Eroica (1958)* * *

Eroica (link to DVD at Amazon)
The very title of this film, Eroica (English title: Heroism), seems to be a sarcastic play on the meaning of heroism. The protagonists in the two short stories in this film are hardly what one would call heroes. The two stories are set during WWII. The movie was made in 1957, so just after Stalin died but Poland was still in the grips of communist censorship. The director is Andrzej Munk, who is apparently one of the Polish great directors although I don't know his work and he died in 1961. The film was meant to be a trilogy but ended up as a bilogy.

The first film (Scherzo alla Polacca) tells the story of a self-centered man who gets disenchanted with the idea of being a volunteer soldier in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans in 1944. He sneaks off during basic training and goes back to his wife -- who it turns out has taken in a Hungarian officer as a lover. Ah so much for the myth of the brave partisan and his steadfast girl waiting for him at home. He is a coward, but perhaps that is sign of his sanity. Unwillingly, he is pressed into being a courier between a Hungarian brigade that wants to sneak weapons to the Polish partisans. Ultimately, the effort is futile. Unfortunately at the very end of the movie, the man makes a sappy turn-around in character and abandons his self-centered ways and goes to help the the uprising. It would have been more in character with the movie if the man remained cynical and flipped his finger at the uprising. I got the feeling that a censor prohibited such a cynical ending.

The second film (Ostinato Lugubre) tells the story of a group of Polish Officers who
are prisoners of war in a German camp. Most of them have been there about 5 years and they are all now missing a few marbles. The are treated well and eat enough, but the constant confinement, lack of privacy, and resulting "submarine fever" lead to depression and other mental illnesses. One man can no longer deal with the lack of privacy and "escapes" -- into some ductwork above the toilets. The others think he has really escaped and he becomes a symbol of hope and pride for the entire camp. Two men who know of it steal food for him and protect his secret, a secret that must be kept for the sake of the morale of the camp. All the while the escapee is slowly sinking into complete depression and insanity in his little hole. There is something deeply cynical and bitter about this story and I wonder if it was not meant as an allegory for life in communist Poland in the 1950s. This was the Stalinist period and life was very hard. People were not starving, but rather they were in a prison of the mind not unlike that in the POW camp depicted here.

This movie features prominently in The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland by Paul Coates, a book on the post-war cinema in Poland.

The Endless Steppe (1968)* * * *

The Endless Steppe (link to book on Amazon)
This is the autobiographical story of the childhood of Ester Hautzig who was born in Vilna, Lithuania in the late-1920s. She was from a rich Jewish family in a city that was one of the Jewish centers of learning and culture at that time. But this is not a story of Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. It is a story of being sent to Siberia. In 1941, Lithuania was in Soviet control. Her family owned a large business—they were bourgeoisie capitalists in the Soviet scheme of things. At that time, such people were being arrested and sent to Siberia. Her father and mother did not know it at the time, but being arrested was the lucky break that saved their lives. The rest their extended family, along with almost all the Jews in Lithuania and Poland, were killed by the Nazis when Germany marched across Poland and Lithunia on the way to Moscow. This book tells the story of travelling across Russia to Siberia in cattle cars and of growing up on the Siberian steppe with her mother and old grandmother. Her father was sent to Siberia with them, but he was soon conscripted for a labor brigade on the Eastern front. Although the book was written when she was an adult, it is told from the perspective of her youthful self. Youth has an odd way of not seeing hardship in quite the same light as adults. In the end in fact, the Siberian steppe becomes the place she thinks of as home. When the war ends, her father writes for them to join him in Poland. She begs her parents to stay in Siberia and make their home there. Her parents naturally think she has lost her mind. Ester and her mother return to Poland and later emigrate to New York.

