"Prisioner of Paradise"

So, I just saw the most amazing documentary on PBS about Kurt Gerron. He was a famous actor and director working around the early 1920s in Germany. He worked with Marlena Deitrich and Peter Lorre, among others. He was also a Jew. He was such a cigar-chomping caricature of a Jew to the Nazis, as a matter of fact, that it is his image that immediately follows the famous shot of stampeding rats in "The Eternal Jew," one of the most famous Nazi propaganda films. "The Jew is the rat!" the narrator screams, before moving on to vicisiously and personally villify Gerron as an excessive and morally corrupt example of Jewish inferiority.

Gerron left Germany early on in the Nazi era, but ended up at a concentration camp following a series of moves, first to Paris, and then to Holland. Highlights (lowlights) of that part of his life include refusing an offer from Deitrich and Lorre to come to Hollywood and direct a film because they wouldn't send him to America first class. Also, failing to plan an escape as he worked at a seaside resort in Holland, where he could have easily hired a boat.

He lived, or was a prisioner, in the "best" concentration camp, Theresienstadt. While there, he put on Cabaret shows with the encouragement of the SS; they were so good they helped convince a representative of the International Red Cross that Theresienstadt was a thriving and healthy community. Gerron also directed a propaganda movie for the Nazis about the camp, shot extremely late in the war, after the Allied invasion of Normandy. After the movie wrapped, the Nazis began shipping off Theresienstadt's prisioners in earnest. Get this shit: Gerron is on the VERY LAST train out of Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, and is killed on the VERY LAST day before the concentrations camps are closed. DAMN! That is some shit, to say the least.