HBO Max Holocaust entry “The Survivor” tells the compelling story of Harry Haft, aka Herzko Haft, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz by boxing fellow inmates for the amusement of Nazi military personnel, who then executed the losers.
“The Survivor” boasts impressive credentials. Its director is Academy Award-winner Barry Levinson (“Rain Man”). In the title role is Boston-born, indie-film regular Ben Foster (“Hell or High Water”), who is Jewish on his mother’s side and who lost a shocking amount of weight to play Haft as an Auschwitz prisoner. Inevitable comparisons will be made between “The Survivor” and “Raging Bull” (1980), and there are times when Foster’s Haft seems to a distant cousin of Robert De Niro’s Italian-American Jake La Motta.
The story bangs back and forth from Auschwitz to postwar Brooklyn and Georgia, and it is shocking to see the difference between Foster in the camps, where he is skin and bones, and Foster postwar, where he at first continues to fight and continues his crusade to find Leah (Dar Zuzovsky), the girl he was in love with and with whom he was captured by the Nazis. After the war, Harry meets Emory Anderson (Peter Sarsgaard), an ambitious journalist who convinces Harry that by writing his story for the newspapers, Anderson will help to find Leah.
