BOB GARFIELD: Some notable dates. Tuesday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and 25 years ago this month, Holocaust, the mini series, was broadcast for 3 consecutive nights on NBC. Following in the footsteps of Roots, which just the year before had looked squarely at the excruciating history of slavery night after night on network TV, Holocaust dug around in the unmentionable history of the massive extermination of the Jews.

GIRL CHILD: Daddy, why does everybody hate the Jews?

BOY CHILD: Cause they killed Christ! Didn't you learn that in Sunday school?!

MOTHER: Come on, you two. Off to bed now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Plenty of other films before 1978 had treated the subject, but Judgment at Nuremburg and even The Diary of Anne Frank had to some degree minimized the Jewish angle and treated the Holocaust as a more generalized phenomenon. In Holocaust, nine hours long, the Holocaust was presented as a tragedy for the Jews, and it was presented -- spelled out, really -- for a mass television audience for the first time. WNYC's Sara Fishko reports. [MUSIC FROM "HOLOCAUST"]

SARA FISHKO: Hundreds of millions saw Holocaust, which was re-broadcast the following year. By that time, the Holocaust and the media seemed a worthy field of study.

ANNETTE INSDORF: Back around 1979, I realized no book had ever been written on the subject, and I saw more and more films dealing with the Holocaust.

SARA FISHKO: Annette Insdorf has just updated her book, Indelible Shadows: Film on the Holocaust. To the 180 documentary and dramatic films already in the earlier editions, she's just added 170 more, most made since 1989. And that doesn't even include the very recent crop of related films such as The Pianist, Max, The Gray Zone, The Last Letter, Blind Spot.

ANNETTE INSDORF: I'm convinced that the reception of Holocaust films has changed a great deal since I wrote the first version of the book in 1979. At that time the images were a wee bit fresh. In other words, if you saw a sealed boxcar or smoke emerging from a chimney or barbed wire, you did not necessarily go - oh, Auschwitz -or - the Jews. It wasn't inherent in that. Now, after 22 or 3 it is.

SARA FISHKO: In some cases, filmmakers, some with family connections to the tragedy, reacted to an outpouring of fictionalized portrayals with an outpouring of personal documentaries using testimony and authentic images to tell stories of the period.

STEVE BRAND: You know I think back then the cycle of films that I was part of was in some way like the Jewish reaction to Roots, cause Roots came out and everybody started looking in their own back yard.

MAN: We made our own bunker...

SARA FISHKO: Steve Brand's film Kaddish was made in the mid-80s. It tells the story of a young Jewish man whose father survived by hiding in a hole in the ground for six months.

MAN: ...about 4 feet high... and we buried ourselves there May 2nd, in 1944...

SARA FISHKO: And the resulting obsessive behavior of the son.

WOMAN: He was in his room, and he comes out with three pages of writing about the Swastika and about Germany-- I said, "where did you get this from?!"

SARA FISHKO: The term "Holocaust film" was not yet in such casual use.

STEVE BRAND: Back when we were doing Kaddish, Elie was going around talking about the Holocaust. Survivors were gathering for, for annual demonstrations. It wasn't a big thing. Certainly children of survivors was just becoming -- there was this group called Second Generation; this was all pretty new.

SARA FISHKO: Many others took up the subject. Annette Insdorf points to waves of films. There was an early group from the late '50s to the '70s which focused on the Nazi criminals and the Jewish victims.

ANNETTE INSDORF: The second wave mainly for me in the late '80s but certainly through the '90s - that has focused on resistance and rescue. How and with whose assistance were the few saved. [MUSIC]

AVIVA SLESIN: There was always the hope that I could put the past behind me and never have to deal with it. I thought just keep doing your cultural and interesting projects.

SARA FISHKO: Aviva Slesin has had a career of making films about everything else -- the Algonquin Roundtable, the director William Wyler, the National Gallery. Her current film, however, is Secret Lives, a documentary based on her experiences as a hidden child during the Holocaust.

AVIVA SLESIN: And my mother was on a certain day packing children's clothes--

SARA FISHKO: Slesin's film is the story of Jewish children sent away by their parents to live in non-Jewish families -- to "pass" and therefore survive the war years.

AVIVA SLESIN: --and I asked her -- am I going alone? -- and she said yes, tomorrow you are going alone; that we'll come the next day.

SARA FISHKO: Secret Lives examines the impact of such arrangements on children who suddenly had new sisters or brothers.

WOMAN: ...Mowanah(ph) didn't look like us. My sisters and I were these typical Dutch girls, you know, I mean the Germans loved us. And Mowanah was this little dark thing.

SARA FISHKO: And its effect on the grownups who were their protectors. In fact, the personal stories are the heart of the film. Slesin doesn't even think of Secret Lives as a so-called Holocaust film.

AVIVA SLESIN: I don't think people are as interested in the Second World War. I think they're Holocausted-out in some way. I think they are rendered numb by more and more stuff about the Holocaust. I think people just roll their eyes and-- I find myself doing that too until-- the second sentence -- if I hear what the real story is - what hap-- what did happen in Shanghai, what did happen -- oh there was an American diplomat who, who brought out Jews? Oh! Who was that? Varian Fry? -- Then I'm interested again. [MUSIC]

SARA FISHKO: Filmmaker Liz Garbus has looked to relationships too to sort out the subject. Her film, soon to be broadcast on the A&E network tells the true story of a woman who tore off her Jewish star and hid her identity to survive. Eventually she even went so far as to marry a Nazi officer -- hence the title, The Nazi Officer's Wife.

WOMAN: And I had to pretend to be 8 years younger; I had, I had always to be very, very careful when I talked about it -- not to give me away.

LIZ GARBUS: You're this Jewish person pretending to be Christian and everybody all around you - the Jews are being shipped off and killed, and to sleep at night and have sex with a Nazi Party member is a pretty deep connection to somebody who's really the enemy. Those were the most interesting questions to me.

SARA FISHKO: So as the number of films increases, the emphasis changes. First the Holocaust is unmentionable, unknown even, barely treated on film. Then so big in scope one can't even comprehend the generalities. Then the stories are personal, complex, bringing the tragedy down to earth, so to speak, with human dilemmas we can understand. And the audience is there.

ANNETTE INSDORF: So the pendulum has swung, let's say. Instead of ignoring the Holocaust in terms of dramatic storytelling or documentaries, we've now moved in the other direction.

SARA FISHKO: What is interesting is the back and forth of fiction and non-fiction. Holocaust in 1978 told a fictional story which reached a mass audience and inspired even more documentaries to tell true stories [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] which may be responsible for the fact that the recent dramatic Holocaust films have not been fictional at all. The memoir and the feature film have merged in Schindler's List and The Pianist. Maybe by now we all know too much to accept anything less. For On the Media, I'm Sara Fishko. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Megan Ryan with Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe and Rob Christiansen with help from Wayne Shulmeister, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Brian Tilley. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello, our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.