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Can a Holocaust documentary have a happy ending? Should it?
(JTA) — Holocaust documentaries tend to sit along a scale from horrific to heartwarming. For every “Night Will Fall,” the rediscovered British film showing gruesome scenes from newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, there is a family-friendly film about a survivor, like “The Number on Great-Grandpa’s Arm.”
Some critics distrust Holocaust documentaries that have “happy” endings, or that focus on the second chance given to survivors, as if they betray the fate of the many more millions of Jews who died rather than survived. Raye Farr, the former director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, once criticized Holocaust documentaries’ “increasing inclination to go for sentimentality.”
“How Saba Kept Singing,”a documentary airing on PBS on Tuesday in honor of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is firmly on the side of uplift. It’s about Cantor David Wisnia, whose unlikely survival tale was told in a memorable New York Times article in 2019. The film’s redemptive message is clear from its first line — “I’m a lover of life,” says Wisnia — to one of its last: “You are really the proof that Hitler did not win,” he tells his grandson.
Wisnia was a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz by literally singing for his captors. Defying the perverse and inexplicable odds of the Final Solution, the former cantorial prodigy managed to live close to three years at the death camp and slave labor complex.
Perhaps as remarkable was his relationship with a fellow inmate, Helen “Tzippi” Spitzer, a similarly “privileged” prisoner who managed to stay in the Nazis’ good graces thanks to her skills as a graphic artist. Her assignments took her to places beyond the women’s barracks, where she met Wisnia, eight years her junior. Soon the two were arranging trysts in a loft where prisoners’ uniforms were stored. Fellow prisoners kept a helpful watch for guards.
Their death camp romance ended on the eve of liberation, when the Germans began emptying the camps and forced the prisoners on a series of death marches. Although David and Tzippi made plans to meet in Warsaw, life had other ideas. Wisnia eventually made it to America after the war, where he became a cantor at synagogues in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey. As for Tzippi, Wisnia wasn’t sure if she survived the war — and when he discovered the truth it set in motion the next remarkable chapter in their story.
The documentary recalls the horrors of the Holocaust — David speaks movingly about the murders of his parents and brothers in the Warsaw Ghetto, and having to stack bodies on a work detail at Auschwitz — but maintains a cautious distance. Writer and director Sara Taksler keeps the archive footage to a minimum, and when Wisnia relates his story of survival — with the help of Avi Wisnia, a singer-songwriter who accompanies his grandfather on a trip to Poland — it is usually over scenes of the camp as it looks today or black and white animation.
Still, “How Saba Kept Singing” is hardly saccharine. Grandfather and grandson are clear-eyed chroniclers of stories David told often (in 2015, he published a memoir, “One Voice, Two Lives: From Auschwitz Prisoner to 101st Airborne Trooper”). And David never takes his good luck for granted — the film is organized around his suspicion that there is a missing piece to his story of survival and that, as Avi says, “He could not have done it alone.”
About his time with Tzippi, David is both honest and discreet. “It was physical,” he admits. “She taught me everything. I knew nothing. I was a kid.”
Avi recounts the family’s shock when they first learned of their patriarch’s relationship with another prisoner at Auschwitz. “Even in the hell of a concentration camp you can still find some kind of a human connection,” says Avi.
Wisnia arrived in the United States in 1946 and lived with an aunt in the Bronx. He met his wife – the appropriately named Hope — and got work as an encyclopedia salesman and, for over 50 years, as a cantor. The couple would go on to have two sons, two daughters and six grandchildren.
As for Tzippi — it’s not giving away too much to say that she also survived the war and got married, to a bioengineering professor who eventually taught at New York University. Per the Times, the couple “devoted years of their lives to humanitarian causes.” She and David would meet again, in a reunion described in that 2019 New York Times story and heard in the documentary on audiotape. Suffice to say that David got an answer to the mystery that long nagged him: “How come I stayed in Auschwitz two and half years and never moved? How the hell can you explain it?”
The film is also saved from sentimentality by the knowledge that David is among the last living witnesses to the Holocaust, which he and Avi sadly acknowledge when discussing whether David would return to Auschwitz for the 75th anniversary of its liberation in 2020. Cantor Wisnia died June 15, 2021, at the age of 94; Tzippi died in 2018 at age 100.
Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum, another victim of the Warsaw Ghetto, purportedly gave permission for the Nazis’ prey — and perhaps future filmmakers — to see their survival as a sanctification of life, not an occasion for guilt. “Today when the enemy demands the body, it is the Jew’s obligation to defend himself, to preserve his life,” he is reported to have said.
Avi Wisnia picks up this theme during a performance with his saba, Hebrew for grandfather.
“I honor the past, and we sing for the future,” he tells the audience. “The greatest act of defiance is to live.”
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Iran Sees US Peace Plan as ‘One-Sided’ as Trump Presses for Deal
A view of a residential building damaged by a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 23, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
A US proposal for ending nearly four weeks of fighting is “one-sided and unfair,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Thursday, while US President Donald Trump said Iran must make a deal or face a continued onslaught.
The Iranian official said the proposal, conveyed to Tehran by Pakistan, “was reviewed in detail on Wednesday night by senior Iranian officials and the representative of Iran‘s Supreme Leader.”
It lacked the minimum requirements for success and served only US and Israeli interests, the official said, while stressing that diplomacy had not ended despite the lack for now of a realistic plan for peace talks.
Trump described the Iranians as “great negotiators” but added that he was not sure he was “willing to make a deal with them to end the war.”
Iran has launched strikes against Israel as well as US bases and civilian sites in the Gulf states. The Iranian regime has also effectively blocked Middle East fuel exports via the Strait of Hormuz since the US and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28.
“They now have the chance, that is Iran, to permanently abandon their nuclear ambitions and to join a new path forward,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
“We’ll see if they want to do it. If they don’t, we’re their worst nightmare. In the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away.”
Oil jumped to $105 a barrel on Thursday and stock markets fell on renewed pessimism over ceasefire prospects as global plastics, technology, retail, and tourism struggled with the impact.
STRAIT OF HORMUZ A CRUCIAL ISSUE
Trump suggested on Thursday that Iran let 10 oil tankers transit the Strait of Hormuz as a goodwill gesture in negotiations, including some Pakistan-flagged vessels, elaborating on what he had described as a “present” from Iran.
The president, who is expected to send thousands of troops to the Middle East, driving expectations of a ground invasion, also said taking control of Iran‘s oil was an option but gave no further details.
A note seen by Reuters on Tuesday to the United Nations from Iran said “non-hostile vessels” could transit the strait if they coordinated with Iranian authorities.
A Thai oil tanker has passed through the strait following diplomatic coordination with Iran, and Malaysia said its vessels were also being allowed to transit in a sign that restrictions were loosening for some countries. Iran would be receptive to any request from Spain related to the strait, its embassy in Madrid said, in the first such offer to an EU state.
US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed that the US had sent a “15-point action list” as a basis for negotiations to end the war.
Pakistan’s foreign minister said “indirect talks” between the US and Iran were taking place through messages relayed by Islamabad, with other states including Turkey and Egypt also supporting mediation efforts.
Any talks, were they to happen, would likely prove very difficult given the positions laid out by both sides.
According to sources and reports, the 15-point proposal includes demands ranging from dismantling Iran‘s nuclear program and curbing its missiles to effectively handing over control of the strait.
Iran has hardened its stance since the war began, demanding guarantees against future military action, compensation for losses, and formal control of the strait, Iranian sources say.
It also told intermediaries that Lebanon must be included in any ceasefire deal, regional sources said.
Trump has not identified who the US is negotiating with in Iran, with many high-ranking officials among the thousands of people killed in the war across the Middle East.
Israel removed Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf from its hit list after Pakistan urged Washington to press Israel not to target them, a Pakistani source with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters. An Israeli military spokesperson declined to comment.
A Western diplomat said the US had taken a “maximalist” position and it was not clear if Washington was seeking to end the war or to calm markets before a potential ground operation.
WAVES OF MISSILES
On Thursday, Iran launched multiple waves of missiles at Israel, striking Tel Aviv, Haifa and other areas, including a Palestinian town in central Israel.
At least one ballistic missile hit Tel Aviv, according to the military, while others carried cluster munitions that dispersed smaller explosives, damaging homes and cars. Israel’s ambulance service said a man was killed in Nahariya after Hezbollah fired a rocket barrage at the northern city.
