Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah and set on the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar to mark the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, falls on the eve of May 4 through the eve of May 5.
But Congress has designated an eight-day period around Holocaust Remembrance Day — called Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust — for special memorial efforts, and TV has a few things airing on Monday night. I don’t mean the major networks are preempting the likes of “The Odd Couple’’ or postponing the premiere of the lousy new Fox procedural “Houdini & Doyle’’ to commemorate the 6?million Jews who were murdered.
But on our local PBS channel, WGBH 2, the series “Independent Lens’’ is featuring a documentary called “My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did’’ at 10 p.m. It’s about the sons of the Nazi war criminals Hans Frank and Otto von Wachter and the very different ways they view the men who raised them. Interviewed by British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, Niklas Frank condemns his father, while Horst von Wachter clings desperately to his father’s “good character.’’
Spine, prepare to shiver.
At 9 p.m., HBO is airing “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah,’’ a short documentary nominee at this year’s Oscars. It looks back at the 12 years it took Lanzmann (inset), now 90, to make the monumental 9½-hour 1985 film “Shoah,’’ including the challenges of convincing survivors to talk and of editing down 200 hours of footage. Also touched upon in the film: Lanzmann’s teenage years fighting in the French resistance, his love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
The documentary will be followed at 9:45 p.m. by a showing of “The Pianist,’’ the 2002 movie that won Adrien Brody an Oscar for playing a Polish-Jewish musician struggling to survive WWII.
By the way: Want to light a virtual memorial candle? There’s an app for that, called Yom HaShoah, that you can download for free.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.
