An old friend recently told me of a film called 1945, a production making the rounds in selected cinemas.  He said he thought it was available on Nexflix, where I recently saw the 57 minute documentary.  [1]   He didn’t want to spoil it for me, but told me it’s a remarkable piece of work, as I recall he said it used  until recently unknown footage from right after the war, in the summer of 1945.  He told me it was well worth checking out.

I preface this short discussion, which I place under the category of Ahimsa, to say that as a guide to one’s own life, there is no more admirable path than non-harm.   We don’t need to kill other creatures in order to eat, we don’t need to browbeat those we disagree with, we don’t need to break heads.   There are alternatives to each of these things.   You can live well on a vegan diet.   You can mildly and directly make points in a conversation with somebody you might be tempted to browbeat.  You can usually leave the room when the temptation to break somebody’s head is about to become unbearable.    I think Ahimsa works beautifully with “what is hateful to you, don’t do to somebody else” the classical Jewish statement of the Golden Rule, formulated by Hillel.  

If you are stuck in a room, or a prison, or a camp, or a city, where violence is the rule and your survival is an open question, Ahimsa begins to seem like less of an absolute.  If you are starving to death you are as likely as not to eventually kill an animal and eat it (or have someone else kill it, butcher it, and cook it, then you can eat it).   Few fellow vegans would be self-righteous enough to fault you for it.  If someone slaughters your family, and then comes for you, a Gandhian smile of resignation is probably not the best move.  Contrary to what the Great Souled One urged on the Jews in the path of Germany, Nazi-types will never be moved by Soul Force.

In the face of certain brutality, only physical force is useful.  Brutes know this instinctively, from having been humiliated enough to become violent.   The Nazis did not come to power in Germany on the strength of their ideas– they came to power because they were the most ruthless, determined and disciplined head-breakers in Germany.   They knew that many people who feel powerless admire, and will identify, with decisive, brutal action portrayed in a heroic light.   As for the rest, only a few heads have to be broken publicly before the rest will fall into line.  The Nazis did far more than break heads, they had camps waiting for anyone who opposed them in any way.  Many were killed, starved and brutalized in these camps.

One of the Nazi goals was lebensraum, “living room”, defined by google translate as “habitat” which is also a synonym for heimat, which translates to “homeland”, a phrase modern American fascist types adopted after the attacks on 9/11 that apparently changed history forever.   Nazis invaded Poland, in a brutal and unprovoked blitzkreig, and enslaved the Poles, taking their best land for ethnic Germans.  They also killed most of Poland’s three million Jews while they were there.   The Nazis set the standard for ruthless regimes, we compare all such regimes to those murderous, enslaving no-holds-barred motherfuckers.

1945, using film noirshot after the German surrender, in the months immediately after Mr. Hitler poisoned Eva Braun, and his dog, and shot himself in the mouth, documents what the filmmakers call “the largest episode of ethnic cleansing in history.”   Twelve million ethnic Germans, we are told, were displaced, very badly treated and up to a quarter of a million killed.  Worse ethnic cleansing than the one immediately preceding it?   There’s an argument to be made there.

There are films of atrocious conditions for ethnic Germans forced to flee their new homes, after only five years as lords and masters.  Thousands died on forced death marches back to the old heimat.  As many as 250,000 lost their lives in those terrible post-war months.   In a soccer stadium, in front of a huge Czech crowd, German men were forced to remove their shirts.  The twenty one men with SS tattoos (the SS were the most fanatical of the Nazis, the elite units personally loyal to the Fuhrer) were brutally beaten to death, sadistically, revived with a bucket of cold salt water to the face, beaten again, revived again, beaten until they were dead.   Children were starved.  Several of the survivors cry as they recall what they were subjected to by the brutal “victors” of history’s then most brutal war.

I have to say, I watched this all pretty much unmoved.   Which surprised me.  I couldn’t feel much sympathy for these victims.   I wondered, more than once, why no mention was made of the ethnic cleansing so recently undertaken by the German government.   There was no mention, by the BBC narrator, of the extermination — or even the existence– of so many Jews, homosexuals, Slavic slave laborers and other untermensch enemy of the state types. [2]  There seemed to be no concession to human nature on the part of the filmmakers who describe this brutality as something as abhorrent and incomprehensible as that shown by the Nazis.

I realize I am not a disinterested observer.  Nazis marched through the areas where my grandparents on both sides came from.  When the German army and the SS were done marching through the Ukraine and Belarus, everyone besides my four grandparents in New York were dead.   So beating a few SS men to death for the amusement of a vicious crowd of people recently liberated from Nazi rule does not sound so bestial.   I understand it was horrible for the German men standing shirtless in the stadium as the most fit and brutal among them were beaten to death, but I found myself philosophical about it. 

The experience of watching the documentary and my reaction to it made me understand something troubling about the human condition.  We may be lifelong opponents of torture and sadism, of capital punishment.   But show us the perpetrators of our family’s slow death by starvation, torture and finally shooting and we will, if given the chance, fuck those people up.   This is one of the horrors of the human condition– this limitation of our powers of empathy that fuels the endless cycle of righteous rage and violent revenge.

I get a chance to ponder this horror several times every day, as our Divider-in-Chief regularly throws bloody meat to his irrational “base” and the shrewd billionaires who put him into office.   I don’t generally cheer for the idea of anybody having a painful, prolonged heart attack in the middle of an incoherent world-televised live speech.  But if it has to happen…. if you know what I’m sayin’….

[1] Oy yoy yoy!   This BBC production is not the movie my friend told me about!    I went to check the title for the BBC subtitle (“The Savage Peace”) and found this film, also called 1945, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 94%, the one my friend urged me to see:

On a summer day in 1945, an Orthodox man and his grown son return to a village in Hungary while the villagers prepare for the wedding of the town clerk’s son.  The townspeople – suspicious, remorseful, fearful, and cunning, expect the worst and behave accordingly. The town clerk fears the men may be heirs of the village’s deported Jews and expects them to demand their illegally acquired property back.

Guess I’ll have to go to the Lincoln Plaza Cinema to check it out. 

[2] A friend pointed out that the BBC occasionally displays a highly refined, almost irreproachably subtle, version of well-born anti-Semitism.