The book is written for middle-schoolers and so is a quick read. I quite enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone interested in stories from this era. Hauzig is a very good storyteller and this is an entertaining story. She is never self-pitying, not only because it would be unseemly and ungrateful given what happened to the rest of her family, but also because she was a child of 10 and it was her parents who did the worrying and working. They had hardly anything to eat, but they did find food even if it meant scouring the frozen fields for half-rotten potatoes. They were crammed in with other families into tiny rooms, but they did have places to sleep. There are many funny stories in the book. One of my favorites is when they first arrive at the gypsum mines where they are to do forced labor. In the morning after their arrival, the adults are given their jobs. Her father is told that since he is an educated man, he will drive the horses. Her mother, being an educated woman, is told that she will be the supervisor for the women. “And what will we be doing?” asks the mother. “The women will be dynamiting,” replies the mine chief. Her alarmed father begs to take his wife place, but he is told that the rules are that the men dig the gypsum, the women dynamite it, and the old people load it. Those are the rules. Such ridiculous and nonsensical Soviet rules are the source of many of the funny stories in this book.

On the cover leaf, they liken this story to The Diary of Anne Frank. I have not read that for years, but somehow I think that Endless Steppe is not at that level for a variety of reasons—not the least of which is that Hautzig survived and tells her story from memory rather than the moment. Nonetheless, it is an excellent book and gives young teenagers a view of a unique WWII experience.

The 1940 and 1950s in Central Europe: Film

The 1940s and 1950s in Central Europe (Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland) is a historically fascinating and tragic period marked by devastating war and totalitarianism. Below is an annotated list of films reviewed in SunnysideKitchen that are focused on this period. Some of these films were made behind the Iron Curtain. There are a couple dates to keep in mind for these. Stalin died in 1953 after which there was a loosening of the restrictions on the kinds of films that could be made and filmmakers were no longer in the "socialist realism" straight-jacket. So these films span two different eras: before- and after- Stalin's death. The Hungarian films have another important date: 1956, the year of the Hungarian Uprising, after which hard Stalinism returns to Hungary. For the other Warsaw pact countries, 1968 is the more critical year. This is the year of the Prague Spring. After that is crushed, severe film censorship returns for all filmmakers behind the Iron Curtain and things don't get better until the late 1980s when the communist governments are overthrown. Burnt by the Sun (1994) This film is set in the early 1930s, so a bit before the 1940s and it's set in Russia, which is not Central Europe. Nonetheless, it is about an important aspect of the tyranny of communism and Stalinism, in particular, that affected Central Europe in the 40s and 50s -- which was the capacity of the system to turn on it's own followers and use this unexpected violence to control. Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, one of the most famous modern Russian directors. Ballad of a Solider (1959) Most Americans have no idea of the suffering and sacrifice Russians experienced in the war. This film gives you an air-brushed taste of that. It is a famous Russian film about a young soldier who travels home to help his mother in the midst of the war. Before 1953, all WWII films in Russia had to follow a "great Red soldier" script. After 1953, there are a series of films about the terrible human toll of WWII. This is one of the most famous of those. Downfall (2004) Excellent film on the last few days of Hilter's life when he is in the bunker. Shows the downfall of Berlin. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. The Bridge (1959) An anti-war film made in the late 1950s in West Germany. Shows the home front situation and mentality as the Americans are pressing across Germany. Eroica (1957)Two Polish films on "passive heroism". The first is about a man who is not at all interested in dying for his country, but ends up helping the partisans against the Germans none the less. The second is about a group of Polish POWs who are descending to madness and one who makes an unusual sacrifice to help the group morale. Fateless (2005) Autobiographical film about the experiences of a 14-year old Hungarian Jewish boy who is rounded up and sent to the camps in Poland. Beautiful film. Heimat Heimat episodes 1-7 follow a German family in a small German village through the end of WWI to the end of WWII. We see from their perspective the radical changes that happened: poverty and hardship after the end of WWI, followed by great infrastructure improvement (roads, electricity) and an increase in personal wealth, the rise of the Nazis and war, and then defeat and occupation by the Americans. I found it a bit slow, frankly. Ivan's Childhood (1962) Beautiful yet searing indictment of the brutality of WWII. It follows a 10-year old boy, Ivan, who becomes a scout for the army. Judgment at Nuremberg (1962) Excellent film that explores the culpability of German judges within the corrupt Nazi State and the manner in which people can become morally corrupt even though at each step they take what they believe is the most morally defensible position at the time. LoveFilm (1970) This film is set in the 1960s in Hungary, but it has many flashbacks to WWII and the immediate post-war period in Budapest. By Hungarian director Istvan Szabo. Mein Krieg A German documentary (in German with subtitles) using footage taken by soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front. Even if you can't understand German it is interesting because it shows really what it was like from the heady days at the beginning of the invasion as they moved at full speed to their depressing retreat back to Germany after brutal casualties. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Mephisto (1981) This movie is set in the late 1930s in Germany. Explores the role of artists (and by extension intellectuals) within a totalitarian state. It is a clear metaphor to the moral dilemmas faced by artists, such as the director, working behind the Iron Curtain. The Murderers are Among Us (1945) This movies is set immediately after the war in Berlin. It is one of the most famous of the "Rubble Films". This film show you what Berlin looked like right after the war. Unfathomable. DEFA's first film -- the state film monopoly that started in the Soviet zone of Berlin and then became the GDR film monopoly. NAPOLA (2004) German movie about a young poor man who goes (against his father's wishes) to a National Political Academy (NAPOLA), which were military schools run by the Nazis. The movie is kind of like "Dead Poet's Society" but at a Nazi military academy. Shoah (1985) An impressive 8-hr documentary which interviews people who were in Poland and witnessed aspects of the Holocaust. It includes both people who survived the camps and people who saw the trains or saw the camps from the outside. This is a must see for anyone interested in the history of this period. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days This is a film about one of the few resistance groups in Germany during the war. They were a group of Munich students who distributed fliers protesting the war. After Stalingrad, they produced a flier telling people about the huge casualties and arguing for armistace. They were caught and executed. The film focuses mainly on the trials and the resolve of the students to die for their beliefs. This movie illustrates one reason that there was not much resistance -- an effective police state combined with swift execution for those who dared to question the war. Stalingrad (1993) This German movie covers the bloodiest battle in human history where 1.25 million soldiers were killed and another 1/2 million civilians perished. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Zelery (2003) A romantic epic set in 1945 in Czechoslovakia. A beautiful Czech film that is mostly about village life, but it also illustrates the mass rape and pillaging that Russian soldiers committed as they swept across Central Europe.

