An Israeli high-schooler confronts the shoes at Majdanek in a scene from *Delegation.*

The Breakfast Club Meets Shoah

Delegation, a recently released Israeli film about a group of teenagers on a class trip to the Nazi death camps, resists the “trauma roller coaster”

By Johanna Berkman

Not many films are shaped both by John Hughes’s teen movies and Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, yet those are the key influences on filmmaker Asaf Saban’s latest feature, Delegation.

Saban makes use of both the coming-of-age and road-trip film genres in order to enter what he calls “that minefield.” Only, for Saban, that minefield is not just the troubled terrain of adolescence but also the literal killing fields of Majdanek, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. “I didn’t want to answer why the educational system sends them there,” says Saban.