Kino Eye: Holocaust Memorial Day - Eva's diary

Friday 27 January was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My chosen film, unfortunately, is not easily accessible and is not that well-known. Omer Bartov in his otherwise excellent book The “Jew” in Cinema doesn’t even mention it, although it is one of the most interesting, if perplexing because of a peculiar twist, of the films depicting those terrible events.

There was a publishing sensation in post-war Hungary when the diary of Holocaust victim Éva Heyman, a 13 year-old girl from the Transylvanian town of Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania), was found by her mother. Éva perished in Auschwitz and was dubbed the “Hungarian Ann Frank”. The mother, Ágnes Zsolt, who survived Auschwitz, published the diary as My Daughter Éva and in 1993 it was adopted for the screen by András Jeles, a brilliant avant-garde Hungarian filmmaker whose work nowadays is sadly neglected.

The film, called rather oddly Why wasn’t he there? (Senkiföldje — Dieu n’existe pas), follows Éva and the events leading up to her deportation, where the film ends. She reads Dickens’ David Copperfield and the film narrative is interspersed with scenes from the novel. As the rumours of the coming deportations mount, the tension and desperation in Éva’s household increases but she finds solace and escape in her diary and reading. The peculiar twist is that there never was a diary. The mother forged it.

That assessment is now generally, although not universally, accepted because of close textual-historical analysis which reveals a number of contradictions in the time and dates of various events.

Jeles knew this before he began filming but nevertheless went ahead saying that it was, regardless, a story worth telling.

The reasons why Éva’s mother invented the diary, assuming she did, are a mystery; was it because of some kind of feeling of “guilt” because she had survived and her daughter had not?

As far as I know finance was not a consideration: she made no money out of it.

My guess ­— and I emphasise it is a guess — is that Jeles thought the three narratives: Dickens’ novel, the diary in the film, and the forgery by her mother, are all somehow intertwined (the original working title was Parallel Lives).

All of them involved some kind of escape into another world, far from the oppressive reality that steadily engulfed Éva and her family.