TREBLINKA - OUTLINE FOR A MOVIE PLOT (suggestions, ideas, criticism welcomed)
MAIN CHARACTERS: Naomi Silver (pen name, Treblinka - journalist)
Wolf-Dieter Oting (German SS officer)
(Two actors needed for Naomi and Wolf: 1944 Naomi is 17, Wolf is 21. 2006 Naomi is 79, Wolf 83).
LOCATIONS: Treblinka death camp, Germany - 1944; Buenos Aires, Argentina - 1948; Tehran, Iran - 2006
PLOT OUTLINE: (initial sketch)
Naomi Silver, pen name, Treblinka, is a writer-activist famous for her promotion of the conspiracy theory that the Holocaust never happened. Sent to the Treblinka death camp 1943-44 she was freed by the Allies in 1944. Naomi does not speak for 18 months after Treblinka, and when she does speak she has no recollection of the death camp. Several years later, having emigrated to Argentina in 1948, she falls in with a group of Nazi ex-patriots who are attempting to hide from Zionist Nazi hunters, and who are publishing pamphlets and writing news articles purporting that the Holocaust is a myth.
Wolf-Dieter Oting, German SS officer 1941-44 is responsible for the arrest of Naomi and her parents, physicists David and Zelda Silver - all sent to Treblinka where David and Zelda are gassed. Oting, perversely attracted to the 16-year-old Naomi, connives to be posted at Treblinka where he saves her from death and arranges for her to work as a model for his artist-mistress Gerda Lemke. Abused and terrified by this couple, Naomi withdraws further and further from reality.
After the Allied 'Victory in Europe', Eisenhower is so incensed by what he sees at the death camps that he deliberately starves to death 800,000 German POW's. (see James Bacque's 'Other Losses'). We see Oting in one of these Allied death camps, exposed to the pouring rain, ankle deep in mud, gnawing on his daily ration of half of a raw potato). He escapes with the help of Gerda Lemke and her influential friends (her father is Helmut Lemke, a jolly and prominent German industrialist responsible for the wartime production of the gas used at Treblinka). After a nerve-jarring trip overland to Lisbon, Wolf-Dieter Oting manages to
bribe the captain of a Liberian freighter and gain passage to Buenos Aires, where he is later joined by his mistress, Gerda Lemke.
In 1950, age 23, Naomi attends a gallery opening in Buenos Aires and is mystified to see a likeness of herself in several of the paintings by Lemke, dated 1943. She meets the artist and Oting, without recognizing them, and is seduced into their circle of Nazi expatriots. In 1953 Gerda Lemke is seized by Israeli Secret Police and held as 'bait' in their attempt to catch Oting. Oting, no longer interested in Lemke, flees to the Middle East with Naomi.
In 2006 we see the odd couple as favorite guests of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Oting is 82, and Naomi is 79. Ahmadinejad is taking them on a tour of one of Iran's underground facilities for the production of portable nuclear weapons. Later, at a lavish dinner party in Tehran, Ahmadinejad introduces them to some teenage suicide bombers, and jokes about how much oil he is selling to the US.
Q: Do you think Naomi should recall her experience at Treblinka?
Q: When Naomi watches the television coverage of a nuclear attack on Seattle, is that when she 'awakens'?
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