It is hard for me to say whether I liked [Playing for Time] itself. Ice cream is something you like, vanilla or chocolate. The movie was a morbid, frequently horrifying drama—as sickening and shocking a television experience as I've had since Holocaust….

The situation was not helped by the German guards coming across as music lovers, making you think at times that Auschwitz was a perverted camp in the Berkshires. Especially disturbing was the incomplete portrait of Dr. Mengele, Herr Kommandant. What did this little man in the white lab coat do, I kept thinking, aside from listening to good classical music?

The basic shortcoming was Miller's script. He never really managed to tell us why the Nazis were torturing the poor people we saw. For three hours the movie showed us how cruel the human race can be. But what did it all mean? You had...