Remembrance is a German movie of 2011 with three titles in three languages
Remembrance – the English title, is probably the least descriptive.
Die Verlorene Zeit – the German title, means “lost time.”
Zagubiony Czas – the Polish title, also means “lost time.”
This movie is about World War II, the Nazi concentration camps in Poland, what the war did to Poland and its people. It is also about undying love, and the moral obligations to life.
Based on the true story of Jerzy Bielecki and Cyla Cybulska, the German drama is directed by Anna Justice. It tells the story of Hannah Silberstein, German-Jewish woman from Berlin held in a concentration camp in Poland, who falls in love with a captured Polish resistance member named Tomasz Limanowski.
Tomasz orchestrates a daring escape for the two of them, and thus effectively saves her life – and his. But being free does not mean being safe. Poland is war-torn, and there is no safe place to hide. Quickly the couple is separated again, and eventually both come to believe the other to be dead.
In 1976, thirty years later, Hannah is married to an intellectual in New York City. They have a college aged daughter. By pure chance, she sees a television interview of Tomasz in Poland – he seems very alive indeed. Her old quest to find the love of her life is rekindled, and it brings turmoil over her family.
Germans know how to make movies that seem realistic. In Hollywood movies Germans would speak English with German accents. Here in Die Verlorene Zeit, we are treated to German when the Germans speak in the concentration camp, Polish when the Poles speak, and English, for the scenes that take place in New York. There are English subtitles for the Polish and German dialog. This approach to the language not only makes the scenes realistic, but it also puts the viewer into the middle of the action. What would it be like to be a Polish prisoner, donning a German uniform, pretending to be a German, but only knowing a few words, when your life – literally – depends on it? How does a German woman hide in Poland when she does not speak the language?
As is done by so many World War II movies, the terrible plight and suffering the Nazis put millions of Germans, Poles and Russians through boggles the mind. How could they inflict so much injustice on so many people for so long? How could they destroy so many lives – destroy by killing, then destroy by separating families, and lovers?
But then, if it hadn’t been for the war they caused, my own father, a young boy from Silesia, now Poland, would never have had to flee the east when the Russians invaded, and he would never have met my mother in Bavaria, and I would not exist, and I would not be writing this review.
The injustice of war, the crime of atrocities, comes to vivid life in Remembrance. It reminds us of the depth of the human spirit, and the seeming inevitability of fate.
Hitler and Göring knew it. See below. George W. Bush and Cheney knew it. See Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Obama knows it too. See Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Naturally the common people don’t want war…. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along…. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Hermann Göring (or Goering), Nazi military leader, Commander of the Luftwaffe, and President of the Reichstag
The quote is taken from an interview G. M. Gilbert had with Göring in the jail cell where Göring was being held during the Nuremberg trials. I cannot, of course, reproduce the entire interview, but here is some context for the quote, beginning with Gilbert’s words:
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.”
“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974) 278-9
We continue to this day to tell our voters they are in danger of attack from religious fanatics on the other side of the world, so they are willing to send our seemingly infinite supply of young men and women to far-away countries so they can lose their lives, limbs and sanity.
We tell our son that he is a hero, but we don’t tell him that:
…the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.
In the days after this event, they refused to shoot at each other.
Fraternization with the enemy is treated as treason in war. In subsequent years, officers immediately squashed any attempts at this, and it never happened again.
War is the game old men play with the lives of the young.
No wonder the old men don’t like it when the young men exchanges pictures of their families. They might realize that both sides are human, and both sides are actually the same. They might realize the insanity of the war. We can’t have that!
War ends lives in desolate fields, overseas, in mud, in smoke, away from all that we love, alone, desperately alone. War wastes people.
It is April 1945. The Americans have pushed deep into Germany from the west. The Russians are advancing on Berlin from the east. Germany is all but defeated. Hitler, however, has ordered an all-out battle, recruiting children, elderly, anyone that can hold a gun to fight to the end. The SS hangs Germans who resist in this effort from telephone poles with signs around their necks reading slogans like: “I didn’t allow my children to fight for my country.” Hitler’s scorched earth initiative is underway.
Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) is an army sergeant and tank commander of a Sherman tank. He is with a platoon of a handful of tanks deep in Germany behind enemy lines. When his second in command dies, he is assigned a rookie soldier, Norman, who has been in the service only eight weeks and has never seen combat. To make matters worse, their platoon commander gets killed by an ambush, placing Wardaddy in charge as the next in line.
