (or in other words, three minutes out of 60. It also rankled that the reviewer made some direct comments about my beliefs which were worded as absolutes.

I was very conscious about the film at the end throughout the whole process and it certainly did raise a lot of comments from audience members. In one way, The Jewish Chronicle reviewer was right in that I am sure that for the play’s audience base, these were pictures that are etched into their consciousness and are as important as they are tragic, and a terrifying a part of their heritage. It is impossible to understand the impact this has had on the Jewish population and I am reminded of the quote that sits outside one of the memorial buildings at Auschwitz - “Whilst not all victims of The Holocaust were Jewish, every Jew is a victim of The Holocaust”. It’s a pity I never got to meet the reviewer because if I was asked why I set about writing the play; I hope I would have been able to explain the following.

One of the many things that stays with me from my first visit to Auschwitz was both how little I actually knew, and how the things I thought I knew were, at times, a distortion of the truth. As an example I thought that gas actually came out of the showerheads rather than the blue Zyklon B tablets being thrown in through holes in the ceiling. It may not seem a particularly important point but to me it illustrates just how poor my school education was on this subject as well as my own facilitated learning. I was ashamed that I knew so little about one of the most significant and important events of the last 1,000 years. When I returned home, I asked friends what they knew and I found their level of knowledge to be very similar to mine, which was at best a ‘Hollywood education’. I recognise that the very thought of dramatizing any of the events of The Holocaust is deemed a poor choice by some, particularly by people who are not directly linked to these events. One of the guides on my second visit to Auschwitz was very critical of Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler's List but was full of praise for The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski. The main reason for this? Polanski was a Jew who managed to escape from the Krakow ghetto and Spielberg wasn’t.

I would love to say it was more than this, a deeper reason, but the crux of the argument was that one of these films was more authentic because of the director’s personal history.

Back to Mala and Edek and let me state that I never wrote this play for people whose heritage is embroidered within The Holocaust. Yes, the images I used will be well known to some, but not to us all. The play and film were always written for people of my age and education. It was written for the young person who asked an Auschwitz survivor ‘What did you do for entertainment in the camp?’

So what do all these ramblings mean? What point am I actually trying to make? I guess that I am trying to say that it is easy to judge a person for specifics, but when those specifics are but a small part of a bigger system. then surely the bigger system is the important part.

Yes Benedict Cumberbatch’s use of one word was inappropriate, but let us not lose sight of the wider point he was making. Yes, Spielberg may not share the same history as Polanski, but the work of his Shoah Foundation has done more than any other to record on film the first-hand accounts of survivors of The Holocaust. And yes, as far as I know, there is no Jewishness in my family but that doesn’t eliminate me - or indeed, anyone else - from thinking about how today we can still learn from those events. It isn’t just about what the Nazis did to the Jews, it is also about what we were capable of doing to each other.

Even the best cameras, with their high resolution lenses, editing facilities and speedy shutters can only give us a snapshot of a situation. Sometimes that is enough, whether it is a lone person standing in front of a tank, a person planting a flag upon the moon or a doctor pointing each person in a long queue off a train, to the left or to the right. But sometimes if we only look at the snapshot and don’t discover the story behind it, misleading conclusions can be drawn and stated as fact. Sometimes, context really is everything.