As you know – if you’ve been reading these posts long enough – I have been researching the amazing actor and director Kurt Gerron for years and was amazed to discover him in a cartoon in which he is used as the icon of the Jew who would have to be demoted and deflated.  It was the piece of the puzzle that was missing for me.  I knew that Gerron is almost unknown today despite his star status in stage and film before the Nazis came to power.  I also knew that the last film he directed before the propaganda film he was forced to make in Theresienstadt was the German language version of Disney’s Snow White, in which he also did some of the voices, such as the magic mirror.  After that, he was edged out of the film industry in Amsterdam.  And here he is, in a cartoon in an exhibit on the Netherlands where his name is unknown, a symbol of the proposed morification of the Jews.

I tried to tell the woman at the information counter who he was, but she just directed me away to another exhibit and sent me off to write to their archives.  I will.