Hopelessly outgunned, they are assigned near-suicide missions inside Germany, running into ambush after ambush as they roll through the villages.
War is absurd. What it does to people is absurd. The objective of war is absurd. In Fury we see deep into the souls of five men who are in an impossible situation, each dealing with the insanity of what is going on around him in his own way. The men are trapped inside 30 ton graves. They desperately do the only thing they can do to get a chance of ever making it back, which is killing everyone that crosses their path. War never ends quietly.
This movie took a lot out of me. It is timely, especially now as we talk so much about war.
Here is an email from an Iraq veteran that puts an entirely new light on the war in Iraq. He says he cringes when people thank him for “serving his country.”
I now have to pay some of the highest taxes in the world, in an environment of growing regulations, militarized and corrupt police, marginal and expensive education system, crazy healthcare regulations, I can’t even legally buy the light bulbs I want!!!!
The Defense Department bought 20 Italian G222 transport aircraft for $486 million for the Afghan Air Force. The manufacturer was a North American affiliate of Alenia Aermacchi, an Italian aerospace company.
The planes were plagued with technical problems that kept them grounded. Eventually the military gave up. Instead of holding the manufacturer accountable, they decided to scrap 16 of the planes for $32,000 in scrap metal. Four of the planes remain in Ramstein, Germany.
This is just one example of a half billion dollars down the drain. It didn’t help the warfighters in Afghanistan. It didn’t help the Afghan people. It didn’t help U.S. veterans returning from the war. It didn’t pave roads in Los Angeles. It didn’t build mass transportation systems in the United States. It didn’t feed the poor in New York City. It didn’t repair our bridges in the U.S. It didn’t build any new schools.
It put money into the pockets of the shareholders of Alenia Aermacchi and the military industrial complex that feeds off it.
This is an example of the use of our defense budget. This $486 million had NOTHING to do with defense.
After a few comment exchanges with one of my readers below this post and a few ongoing posts, we took our discourse offline and continued via emails. I kept arguing that we need to keep our hands and guns out of the Middle East and let it stew until it burned itself out (even though they have proven that they won’t since the death of Muhammad), and he kept countering that I had my head up my ass ignoring the endless, never-ending threat.
He didn’t offer workable solutions, I didn’t offer any either, but my overall approach was way cheaper, because it doesn’t involved “boots on the ground” and $1.1 million Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Then he wrote me an email list night with this paragraph in the middle of it:
The truth, in my opinion, is that the “Middle East” is one of those trash bins that will not go away on its own. Replete with bad history and bad ideas. Unfortunately, one of its worst ideas, Islamic imperialism, is pushing beyond its tribal borders. And again, the nightmare of our global history demonstrates that wishing away such bad ideas comes with yet another horde of barbarians at the door.
And while the statement is just an extension of his argument all along, there was one word embedded that got my attention: Horde.
The horde of barbarians at the door is a powerful image that elicited the emotions that I am sure he intended me to have.
I have written about the Mongol empire before, here and in my book review of The Journeyer. Between 1200 and 1300, founded and established largely by Genghis Khan, it covered 33 million square kilometers (about 13 million square miles) which is about a quarter of the world’s land area today and the majority of the known world then. That makes it the largest continuous empire in history. Even the Soviet Union was not that large.
Genghis Khan’s hordes completely overran all civilizations they encountered. They effectively employed horses as military technology, their warriors were fierce and fearless fighting machines, and their brutality and complete horde behavior was unseen until then. This combination of traits, along with Genghis Khan’s military instinct, quickly made them the world’s first and only super power.
As they advanced against civilization after civilization, they brutally killed all the men and raped and then enslaved the girls and young women. The Mongols killed approximately 11% of mankind or about 40 million people.
A Carnegie Institution research project claims that the Mongols may have caused the world’s first anthropogenic climate change, that time cooling the earth. By killing so many people, vast tracts of agricultural land could no longer be cultivated for generations, and natural reforestation took over the fallow fields, removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cause noticeable global cooling.
