TV REVIEW : ‘Survivors’ Memoirs Offer Only a Glance at the Holocaust

“Schindler’s List” changed Steven Spielberg, and that film’s humanistic echoes are still sounding out. The filmmaker’s ambitious project, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is an attempt to get every Holocaust survivor’s memories in retrievable, computer form. “Survivors of the Holocaust,” on TBS, is that project in a condensed, hourlong TV format.

As such, it’s only a glimpse at this century’s most horrible chapter, and a faint addition to TV’s growing library of Holocaust documentaries. Producers June Beallor and James Moll, with director-editor Allan Holzman, have assembled a gallery of Holocaust survivors recalling some of their most vivid memories, and their subjects feel remarkably open to remembering. But this hour can only be truly affecting to viewers who have never, ever heard of the Holocaust--and for them, this hour is not a sufficient introduction.

So, caught between being a thin history and a slim introduction to Spielberg’s digital preservation effort, “Survivors” quickly recalls the growing days of dread as the Nazis assumed power in 1930s Germany, the Jewish ghettos, the rail voyage to the death camps and the crematory.

But this is subjective, personalized history; the individual memories form a terrible, sad photo album containing snapshots of good and evil. These survivors were mostly kids during the Holocaust, so they recall such things as how boring life was in the ghettos, or how a son beat his father to death for a small bread loaf while packed in a rail car headed for Auschwitz.

Such survivors as Shony Alex Braun endure the full brunt of “the survivor’s guilt”: His violin playing saved his life, but he was also ordered by a Nazi guard to shove a fellow Jew into an oven. In front of Holzman’s camera, Braun’s fellow survivors break down in sobs or, like Sarah Salamon, look heavenward saying, “God, where are you?” It is as if she were still back in the camp, bringing the terror and despair of those years up to the present. If Bosnia isn’t enough of a reminder of vigilance in the face of genocide, this is.

* “Survivors of the Holocaust” airs at 5 and 8 p.m. tonight on TBS.