It seems like a strange combination, but the notion of clowns and the Holocaust is practically a mini-genre on its own.
There's the story of a Jerry Lewis project on this subject and a few years back Roberto Beningi had great success with "Life is Beautiful".
Balancing the comic and tragic (if not horrific is a challebge that several have tried and few have succeeded at. Although "Life is Beautiful" was well-received, I thought it was horrendous.
Latest in the string is "Adam Resurrected", directed by Paul Schrader and starring Jeff Goldblum as the clown and Willam Dafoe as his nemesis, a commandant at the Strelling camp.
The timeline is split between the period leading up to and through WWII and recent history, where Adam Stein (Goldblum) is an inmate at a sanitorium for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. The arrival of a young feral boy awakens memories in Stein that must be confronted for the last time.
I've liked both Goldblum's and Dafoe's work in the past (along with Derek Jacobi as the sanitorium director), but this movie escaped them. It's one of those movies where accents shift like the sands outside the sanitorium. The actors try their best (Dafoe, I think, most successfully), but they are ultimately defeated by a screenplay that feels awkward.
Despite the pedigree of the folks involved, this film does not appear to have distribution.
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