Horrors
of War

by Howard Schumann

The grey zone is the space between black and white, where everything is relative and there are no moral certainties. In Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone, it represents the ambiguous space between the selfish desire to live and selfless sacrifice for others. Nelson explores the moral dilemma of a group of Hungarian Jews known as the Sonderkommandos who knowingly collaborated with the Germans at Birkenau to secure preferential treatment for themselves. This included access to books, alcohol, cigarettes, better food, the valuables of the "cargo," and four additional months to live. One duty of the Sonderkommando was leading fellow Jews into the gas chambers while telling them they were going to take a shower. Another was to empty the gas chambers of dead bodies and feed the dead into the ovens.

According to Nelson, “The fact is that conditions in the camps, and particularly in the Sonderkommandos, brought out shameful qualities in men, the most benign of which were mistrust, greed, xenophobia and self-hatred.” All of the characters are fictional except for Dr. Miklos Nyiszli (Allan Corduner) who assisted the notorious Joseph Mengele in his medical experiments on Jews. His book, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, was a source for the film, as was Primo Levi's essay The Drowned and the Saved.

The film shows the uncertainty of the Sonderkommandos in dealing with a 15-year old Hungarian girl (Kamelia Grigorova) who miraculously survives the gas chambers. Some want to save her as a final symbolic act; others feel her presence is a hindrance to their plans to destroy the crematoriums and escape. Though the revolt is only partially successful, this incident remains as the only known uprising that took place in the concentration camps.

The Grey Zone is an honest work, but one that suffers from heavy-handed direction and stilted dialogue. Based on Nelson's 1996 stage play, the film's dialogue often sounds like a rehearsal for a college drama production. The talky screenplay and questionable acting take away from the power of the events being depicted. Actors David Arquette and Steve Buscemi look, feel, and speak like healthy well-fed Americans, not emaciated Hungarian Jews. Harvey Keitel has a powerful presence, but his fake German accent often seems silly.

I also found the film to be unnecessarily graphic in its depiction of women being tortured, prisoners being executed en masse, and old men being clubbed to death. The horrors of the Holocaust are so incomprehensible that they can only be grasped through suggestion, not cinematic hammer blows.

There is an important story to be told here, but The Grey Zone ends up as standard Hollywood fare: big-name stars, atrocious accents, and gory violence. In Nelson's hands, the story that should be gut-wrenching becomes an uninvolving spectacle. Even the achingly beautiful Brahms' Alto Rhapsody sung by the immortal contralto Kathleen Ferrier cannot save it.

My Name is Ivan (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962).

Based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, My Name is Ivan is a bleak but deeply moving film about a 12-year old boy (Nikolai Burleyayev) whose parents and sister were killed by the Germans and is now a scout for a Red Army battalion on the Eastern Front in World War II. Ivan's size allows him to slip behind enemy lines and obtain vital strategic information about German positions for the Russians. Alternating between idyllic dreams of childhood, nightmares of revenge, and scenes of war devastation, Tarkovsky creates a uniquely personal exploration of the effects of war on the mind and spirit.

As the film opens, Ivan wakes up jarringly from a poetic dream of his mother, and finds himself in the attic of an empty windmill. Dodging enemy fire, he swims across a muddy swamp to reach a Russian bunker where the ranking officer, Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), questions his credentials. Ivan is short-tempered and speaks to the Russian commanders with bravado unusual for someone of his age. The officers, however, take an interest in Ivan's welfare and provide him with love and protection. When they plan to send him to a military school, Ivan demands to be sent back to the front, seeking to revenge his parents' death.

Tarkovsky shows us war without bombs or glory or battle scenes -- only the suffering spirit of a child devastated by loss. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more an internal map of Ivan's mind. Haunted by the demons of approaching death, he seems to become emotionally inert. Tarkovsky said about the film: "I attempted to analyze the condition of a person who is being affected by war. When personality is disintegrating, then we have the collapse of the logical development, especially when we are dealing with the personality of a child. I always conceptualized Ivan as a destroyed personality pushed by the war from the normal axis of development."

This was Tarkovsky's first directorial effort. With its use of hallucinatory camera work and very long takes, it presages his later work. Using dream sequences of normal life juxtaposed with mud-splattered reality, the film is suffused with an air of melancholy and longing. This is one casualty of war not counted in the statistics.

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)

Reading war statistics, or even seeing bloody images on television, does not fully communicate the horror of war as well as this heartbreaking anime feature from Takahata, a long-time colleague of Hayao Miyazaki. The film tells the story of two children, Seita, a 14-year old boy and Setsuko, his 4-year old sister, and their uphill struggle to survive the effects of American firebombing in Kobe near the end of World War II. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, Grave of the Fireflies powerfully communicates the human ability to carry on against overwhelming odds. Though despairing, the film does not resort to cheap melodrama to achieve its effect, but delineates simple and direct images that are not watered-down to appeal to the children's market. It would indeed be too sad for most children under thirteen.

In an interview with Cedric Littardi of AnimeLand magazine in 1992, Takahata said that he did not set out to depress the audience but to show a natural death, as opposed to a "scientific" death, the way most of us view it - behind closed curtains in a sanitized hospital. Takahata in some ways softens the impact of the tragedy at the outset by showing Seita dying outside a subway station and his spirit reunited with his little sister Setsuko. The story is told by flashback as the two children are left alone to fend for themselves when their mother is killed in the bombing campaign. When their father is also killed in the Navy, they must struggle against starvation, the cruelty of an aunt they trusted, people's general indifference, and their own pride. Though both children eventually succumb to malnutrition (or radiation poisoning), the animation is so lyrical that it creates a magical, dream-like effect. This does not mask the tragedy but makes it all the more poignant.

In our day where our leaders are busily preparing for another war, it is important to remember the human cost of these plans and the untold suffering they will inevitably bring. Grave of the Fireflies should be required viewing in the Oval office.

©2002 Howard Schumann
CineScene