Triumph of something other than the will

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during a recent free preview weekend was a new one to me: Triumph of the Spirit. It's going to be on again, tomorrow morning at 3:25 AM (or overnight tonight if you will) on Epix2.

Willem Dafoe plays Salamo Arouch. At the start of the movie, he's in what looks like some form of solitary confinement, as somebody opens up an eyehole and looks in on him. Salamo in a voiceover tells us that he thinks of his wife Allegra (Wendy Gazelle), his father (Robert Loggia) and his brother Avram (Costas Mandylor), and the things he liked to do in the old days.

You see, Salamo is a Jew, from the Greek city of Thessaloniki, and this is the beginning of 1945. Salamo is interned at Auschwitz. Flash back a couple of years. Salamo worked with his father for a bit at the port of Thessaloniki, as well as taking up boxing. He was naturally good at boxing, and even became the middleweight champion of the Balkans. But then World War II came and the Nazis occupied Greece, forcing the Jews into a ghetto before ultimately putting them in cattle cars and sending them up north to the various extermination camps, which for the entire Arouch family was Auschwitz.

When the train arrives at Auschwitz, the Jews are separated, the men on one side and the women on another. One woman wants to be with her child, which turns out to be a fatal decision as this is the first group of people to be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately upon arrival, not that the people arriving knew this was going to happen.

The remaining people are put to slave labor, given poor rations that are going to weaken them to the point that it's easier for the Nazis to decide which ones to gas next, and have to deal with kapos (roughly similar to the trustys from Brubaker metioned a few weeks back) who enforce all of the obnoxious and dehumanizing rules the Nazis have instituted.

One day during the enforced labor, one of the kapos goes after Salamo, who makes what you'd think is a mistake of fighting back, and actually besting the kapo in a fight. This brings him to the attention of Major Rauscher (Hartmut Becker), one of the Nazi officers in the administration of Auschwitz. It turns out that one of the things the Nazis have been doing to the Jews (and other undesirables who have wound up in the camps) is to set up boxing matches between them for the entertainment of the officers, who bet on the boxers. Rauscher, upon learning about Salamo's having been middleweight champ of the Balkans, knows he's got a winner on his hands and could make a lot of money.

Salamo decides to fight, mostly because it means a chance at life and perhaps a little bit better conditions. But it's goin to be tough, as the boxing matches aren't a set number of rounds, but until one opponent falls and can't get back up. And lose too often, and it's off to the gas chambers for you. He's coached and helped in general by a Gypsy (Edward James Olmos).

Meanwhile, life (for some values of life) at Auschwitz goes on, with Avram being gassed for refusing the job of cleaning out the gas chambers after another round of gassing, and Dad getting too old to go on, leading to his gassing too. Among the women, they're trying to survive too, with one faking a pregnancy to try to get some extra rations based on everybody else's sympathy.

Now, we know that Salamo survived so we can expect that he's going to survive at the end of the movie when the camp is finally liberated, but there's still a lot of brutality he has to face along the way, such as when there's an uprising among the Jews, and a drunken Rauscher drawing his gun on a Jew who won't fight.

Salamo Arouch's story is an interesting one, although unsurprisingly Triumph of the Spirit takes some liberties with it. A big one is that Salamo only got married after liberation; he's also portrayed as being rather older than he was in real life.

I didn't know any of this until looking up Arouch after watching the movie. The bigger problem for me was that the movie consistently had a sort of TV movie-of-the-week feel to it, making the horrors of Auschwitz seem rather sanitized and anodyne. Not as bad as Operation Eichmann, but definitely noticeable. On the bright side, the filmmakers were able to get permission to do some second unit shooting at Auschwitz, especially surprising since the movie came out in 1989 and at the time of filming the Communists were still in power.

Despite the problems I had with the movie, I'd definitely recommend Triumph of the Spirit. It seems to be out of print on DVD, but it is available on Amazon streaming, the last I checked.