In Iran, strikes hit a residential zone in the southern city of Bandar Abbas and a village on the outskirts of the southern city of Shiraz, where two teenage brothers were killed, Iran‘s Tasnim news agency said. A university building in Isfahan was reported to have been hit.
US and Israeli officials said Israel had killed the naval commander of Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards, and that it had many more targets left as it degraded Iranian capabilities.
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Iran Was Never Just Israel’s Problem
Iranians take to the streets during nationwide rallies on Nov. 4, 2025, marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy by waving flags and chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Photo: Screenshot
Some criticism of this war is justified.
If leaders want Americans to support military action against Iran, they must explain clearly why the threat is not merely Israeli, but American. They must define the objectives honestly and explain why the costs are worth bearing.
When they fail to do that, skepticism is not a vice. It is common sense.
But much of the commentary around this war has not been serious skepticism. It has been historical amnesia.
Too many Americans now speak as though Iran were chiefly Israel’s problem, and that the legitimate threat from Tehran was mainly the product of lobbying, hawkish paranoia, or another foreign entanglement sold under false pretenses.
This view appears on parts of the Left and on parts of the Right alike. It is a genuine horseshoe: one side speaks in the language of anti-colonial grievance, the other in the language of “America First” suspicion, but both often arrive at the same lazy conclusion — that Israel is the primary author of the crisis and Iran’s own record is somehow secondary.
That is not realism. It is illiteracy (or anti-Jewish bias) masquerading as restraint.
The Islamic Republic of Iran introduced itself to the United States in 1979 not through diplomacy, but through humiliation and hostage-taking. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis were not a misunderstanding. They were an opening statement.
From the beginning, the Iranian regime announced that ideological confrontation with America was not incidental to its identity. It was central.
What followed only confirmed this. For decades, the regime paired annihilative rhetoric with action: terrorism, proxy warfare, hostage-taking, intimidation, and subversion across the region and beyond. Iran did not merely talk like a revolutionary power. It behaved like one.
Americans should remember what that looked like in practice. Some of us knew it through Iraq.
I remember the explosively formed penetrators used in catastrophic IED attacks against American forces. Those weapons were not an abstraction. They were part of the same Iranian model of deniable warfare that allowed the regime to bleed its enemies while pretending to stand one step removed from the violence.
Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. That’s not an Israeli “talking point” — it’s something that Americans need to hear.
Nor was Iran’s model of violence confined to one battlefield. Its partnership with Hezbollah, and the operatives who helped turn that relationship into a durable instrument of terror, showed that Iran’s strategy was never simply defensive. It was regional, ideological, and expansionist.
The nuclear issue tells the same story of denial colliding with evidence. Iran has insisted for years that its nuclear program is peaceful and civilian. But enrichment at levels far beyond normal civilian requirements tells a different story. Americans do not need a degree in nuclear physics to understand that.
One need not endorse every tactical choice made in this war to recognize that Tehran’s claims about its intentions have repeatedly collided with the evidence.
The missile issue is similar. For years, Iran presented supposed limits on its missile range as though they reflected meaningful restraint. Yet its actual capabilities and behavior have repeatedly revealed a larger reach and a more aggressive intent than its public narratives suggested.
This is why the old Waltz-Sagan political science debate still matters. Kenneth Waltz argued that nuclear weapons can stabilize rivalries because states fear annihilation and therefore behave more cautiously.
Scott Sagan warned that proliferation can make catastrophe more likely through accidents, weak controls, organizational failures, and the conduct of dangerous regimes.
In the Iranian case, Sagan’s warning is plainly the more relevant one.
The problem is not that Iranian leaders are cartoonishly irrational. The problem is that too many Western analysts assume every regime calculates risk, death, survival, and martyrdom in roughly the same way. They do not.
A revolutionary regime that has spent decades pairing annihilative rhetoric with proxy warfare, terror sponsorship, nuclear deceit, and regional coercion should not be analyzed as though it were simply another status quo state with ordinary preferences and ordinary inhibitions.
That is also why the phrase “regime change” should not be treated as morally disqualifying in itself.
