By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
Honoring our veterans from WW2 is a wonderful thing for our nation. We have to acknowledge the bravery of Americans who were willing to sacrifice everything to fight to put an end to the war and restore peace. The story can be told as heroic good fighting with honor against evil and overcoming it. This story is told throughout many American WW2 films, like Saving Private Ryan for example. Saving Private Ryan contains anti-war messages and tones, but still exemplifies the heroism and brotherhood aspects. But this story can be a double-edged sword, as the national perspective can become tunnel-visioned on the positive aspects which if done too much is to overlook or ignore the horrificness of WW2. One film which tells a different story, and that I think is important for every American to watch, as it can broaden their perspective as it certainly did mine on the war, is Come and See, a 1985 WW2 film from Russia about the eastern front between Germany and the Soviet Union.
When it comes to anti-war films, there’s an idea that claims there is no such thing as an anti-war film because showing the fighting and positive aspects is enough for at least some minority of the audience to misinterpret the film and actually come out with more positive thoughts than previously about war. A perfect example is Apocalypse Now, which is heavily packed with anti-war themes, but despite this, the combat sequences and especially the helicopter attack scenes are so thrilling that the film was screened by the military to get soldiers more excited about going into combat; a complete 180 from what the intended message of the film was. This idea is challenged, however, by Come and See. In Come and See, the reason the film comes off as so anti-war isn’t just because of its unflinching showcase of disturbing imagery, but also because of the complete absence of positive outlooks about war. The film follows a teenage Belorussian soldier, Florya, who can’t be more than 15 years old as the protagonist. Florya has to bring his own rifle and equipment to the military outpost because the Soviet army is so severely undersupplied and after being assigned to domestic work and a bombing of the outpost, he becomes separated from his division. This all happens in the beginning and from then on, the film follows Florya trying to escape the war through an odyssey of brutality and chaos. Instead of huge, exciting, and bombastic fights between two sides of soldiers, the combat in this film is shown as sudden bursts of short gunfire or explosions from unseen enemies at random intervals which leave more and more characters, mostly civilians, dead. After the initial outpost bombing, we cease to see any more organization or comradery among the Soviet military, and it becomes a free-for-all of soldiers pursuing their own personal interests and civilians trying to survive. The main victims of the film are civilians too, who often are killed without reason or sensibility. There are no themes of bravery, heroism, honor, or glory, and it gives an American audience who is used to associating these themes with the war in movies, a jarring new sense of horrificness, at least it did for me.
When watching this film, the sheer cruelty from the Germans against the Belarussians may seem almost like a cartoon character who is evil just for the sake of being evil, and I had the thought that the film, being created under the Soviet Union, that maybe it was exaggerated in some aspects, but what makes Come and See so important is that if you research into the historical information, all the events are based upon real events and the endless cruelty portrayed is an eerie replica of what really did happen. As the film points out towards the end, over 600 villages in Belarus alone were razed or burned to the ground, often with the entire population trapped within. Survivors of these events were usually sent by train to concentration camps. Completely ignoring the entire African and Asian theaters of WW2 and the internal genocides of the Holocaust and in China, just the eastern front alone had a death toll of around 30 million people, comparable to the total combined military and civilian deaths of the entirety of WW1 at around 40 million. So to look at the Eastern front, just one part of WW2, is to look at something around the same level of brutality as the entirety of WW1, so it’s just important to keep in mind the sheer scale of violence during the war.
Again, it’s important to remember the veterans and their sacrifices of everything to end the suffering, but we can’t let our pride in their accomplishments hold us hostage to accepting that WW2 truly was by far the darkest time in all of human history and the fact that it happened at all, nonetheless not even a century ago in a ‘civilized’ and modern world, is an embarrassment to humanity. While never forgetting how the ‘good’ or ‘just’ countries overcame the evils of fascism and whatnot, we must also acknowledge that the evil came from somewhere and the only reason we overcame the evil was that the evil existed at all. In American films, WW2 is often defined by achievements, but Come and See will force the audience to recognize the other side, which is the failures and the unending cruelties facilitated. Come and See had a big impact on me and made me think that perhaps instead of thinking of WW2 as a battle with winners and losers, we might want to think of it as a tragedy between offenders and victims.