For their HBO Max film The Survivor, which chronicles the real-life journey of Harry Haft, a concentration camp prisoner forced to box to survive his internment, both director Barry Levinson and star Ben Foster found compelling connections to the story through their own families, as well as disturbing parallels to currently unfolding history.
“I was about five years old and late 40s living with my parents and my grandparents in a small house, and a man showed up at the door,” recalled Levinson during Deadline’s Contenders Television panel alongside Foster. “His name was Simka and it turned out that it was my grandmother’s brother – and I never knew she had a brother – and they started talking to one another in a language which I didn’t understand.”
Levinson recounted how his great-uncle stayed with the family for two weeks in the bedroom across from the future filmmaker. “I woke up one night because he was thrashing about in bed, he was speaking a language and he was yelling out and he’s tossing and turning and then he fell back asleep. And night after night after night. The same thing would occur.”
Years after Simka’s departure, a teenaged Levinson would learn the origin of his relative’s distress during a conversation with his mother. “She says ‘Well, you know Simka, when he was in a concentration camp…’ I said ‘He was in a concentration camp?’ And then she started to tell me a few things.”
Later, reading the screenplay for The Survivor, Levinson was struck by its exploration of the disturbing echoes of trauma. “Those who have survived trauma – in this case, a concentration camp – once it’s over, it’s not like ‘Well, okay, that’s done and now you get on with your life.’ Now we call it post-traumatic stress disorder; now we have a name for it. When terrible trauma happens, some people can get over it and some people can’t, and that’s the story of Harry Haft…who fought in the camps as a boxer for the entertainment of the SS. And if you win, you live another day; if you if you lose, basically, that’s the end of you – you’re dead.”
Haft survived the camp and journeyed to America, hoping to one day find his lost love, hoping that by continuing to engage in public prizefighting, he’ll attract her attention. “He’s struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder,” explained Levinson. “And then irony of all ironies Rocky Marciano, on his way up to become a champion of the world, a great fighter in the early 50s – Harry Haft actually fought him. And so this journey…{my] initial connection was post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Foster found resonance with his own Romanian and Ukranian grandparents on his father’s side, who fled Europe to escape the Russian pogroms during the 1920s. “It takes an enormous amount of courage to leave your home with your family when your home is on fire when it’s being bombarded, when you were being assassinated as a people say we are going to find safe harbor elsewhere” said Foster. “To take that ship, take that trip, and say ‘We’re going.” And we have to and we need to pay more attention to that lately.”
Levinson said he sees immediate relevance with the current Russian war in Ukraine. “When you think about you see all of these people leaving in the Ukraine and you say how many of them are going to be affected beyond what just happened?” he said. “How much is that going to linger in terms of going forward, and how do you get past that to somehow get on with your life? And it keeps repeating over and over and over again, and in that sense and also for other incidents that happen in our lives when we’re affected and we can’t just deal with now, all by itself.”
Check out the panel video above.
Deadline Contenders Television is sponsored by Apple TV+, Eyepetizer, Final Draft, Los Siete Misterios and Michter’s. Partners include Desalto, Film AlUla, Four Seasons Resort Maui, Jason Mizrahi Design, ModMD, The American Pavilion, and Tidelli.
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