Shoah * * * * *

This documentary defies words. But that didn't stop me from writing a very long blog on this. It is a 9 hour documentary of interviews with survivors of the holocaust and witnesses to the holocaust. Anyone with an interest in WWII, the holocaust, ethnic conflict, genocide or Isreal should see this documentary. It is very well done. There are no gory photos. In fact there are by and large no historical photographs. It is all modern interviews with people who where there and who are brave enough to talk about their experience. Much of it is talking about mundane stuff and not just in the camps. There are many interviews with people in the towns who remember the deportations or who worked and lived near the camps or railroad stations. A lot of the interviews are in small Polish villages in the 1970s. That in and of itself is interesting.

As mentioned the documentary discs 1 & 2 interview many Poles. To appreciate these interviews, you should know that there is something the Poles in the interviews are leaving out. There was a lot of anti-semitism in Poland pre- and post-WWII. You only get a whiff of this at the end of disc 2 when an old woman and man start going on about Jews being responsible for Jesus' death and thus bringing blood upon their heads. It is well documented that many non-Jewish Poles helped the Germans and applauded their extermination of Jewish Poles. It is also well documented that the few Jewish Poles that managed to survive (90% of Jewish Poles were killed by the Germans) faced extreme harassment and murder at the hands of non-Jewish Poles on their return. In one of the worst cases, 80 Jewish Poles who had returned home to their small village in 1946 were rounded up and beaten to death by the non-Jewish villagers. Unlike Germany, Poland has engaged in national denial about its complicity in the extermination of Jewish Poles. Invariably when this issue is brought up, Poles make an argument about how non-Jewish Poles suffered in the war and were themselves targeted for extermination by the Germans. "How can you criticize us when we suffered so much!". You see this over and over on blogs, film reviews, & book reviews posted on-line by Poles. I can sympathize with this view since everyone knows that Hilter intended to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth (and largely succeed in Eastern Europe), but what is less well known, is that Hitlar, as part of Generalplan Ost, also planned to eliminate the Poles who were considered too anti-German to simply deport to Siberia, which was the plan for the other Slavs in Eastern Europe. Poles suffered unmitigated brutality during WWII, over 2 million civilians were killed, Poles were violently deported off their farms to make room for German settlers, and many of the war crimes/massacres at the Nuremberg trails involved actions in Poland. Nonetheless, if Germans can deal with the complicity of their grandparents and can actively try to root out the seeds of anti-semitism, why can't Poles? A recent book on what happened to Jews in Poland after WWII is ‘Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz,’ by Jan T. Gross.

