Escaping tyranny
Australian director Peter Weir’s 2010 film The Way Back is the story of escape from a Stalin-era Siberian prison camp, and subsequent 4000-mile trek across Eurasia to freedom in India. The story—which Weir himself co-wrote and described as highly fictionalized—was based on the disputed 1956 memoir of Sławomir Rawicz The Long Walk.
The movie version of the story follows the main character, Polish officer Janusz Wieszczek, from his capture by the Russians as they collaborated with the Germans to carve up Poland, to his imprisonment in Siberia, through his escape with fellow prisoners and their attempt to walk to freedom.
Weir tells a visual story well, it must be said. His previous movie, Master and Commander (2003), was an impressive distillation of multiple Patrick O’Brian historical novels about the Napoleon-era royal navy (“tall ships”) officer Jack Aubrey and his scientist friend Stephen Maturin. One particularly realistic detail in that work was the casting of young boys to play the roles of junior apprentice officers on the ships. The casting decision alone is rare in historical reenactment films, which typically go for older, established actors than would have been typical in the historical settings.
But this was supposed to be about The Way Back. What recommends it is that it portrays the inhuman cruelty of the Soviet system under which so many millions lived for decades. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, the Soviet inhumanity surpassed the harsh cruelty of the czarist system by an order of magnitude, inasmuch as such an abstraction could be quantified.
The story is mainly about the sojourn, but Weir capably shows the harsh brutality of the gulags in brief. What the film can hardly capture is the psychological effects of living under such brutality for months, years, and decades while the system remains indifferent to your survival—a system that places no value on human life as it works the inmates to death.
As you can see from the trailer, the film is not primarily about the prison camp experience, but instead tells a story that is more hopeful and humane. I credit Weir for attempting to evoke accurately a past that the modern Russian state wants to erase from historical memory—even as it relies on a potentially fabulist personal account.
Then again, it’s hard to be sure. Putin’s kleptocracy inherited its attitude about the past from the Soviet communists, and they constantly tried to erase history, to exterminate peoples and cultures, in order to gain control of the present. After all, if you want uncontested control of the present, you have to rewrite the past. First you exterminate others, and then you exterminate the ones you made to do the exterminating, and then you wipe out the ones who gave the actual orders along with their documentary trail. Before long no one knows what the past was like any more.
Thirteen years seems like a long enough interlude before recommending a film, but due to the present-day war in Ukraine, this one still seems rather timely.
NEWSFLASH!!!
Okay my head is exploding with this news. I just got off the phone with my oldest grandson and found out he is getting married. Okay, if I write that again maybe it will seem real. My oldest grandson is getting married. Nope, piece of my brain are scattered all over.
I'm currently reading two books and listening to one that are relevant to this topic, to some extent. The books are:
"The Lighthouse of Stalingrad," by Iain MacGregor, and I don't know his opinion on bagpipes or kilts.
"When Time Stopped," by Ariana Neumann (audio)
"Berlin," by Sinclair McKay
The first is a straight battle narrative focusing on a location in Stalingrad called "Pavlov's House." The author has done new research using previously overlooked sources to provide a more accurate story of some key events of the battle.
Ms. Neumann is the daughter of a Czech Jewish refugee who was a successful industrialist for many years in Venezuela after World War II. Her mother was a non-Jewish Venezuelan of Spanish colonial heritage. Her father's older brother also survived the War/Holocaust and emigrated to Venezuela, but almost all their family members in their and the prior generation (the author's grandparents and great-aunts/uncles) were killed. It's a well-constructed narrative structured around her experience gathering information about the family on one level, with the events of the 30s-40s roughly chronological.
The final book is about the city of Berlin in the 20th century. It begins with a description of the destruction of the city in 1945, first by U.S./British bombing and then by the Russian Army.
The connection between these books and Marque's movie commentary is the relentless and brutal violence and suffering, inflicted by everyone on everyone else. The Jews are the exception, in these narratives, although Jewish partisans did some inflicting during the time period. (I'm also doing the French Revolution in the "Revolutions" podcast, because I'm a glutton for punishment.)
It seems to me that we cannot, from where we sit, pronounce judgment on most people or on peoples. (This is not saying we can't judge actions.) The German nation, taken as a whole, persecuted and murdered the Jews. The Russians defeated the Germans at Stalingrad. The Germans exploited and killed Russians. The Russians raped and killed Germans. The Germans bombed the British. The British and Americans bombed the Germans. Scads and lashings of violent death, starvation, disease, and misery.
What nation or people is "the good guy" in all this, except the Jews? With all that everyone has done to everyone else, how can people continue to live on the same planet with one another, let alone in contiguous countries or the same country? Regardless of how the current war in Ukraine ends, how can it really end, with each side having inflicted great harm on the other? How can Tutsi live in the same country with Hutu, with the massacres that occurred in every living adult's lifetime?
It seems to me that the options are either everyone seeking vengeance as soon as an option arises, or a kind of radical forgiveness that accepts that things cannot be "put right" by any human means, that victims from every side can choose against hatred, choose not to try to inflict pain in return.
In contrast to these historical events, or to the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia (remember Ethiopia?) or in Iran, we have the United States, where people actively seek to inspire, in themselves and others, hatred of their neighbor based on ... the "harm" They did to US by supporting a different political party/candidate. Really? What is wrong with us? Don't we see that when we call even the most deluded partisan a "cockroach" or "slime" or "excrement," we are giving ourselves permission to do literally anything to them, because They showed They aren't human, like We are ... by supporting a different candidate.