For anyone without the patience to navigate this site, who assumes Christine Lahti won the 2003 Miniseries Lead Actress Emmy by acclamation (based on predictions made back then): Not only was Lahti overlooked for her OUT OF THE ASHES role as Holocaust abortionist Dr. Gisella Perl, but she could not take even the Showtime network bragging rights (Maggie Smith won over all for MY HOUSE IN UMBRIA, and Showtime's Jessica Lange at least made the final five for her title role in THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE).
Secondly, unlike such concentration camps as Bergen Belsen in countries such as Germany (19 total), Auschwitz was one of five EXTERMINATION camps (all in Poland). Therefore, 99% of internees there died (pretty much everyone except the last group brought in, and Gisella Perl--a collective fate she well knew). Dr. Perl's moral ambivalence involved deciding for 1000 women it would be better for Dr. Perl to deliver and smother their newborns, with the moms being painfully gassed to death within a week, rather than to let actual Nazi SS officers shoot the moms and babies in the head. Whether being forced to do more of their own dirty work--instead of being assisted by Dr. Perl and the more famously documented male prisoner oven details (one of which bucked "groupthink," fought back, and killed many SS guards)--whether, again, such a stubbornly non-collaborative response to pure evil would have driven the SS too berserk to kill as many as they did (or had Hitler turned them into nonhuman orcs, capable of endless killing?), God only knows. Far from stereotyping the "bad guys," director Joseph Sargent takes Nazis=bad for a given, and presents the three immigration officers in New York City as Dr. Perl's real opponents (and not mere "straw men," as evidenced when one of the trio brings Dr. Perl up short by telling her of the son HE lost on D-Day). Certainly some of the niceties presented (Gisella's only infanticide shown here is performed outside of the new mom's view, and her post-Auschwitz baby delivery tally is given as exactly twice her death camp "full-birth" abortion toll) seem too pat.
Thirdly, the DVD extras include amazingly comprehensive filmographies for Christine Lahti, Beau Bridges, Richard Crenna, and Bruce Davison, as well as a helpful map locating all 24 SS concentration and death camps. Also insightful are the cast interviews, "The Choices of Dr. Gisella Perl" among them.
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