I saw Shoah foremost because of my interest in the 20th century history of Central Europe, but also because there have been profound reverberating effects of the holocaust on the current 'World Order' what with the emigration of people of Jewish descent into the US and the establishment of Israel. Of course, Europe is very different. In Central European countries, there were large economically important Jewish communities. Now they are gone -- simply vanished. But the holocaust wasn't just a tragic, horrific historical event, a chapter in the history books from which we all must learn so that "it never happens again". The world we live in today has been fundamentally changed by the events of 1938-1945, including the holocaust, and understanding the world today requires grasping the enormity of what happened then.

There are 4 discs each 2 hrs + long. The disc content is reviewed separated below.

Disc 1 contains interviews with 3-4 survivors. Two were the sole survivors from 97,000 people who were rounded up and exterminated in Poland and surrounding areas in the early part of the "final solution" when guns and gas vans were used. They survived by miraculously surviving being shot and buried in the final days of their camps. While as I mentioned there is nothing in itself visually disturbing and much the dialogue is quite mundane, there were a few very difficult sections. It was very hard to listen to one man talk about having to dig his family out of one of the mass graves and burn them, and about how he begged to be shot but they refused since he could still work. Another difficult part was the interview with one man who talked about what it was like for people (Jewish) who were transported in from outside of Poland and who had no idea what was going to happen. He was one of the 100 men that would be selected from each train load unloaded in Treblinka. These men were to immediately sort and clean the clothes that were shed when the rest, thousands, undressed and were moved to another area sight unseen. He describes working furiously while surrepticiously trying find out what would happen to his family by asking one of the older crew leaders (another prisoner) directing the new guys. His description is chilling: "The man hissed 'they've been killed'. I whispered 'That's not possible! They were here 15min ago.' At that moment, we were in complete shock. You could see the information spreading among the men -- that their wives, their children, their parents, their brothers and sisters who were there just a moment ago...were dead. That night in the barracks -- each man lay in shock unable to sleep, just staring. In the morning, 4 or 5 men had managed to take their lives. The shock is more than you can imagine." So yes, there are parts that are hard to hear.

Disc 2 also concentrates on the same era -- the early part in 1939-1941 when 97,000 Jews were killed with guns and 3 gas vans (moving vans where the exhaust was diverted into the compartment where people were packed). Disc 2 focuses more on interviews with Poles who were in the area -- living near the building where the people were gathered, working in the forests or nearby fields, or simply living next to the Jewish quarters. It also has interviews with some Germans who worked in the camp and with the wife of the Nazi school teacher who was one of the German settlers sent to Poland. This woman was particularly interesting to me -- she had clearly come to some acceptance of having been there and known what was happening. You just didn't look and didn't want to know simply because you didn't dare. But everyone there knew.

That the Western world stood by, proverbially holding their hands over their ears and shouting "I don't want to know", while millions were systematically exterminated is something that I found myself continually returning to while watching Shoah. I don't feel any moral superiority to the Western citizenry of 1938, rather I am struck how, as individuals, we have such a strong inclination to bury our heads in the sand and secondly I feel dismayed by the inability of citizens to stop a government's slide to militarism and evil.

Disc 3 & 4 notes to come.

Viewed on DVD from Netflix.