American documentary showcase P.O.V. (some PBS stations, 9 p.m.) introduces a remarkable story of truth and reconciliation tonight featuring two equally courageous women. One is Monika Hertwig, daughter of a notorious Nazi commandant; the other is Helen Jonas, a Holocaust survivor. In Inheritance, a beautifully filmed documentary that is alternately shocking and poignant, filmmaker James Moll interviews both women at length and then engineers their encounter.
Born in 1945, Hertwig is a German housewife and devoted grandmother to the little boy she and her husband are raising because their daughter was drug-addicted at his birth. She hopes that by doing well by him, by creating something good for the future, she may somehow atone for the past.
She was always told that her father died for his country in the war - until she was 11, when, in the midst of an argument, her mother told her in anger that she was just like her father and would die like him. Puzzled, she asked her sympathetic grandmother for an explanation and was told the truth: Her father was a Nazi who had been responsible for killing Jews, and he had been hanged at the end of the war when she was still a baby.
It was not until Hertwig was well into adulthood, however, that she began to face the implications of what that meant, especially after she saw the 1993 movie Schindler's List. Her father was Amon Goeth, the commandant at the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow, Poland, and the notorious sadist played by Ralph Fiennes in the film. Her mother, Ruth, was his young mistress, living the good life with him in a villa down the road from the camp.
Helen Jonas was a servant in that villa. Goeth plucked her from the barracks when she was 14 and if that saved her from death in a forced-labour camp, she certainly felt no gratitude: She walked in living fear of a master who casually renamed her Susanna because the other servant was already Helena and routinely threw both girls down the stairs. She knew when she heard him get up early in the morning that he was going out to shoot prisoners and that his dogs were trained to kill.
Goeth was friends with factory owner Oskar Schindler and when he came to call, that kinder man would tell Helen that she would eventually be liberated. When Goeth was arrested by the Nazis themselves for stealing Jewish property from the camp, Schindler made good on his promise.
Hertwig appears here both painfully burdened by her parents' history and remarkably committed to confronting its ugliness. She saw Jonas in a German documentary that came out shortly after the Hollywood movie and bravely decided to write to her in the United States, where she now lives.
Moll films their meeting at the site of the Plaszow camp. As is often the case with onscreen encounters, this all feels a bit forced as the two women, with cameras rolling at both ends, agree over the phone from their respective Krakow hotel rooms to a meeting place. Yet once their awkward introduction is complete and they actually visit the notorious villa, their encounter feels charged with truthful tension.
Jonas is not vengeful. She understands Hertwig's pain and will sympathize to a point, but is never willing to let her avoid the truths the perpetrator's daughter has come to Plaszow to hear. Jonas, too, is looking for answers, wondering what in Goeth's past would have made him such a monster, but she observes that Hertwig is perhaps angrier at the parent she actually knew, wondering how her mother could have stood by such a man.
Moll then gradually brings their lives up to date, revealing the shadow the Holocaust has cast over both families decade after decade. He does not, on the other hand, go into Goeth's crimes in any detail, leaving it entirely up to the two women to tell the story through their experience of it. Their on-camera honesty about their respective emotional predicaments is admirable and you can only think that if this level of truthfulness, empathy and wisdom had existed at the time, history would have been rather different.
Check local listings.
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Also airing tonight
SECRET SANTA (Vision,
9 p.m.) This sentimental and cliché-ridden 2003 Christmas flick would like you to believe it is set in the world of Internet access and cellphones, but the story of a big-city reporter who visits a small town to discover the secret identity of an anonymous do-gooder feels seriously dated. It's the kind of movie Jimmy Stewart and Kate Hepburn could have starred in, and it sure would have been livelier than this.
EXTREME SPEED, WILD DOCS! (Newsworld, 10 p.m.) This bit of fact-based programming features an annoyingly breathless countdown of fast animals, with some interesting stuff along the way. A hare could easily outrun an Olympian sprinter while one of the insects featured here could beat a car.
GHOST HUNTERS
International (Space, 10 p.m.) On their season finale, the paranormal debunkers go to Romania to track down tales of vampires and visit the castle of Vlad the Impaler. Let's hope they discover that vampires are actually fiction; the occasional shoulder-shrugging failures to debunk on this show and its U.S. counterpart are lame. Oh yeah, we believe in science, except when we go screaming for the exit.
K.T.
Kate Taylor