Everything depends on the regime in question. When a government has spent nearly half a century brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors, sponsoring terrorism, and lying about capabilities that could turn regional war into mass destruction, its removal is not inherently a dark or reckless aspiration.
There is nothing morally sophisticated about treating the survival of such a regime as the default prudent outcome. This is not merely an external menace. It is a regime that terrorizes its own population as well.
At the same time, serious people should say plainly what force can and cannot do. Decapitation strikes and threat-reduction operations are not a political end state. They are, at most, an opening salvo. They can degrade command structures, reduce immediate dangers, and create opportunities that did not previously exist. They cannot by themselves produce legitimacy, restore sovereignty, or build a stable successor order.
That harder phase, if it ever comes, will depend above all on Iranians themselves — on brave people willing to reclaim their country from a regime that has held it hostage for nearly half a century.
This is the point too many critics still miss. Yes, there has been a communications failure. Americans were not told clearly enough, consistently enough, or persuasively enough why Iran is not just Israel’s problem but America’s problem too. And that failure created space for the horseshoe. On the Left and on the Right, anti-Israel fixation has too often displaced sober analysis of the regime itself. The language differs, but the impulse is similar: minimize Iran’s agency, magnify Israel’s, and collapse strategy into slogans.
But the communications failure does not make the danger unreal.
Nor does the war’s messiness. If the war had gone better — if it had produced a cleaner strategic result, a more visible collapse in regime capacity, or even the early signs of a successful internal uprising — some of today’s criticism would undoubtedly be quieter. That much is true. But it does not follow that the underlying threat was invented. It means only that strategic disappointment always gives selective memory more room to operate.
Iran was never just Israel’s problem. It has been an American problem since 1979. It has been a regional problem for decades. And it remains a wider strategic problem wherever revolutionary terror, nuclear deceit, long-range coercion, and genocidal rhetoric are treated as tolerable, so long as they are aimed at someone else first.
This was not only a failure of statecraft. It was a failure of recognition. Too many Americans looked at the crisis and somehow forgot they were dealing with a regime that has spent decades announcing itself through terror, deceit, and exterminationist intent.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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Shabbat HaGadol and the Story of Elijah
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great awesome Day of God, and he will reconcile fathers to children and children to fathers” (Malachi 3:24).
This is part of the Haftorah for Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. But who exactly was Elijah? It is true that in terms of stature and his place in our tradition, he was the greatest of the prophets, even if no book is attributed to him. His public victory over the prophets of Baal during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel was his most famous triumph. But just as significant was the Chariot of Fire that took him up to Heaven when he died, which became the symbol of mysticism with which he was always associated.
In the Talmud, Elijah figures prominently in the debates about messianism and whether he was to be the messiah, or the pathfinder and precursor. Eventually, it was settled that Elijah would pave the way for a messianic era and instruct us what to do and what parts of our tradition would be revived or survive when it came about.
In the Talmud, there are many episodes in which Elijah is said to appear to rabbis and guide them, and he is associated with solving unresolved halachic issues.
Elijah has multiple associations with Pesach. The most obvious being when towards the end of the Seder, we dedicate the fifth cup of wine to Elijah, and we invoke his presence in asking God to remove our enemies.
Why is this fifth cup specifically Eliyahu’s?
Explanations range from the rational to the mystical. According to Maimonides, the coming of the messiah is a time in which oppression and hatred are removed, and we are free to explore our spiritual lives unimpeded. That’s the mystical.
Practically, there is a debate about if we should drink four or five cups of wine at the Seder. Those who advocate for four cups say it is done for the four terms used in the Torah to describe the process that gave us our freedom from slavery — “I freed you, I saved you, I redeemed you, I took you out.” But others believe “I brought you” counts as a fifth.
Are there four or five words, and should there be four or five cups?
The debate is left unanswered. Although we are obliged to have four cups of wine, we add an extra one just in case — and our tradition happened to dedicate that one to Elijah.
This year we have much to be sad about. So many beautiful young and not-so-young lives have been killed by our enemies. So many more lives have been injured or ruined. And yet there have been so many examples of deliverance, self-sacrifice, and heroism.
Is this the year the messiah will come? We can hope. But in the meantime, we have to do our best to reconcile and heal the chasms amongst us, and to come together to go forward united with pride and joy. Thank you, Eliyahu.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.