Timeless Voice Bids Us 'Come And See'

A film with lessons from Byelorussia to Gaza

• Invaders seeking Lebensraum burned villagers in their homes

• The drones of WWII hummed, as snipers picked off partisans

• History rhymes - awkward, inconvenient - bidding us recognise the tune

• Elem Klimov's Come and See is the masterpiece of anti-war cinema

• The assault on the Pale of Settlement, Tsar's 'home for the Jews,’ was catastrophic

• Those who lived through WWII have no need of propaganda to teach its lessons

See: German Film That Foresaw The Plandemic - Peter Fleischmann captured medical tyranny in a Seventies blend of thriller and satire (Mar 23, 2022)

Sci-Fi Icon Saw Plague Heist Coming 60 Yrs Ago: Philip K Dick on the profit motive behind the cult of preparedness (Feb 3, 2020)

(1,900 words or about 9 minutes of your company.)

Jan 14, 2024

A fashionable phrase doing the rounds is to be "on the right side of history."

These are times when everyone thinks they're on the right side, yet humanity has never been so divided.

How could this be? Didn't the 20th century provide an object lesson in the mistake of following an ideology or a politician?

Yet, here we are, with people trenchant in their defence of Israel or their solidarity with Palestinians; split down the middle by the insistence of one group to take any means necessary to defend their ground; and those who say morality is humanity's absolute and only guide.

In order to focus the mind, I watched last night Elem Klimov's masterpiece, one of the greatest treatments of war on celluloid: Come and See (1985).

The object of Germany's invasion of Byelorussia (present day Belarus) was to conquer and exploit the Soviet Union’s resources, and to repopulate it with German settlers, as described by Per Anders Rudling, a historian at Sweden's Lund University.

As ever, the lessons to learn are obscured by propaganda.

More than 5,000 villages were destroyed by German forces (by some accounts, 9,000). In the case of 629 villages, the inhabitants were massacred, shot or herded into barns and burned to death. Of those villages 200 or more were never rebuilt, probably because no one survived.

These tragic populations are memorialised at a village called Khatyn, pronounced with an "H," but in text similar to Katyn, site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers near Smolensk.

Doppelgaenger

This may be no accident. An article from 1974 in Britain's Daily Telegraph, argued that Khatyn, 30 miles north of the capital Minsk, is not a historic village and may have been created by the Soviets in a clumsy attempt to distract attention from the Katyn massacre, which the Soviets had blamed on Germany. Russia only admitted in 2010 that the perpetrator was the NKVD (Soviet people's commissariat for internal affairs).

It is not uncommon to find that nearby settlements have similar names, but the intent of propaganda in highlighting Khatyn seems likely.

This sleight-of-hand illustrates the depths to which politicians will go; deceiving their own people and humanity, in order to serve short term goals, score points and avoid accountability.

It is unfortunate and it has lessons, because the massacres were very real, among the most brutal in modern times, and a lesson to eternity along side those committed by Japanese upon Chinese in WWII, the South Korean and Indonesian governments of suspected communists after the war, and the Khmer Rouge (assisted by the British Army) of just about anyone. This does not include orchestrated famines.

But it should be a caution to anyone who swallows government propaganda too quickly when the same interests instigate, invent and manipulate outrages in order to justify their actions.

Propaganda games do justice to nobody, not least the victims in Byelorussia, many of whom were Jews. Byelorussia as it was called at the time was part of the Pale of Settlement, territory in which the Russia Tsars between 1791 and 1917 gave protected residence rights to Jews.

It was huge — roughly 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) between the Baltic and Black seas, and 50 times bigger than Israel. It included all of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation. It was shared with the historic inhabitants since centuries past, the Slavs who settled in a land known as Polissia.

Faced with invading a huge territory, the head of the Nazi armed forces’ high command, Wilhelm Keitel, stated in the summer of 1941, “Since we cannot watch everybody, we need to rule by fear.”

German soldiers also faced the guerilla tactics of the resistance, so field marshal Keitel is said to have ordered his men to kill 50 to 100 Soviets or partisans for every soldier lost.

During WWII an estimated 2.2 million Belarusians, or a quarter of the population, would die, “proportionally higher than practically any other theatre of war,” according to historian David Marples.

War games

German and Axis soldiers at first made rapid progress, invading on June 22, 1941 and reaching Smolensk, the head of the the Dnieper river, in only three weeks. According to the short version taught in Western schools, Hitler quibbled about pressing on to Moscow, winter set in, and the rest is history. Hitler, like Napoleon, would be defeated by the frost.

That shortens the story and ignores a bloody chapter which Elem Klimov (1933-2003) tells in Come and See (Иди и смотри).

The film is seen through the eyes of a boy, a young teen. The opening scene shows him playing war games and fantasizing about joining the resistance.

Klimov, who was born in Stalingrad to Russo-German parents, drew on his own experience of the war. "As a young boy, I had been in hell... Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

His co-writer Ales Adamovich, who had been a partisan, said: "Let them not watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war, and as a plea for peace."

Realism is achieved by the use of live ammunition, one of the techniques to put stress upon the 14 year-old lead actor Alexei Kravchenko, including fatigue and hunger. Although silver was used to whiten his hair, he clearly ages in his behaviour and emotional response over the course of filming.

His co-star Olga Mironova would never make another film. Her transition from a bright-eyed beauty to a spirit possessed by premonitions of death is visceral beyond any laboured emoting or Hollywood CGI.