'Operation Finale' aims to tell the truth about the Holocaust

Beth Lilach has yet to see the new film “Operation Finale.” And she’s wary.

“Everyone who knows me knows that I almost never recommend a Hollywood Holocaust film,” she explains.

As the senior director of education and community affairs for the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Glen Cove, she’s encountered more than her share of children and adults who are misinformed about the Holocaust. And Hollywood is a major source of that misinformation.

Now comes this latest entry in the Holocaust canon, starring Ben Kingsley as the infamous German SS officer Adolf Eichmann and Oscar Isaac as the Israeli Mossad agent who helped track him down in 1960. Based on actual events, the film opens Aug. 29, and Lilach is hoping it will be one of the rare Holocaust films she can actually recommend.

No doubt director Chris Weitz agrees. His German-Jewish father and paternal grandparents fled the Nazis and immigrated to the United States. For him, there’s no point in telling the story if he can't get it right.

TELLING THE TRUTH

Holocaust films intrigue us because “we’re fascinated with our own capacity for evil,” says Weitz.

True enough. But how much of what we learn from Hollywood’s depiction of the Holocaust is actually true?

This question seems especially relevant in light of a recent survey by the Claims Conference (aka the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany), released this spring, noting the large numbers of Americans who seem unfamiliar with basic Holocaust facts. Nearly half of adults surveyed — and two thirds of millennials — couldn’t identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp, and 11 percent of adults (22 percent of millennials) hadn’t even heard of the Holocaust or were unsure if they had.

Besides better education initiatives, Hollywood films are crucial in the fight to better inform Americans, Lilach believes — as long as those films are factual and not exploitative. In her view, that doesn’t happen nearly enough.

For that reason, she prefers documentaries to fictional feature films like “Life Is Beautiful” or “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” popular films that stirred controversy for playing fast and loose with the facts. (The  Glen Cove organization offers suggestions of age-appropriate and historically accurate films, books and educational materials; interested parents and teachers can call 516-571-8040 or visit hmtcli.org.)

“I think ‘Schindler’s List’ will probably never be topped in terms of its ability to deal with open eyes with what happened to people in this period,” Weitz says in a phone interview. Of course, even Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning epic has been criticized for relying too heavily on Holocaust cliches (monstrous Nazis; weak, victim-y Jews). Still, the pressure to be accurate isn’t lost on Weitz, whose father, John Weitz, had been one of the first U.S. intelligence officers to enter the Dachau concentration camp after the liberation.

“Watching a World War II movie with him, let alone a Holocaust film, was daunting,” Weitz recalls. “He would give a running lecture on all the inaccuracies being foisted upon the audience.”

Weitz’s film rearranges some plot points in the timeline for dramatic purposes, but he has tried to hew closely to the facts.

His father, a fashion designer and later biographer of prominent Nazis, died at his home in Bridgehampton in 2002, and Weitz admits to feeling his dad’s “spectral eye” on the film. “I’ve had some dreams about him,” he says. “I’ve felt his presence very much.”

STAR POWER

Having Kingsley in the cast, of course, adds gravitas.

Off-screen, out of character, and even just speaking over the phone, Kingsley’s voice evokes a measured cadence, a certain nobility.

The “glory of cinema,” he says, is its ability to tell stories that are otherwise “incomprehensible and indigestible. And yet somehow [we] get some echo across to the audience of those times.”

So what was it like working with the legendary actor?

“Nervous, I think, is an understatement,” says Haley Lu Richardson, who plays Sylvia Hermann, the young woman who helped identify Eichmann. “A better word is intimidated. He was very serious and focused.”

Kingsley generally kept to himself on set, in an effort to maintain Eichmann’s cool, enigmatic persona.

The tense, psychological core of the film is in the conversations and burgeoning relationship between Eichmann and Mossad agent Peter Malkin, while Malkin’s fellow agents bicker over how and how much to speak to their prisoner.

It’s a question put to Kingsley, who for months had to try to get inside the head of this troubling, elusive figure. Were there questions he’d pose to Eichmann if he could?

“Absolutely not,” he says, breaking out of his noble, steady tones, sounding more emphatic now. Almost riled.

“I have no interest in talking to the man,” he continues. “His silhouette is shaped by the experience . . . grief and dignity [of his victims]. I absolutely dedicate my performance to them. I have had conversations with them. I have no wish to have any conversation with the character I played. None whatsoever.”

ART IMITATES LIFE

That emotions can be easily triggered by Eichmann is not surprising. But some shades of emotion were unexpected on set. While shooting a postwar Nazi rally scene inside an ornate old building in Buenos Aires, art almost seemed to imitate life — an ugly side of life, as a crowd of extras playing German émigrés in Argentina were whipped into a frenzy of shouting and Nazi salutes.

“Sure, they’re all acting, but they were so loud, the room was shaking,” recalls Richardson, who’d run downstairs between takes to catch her breath and get a little distance from the crowd. “It was really, really jarring.”

Weitz felt it, too.

“It was . . . strange, the effect that kind of shouting unleashed in people,” he says. “They were hesitant at first, but once given permission, there’s something interesting that happens, anthropologically almost, when people start shouting and saluting together. It becomes a little bit more than performance at that moment. So I can understand why she felt scared.”

That moment underscored for the young actress why films like these are so important.

“You learn about what people DID — the evil and the good,” she says. And hopefully, she adds, that shows us how in future “we can make better choices than those made before.”