In Darkness

IN DARKNESS Agnieszka Holland brings to light an astonishing story of Jewish survival

Agnieszka Holland's sepulchral film brings a remarkable story of Jewish survival to light

The world has heard of Schindler’s Jews, who were saved from the gas ovens by the patronage of an enlightened German industrialist. Socha’s Jews are not quite so celebrated. There are number of reasons for that. For a start, many fewer Jews were saved in this narrative, and their story has not found its own Thomas Kenneally - nor until now its Steven Spielberg. But most importantly their saviour would never be mistaken for any sort of moral pin-up, being a burglar and black marketer who stashed his booty in the sewers of Lvov.

The Passenger, English National Opera

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY Holocaust opera with impeccable artistic credentials - 'The Passenger'

Holocaust opera with impeccable artistic credentials in first-class UK premiere

No two creative artists have a stronger right to make a valid statement about Auschwitz than a Polish-born composer who escaped his family's fate by fleeing to Russia, only to fall into another anti-Semitic trap, and a Polish writer whose clear-eyed transmutation of her three years in the camp inspired the opera. Neither, of course, guarantees the end result of great art.

Sarah's Key

Kristin Scott Thomas's latest mixes the harrowing and the hokey

History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive preserve, the film chronicles both the eponymous Sarah, a young girl who survives the French internment camps, and Julia, a Paris-based American journalist in the modern day whose life is taken over by Sarah's story. Are the film's two parts of equal value? Let's just say that fiction yet again is trumped by fact.

DVD: Speer and Hitler: The Devil's Architect

Docudrama exploring Albert Speer's role in building the Third Reich

Albert Speer was Hitler’s most high-ranking war minister, but just how much was he complicit in Nazi atrocities? Thirty years after his death, and 16 after Gitta Sereny’s controversial biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Speer remains a most enigmatic figure. Made in 2005 and now released on DVD, Speer and Hitler: The Devil’s Architect (dir: Heinrich Breloer; English subtitles) is an award-winning three-part docudrama that attempts to unravel that enigma.

Miroslav Balka, Tate Modern & Modern Art Oxford

Dizzying video images of the Holocaust from Polish installation artist

Walk into the gaping mouth of the metal container featured in Miroslaw Balka’s installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you are plunged into a disorientating darkness. Unnerved, you shuffle forward, passing and perhaps finding comfort in the ghostly presence of other limbs, other bodies which are also shuffling uncertainly, all awareness of spatial relationships denied in the enveloping blackness.