It’s impossible to imagine a non-Jew writing this novel even as it’s tricky enough, as a non-Jewish critic, to review it. If I like the book, I’m insensitive; if I say it’s in bad taste, I’m falling into the guiltily pious attitude toward [Anne] Frank that Auslander ridicules.

— Maureen Corrigan review Shalom Auslander’s comic novel about the Holocaust.

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas stars in the drama Sarah’s Key, about the French roundup of Jews during the Nazi occupation. “It’s something the French have been extremely wary of talking about,” she says. “It’s been hidden away for a very, very long time.” [full interview here]

John Powers on This Must Be The Place: “Dressed as a 50-year-old Goth rocker Sean Penn enters a cross-country roadtrip to track down a Holocaust criminal. It’s a Holocaust road movie which is also [Penn’s character’s] coming of age story because the film is how he comes of age at age 50. In addition to all of this, it’s a comedy.”

John Powers reviews Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzman’s tribute to the Atacama Desert — the driest place on Earth, and home to both sophisticated observatories and the sober memories of a military regime’s abuses:  ”Watching Nostalgia for the Light, I suddenly remembered visiting the memorial to the Jewish heroes who fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. I was surrounded by an Israeli school group, whose teachers, moved to tears by what struck them as sacred ground, were aghast to see their students giggling, horsing around and flirting — in short, being teenagers. And though my brain sympathized with the adults who honored the memory of those blood-stained cobblestones, my body was on the side of the kids, who were living, breathing, exuberant proof that life goes on.”

During the Third Reich, Germany’s foreign ministry staff across Europe cooperated in the mass murder of Jews and others, according to a government-sponsored study released Thursday in Berlin.

The report says German diplomats during the Nazi era were far more deeply involved in the Holocaust than previously acknowledged. It also shows how West German diplomats after the war worked to whitewash history and create a myth of resistance and opposition to Nazi rule.