The Nazi genocide of the European Jews overwhelms the mind with subjects for contemplation, none of which is well suited for narrative fiction. Stories about individuals in the extermination camps may be inevitably moving, and may also lessen the anonymity of the murdered millions, but such stories are nonetheless inadequate for dramatizing the larger issues because of the randomness with which death and survival were determined in the camps. In a sense this randomness becomes the only "story," one that does away with the significance of character to narrative. And so a movie that focuses on a single camp victim, or even on a group of them, feels wrong if our minds have expanded to the enormity of the situation; it's somehow shriveling, and falsely comforting, to be asked to hope that any singled-out individual will survive.

The Holocaust, a crime of historic proportions, is simply greater than any heroic ordeal out of conventional romance — it calls for a new approach to character and narrative. Narrative moviemakers, however, aren't interested in abandoning the significance of personality, no matter the subject. Typical of the road not taken (or even perceived) is the scene in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) in which Helen Hirsch, the brutalized Jewish houseslave of the Płaszów work camp commandant, gives a tearful speech about the arbitrariness of individual fate in the camps. Spielberg, ironically missing his own point, focuses on this individual's "dramatic" speech about the insignificance of the individual, and goes in for familiar, explicit emotionalism. (Schindler soothes her, cannily guessing why her tormentor will not kill her.)

Furthermore, because the Nazis attempted to exterminate an entire people there's an epic dimension to any account of the Holocaust, but this dimension exists in maximal tension with the concept of epic, which classically is the story of a people's ascendancy. (As in the Exodus story; the Aeneid is the quintessential literary example.) The Holocaust is an epic of appalling victimization on a staggering, industrial scale, and though some Jews may have felt they were being punished for their sins (an attitude that at least maintains the rationality in creation), I believe the more dominant feeling is horror at the vulnerability of such a large, diverse, and far-flung group.

What's missing from the Holocaust epic is the possibility of effective group action — no heroes arose from among the Jews to lead them to ultimate, military victory. (Taking the Holocaust as separate from the astonishing martial prowess of the state of Israel.) The heroes were the American and Russian armies, while the internees they liberated had been reduced to skeletons with haunted eye sockets (they seemed literally to have turned into symbols). The Holocaust can't even be seen as an ironic epic, something like the Jonestown mass suicide in which the members of the group, drawn together by whatever desperation and credulity, victimized themselves (and their children, of course). Heroism did survive in the Nazi camps to the extent of the tiny sacrifices that one internee made for another, but such heroism had no meaningful effect on the shape of the larger drama.