The Champ From Auschwitz

In order to get historical details right, from the shoes and hats to the accents, Levinson went to Auschwitz. “The first thing that strikes you when visiting Auschwitz is that this was a factory to kill people on a massive scale,” he says. “It is impossible to ever understand the horror these people faced, and it was abundantly clear that for many who survived, those nightmares would hover over their daily lives.”

Film director Barry Levinson

Jessica Kourkounis/HBO

Levinson knows this from personal experience, because at age 5 he spent a few weeks sharing his bedroom in Baltimore with his Holocaust-survivor uncle Symcha. “Night after night I would wake up to him moaning in a language I didn’t understand. So when the script for The Survivor came around, I immediately thought of Symcha and what we would now refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Haft was similarly haunted, and sometimes volatile and abusive to his loved ones. He’s not a character as simply heroic as Anne Frank. “Why tackle a story with unsettling moral gray areas?” Levinson says. “Not everything is simplistic or black-and-white. Human behavior is never simplistic to begin with. It is complicated on a personal level, it’s complicated on a political level, and ultimately, you need to challenge certain questions and at the same time find a way to engage an audience.”

Still, there was triumph as well as trauma in Haft’s life. “There are uplifting, inspiring aspects of Harry’s story,” Levinson points out. “He ultimately found some peace through the understanding and strength of his wife. At the end of the day, he was not just a survivor. He was able to finally find contentment.” And seven months before his 2007 death, Haft was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.