When I began exploring how films have grappled with the Holocaust in 1979, there were merely a few dozen titles to warrant attention. As the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, I wanted to bring relatively unknown foreign films to attention, and to assess how American movies had dealt with the legacy of World War II. The word “Holocaust” was just coming into common usage, thanks to the NBC miniseries of 1978. It never occurred to me that, by the year 2001, films about the Nazi era and its Jewish victims would be so numerous as to constitute a veritable genre – including consistent Oscar winners – nor did I foresee how this genre would be part of a wider cultural embracing of the Shoah.

But twenty-two years later, the number of cinematic reconstructions – fictional as well as documentary – is staggering. They both reflect and contribute to the fact that awareness has replaced silence about the Shoah. Immediately following the war, and for decades afterward, survivors rarely spoke about their experiences, partly because they knew the world was not prepared to listen. Now, however, the Shoah Foundation's completed videotaping of more than fifty-one thousand survivors in fifty-seven countries corresponds to two phenomena: younger generations – especially in Germany – want to know more about the Holocaust, and the aging survivors feel the urgency to speak before it's too late.

A brief chronological overview of events might be useful in suggesting how the Shoah has entered mainstream culture, starting with the broadcast of NBC's “Holocaust” in 1978.