Genghis Khan himself raped so many women and fathered so many children, it is estimated that some 10% of the male population of Asia are his direct descendants. The harem that he kept was of enormous size. In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country’s current two million people could be Genghis Khan descendants. Did Khan contribute to mankind in any tangible way other than spreading his seed? For the most part, he was a barbarian.
What does all this have to do with today’s militant Islamic Imperialism?
People and “governments” that condone stoning of its own citizens, killing of apostates, raping of females belonging to different tribes of their own religion, and ritual beheadings of innocent people are certainly barbarians.
When hordes of barbarians take over neighboring countries, or grow within countries, they need to be stopped at the root, at the beginning. Not doing so can cause the deaths of millions. Khan could have been stopped before he got big enough. Britain and France could have squashed Hitler when he took over the Rheinland in 1936, and in the process averted WW II. Stalin could have been stopped before he killed 10 million of his own people.
To repeat my reader’s comment:
…the nightmare of our global history demonstrates that wishing away such bad ideas comes with yet another horde of barbarians at the door.
According to the USA Today, September 26 – 28, front page, we are still spending $212 million a day (FY 13) on “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan.
According to the USA Today, September 26 – 28, front page, we are spending $10 million a day on bombing Syria and Iraq.
A single Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, as was shown so nicely and flashing on the evening news a few days ago, costs $1.1 million.
A single Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) smart bomb costs $40,000. The hourly cost of keeping a B-2 stealth bomber in the air is $55,000.
The federal income tax that I pay every year pays for about 30 minutes of flying a B-2. It takes a lot of guys like me for a whole year to pay for a single B-2 mission, to pay for the shock and awe the warmongers are so proud of.
…and we happily let it happen. We have already spent more than $1 billion on ISIS airstrikes, and we don’t have any money to repave the crumbling roads of Los Angeles and New York.
“I’m sitting here wondering where Saudi Arabia is, where Kuwait is, where Qatar is, I’ll be damned if kids in the state of Vermont — or taxpayers in the state of Vermont — have to defend the royal Saudi family, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The United States has started a bombing campaign in yet another country: Syria. Syria is none of our business; and Syria is an Islamic country. We seem to love bombing Islamic countries, and we wonder why Muslims hate us and become terrorists that want to attack us.
President Bush is on record for bombing two countries: Afghanistan and Iraq. Some claim that Yemen and Pakistan should be included, but I can’t find conclusive evidence, so I’ll say: Bush bombed between two and four countries.
President Obama, a Nobel Peace Laureate, no less, has now bombed seven nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and now Iraq.
Only Clinton, the “other democrat” of the last thirty years, has bombed more nations, namely thirteen: Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia 1993, Haiti 1994, Croatia 1995, Zaire 1996, Liberia 1997, Albania 1997, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, Iraq 1998, Yugoslavia 1999, and Yemen 2000.
Everyone keeps stating that there is nothing else we can do.
The “Islamic State” is not a state, but a bunch of religious zealots, criminals with delusions, who have been given weapons, in part by us. They are acting like spoilt toddlers, screaming their heads off to get attention. And rather doing what good parents do that have unruly toddlers, namely ignoring them, we’re giving them lots of attention, like sticking something sweet in their mouths every time they open them. That strategy does not work with toddlers, and it does not work with zealots either.
The United States and its vassals should get out of the Middle East and let the Middle Eastern nations, in their Muslim strife, do what they have done since the day Muhammad died on June 8, 632, when disagreements broke out over who his successor would be, and when two major factions of another world religion of power, suppression and deceit was started.
For 1,382 years Muslims haven’t been at peace. Now emperor Obama and our illustrious thinkers in Congress believe they can make it not be that way.
Have you ever been to Mexico?” Caption Whiteback asked me over the mild roar of the vehicle’s engine. I nooded. “Iraq is kinda of like that, but with bombs.”
Recently I have read two books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell told the story of a Navy SEAL and his experiences in Afghanistan. Where Men Win Glory by Jan Krakauer is an accounting of the life and eventual death of NFL star turned soldier Pat Tillman. Both books did an excellent job putting me into the war, the conflicts, the battles and the immense pain and suffering that war inevitably causes.
Matt Gallagher tells the story of his deployment in Iraq with such vivid clarity that Iraq becomes real in front of my eyes. He puts a spotlight on the hopelessness of the conflict itself. He illustrates the endemic dysfunction of the military establishment. Life of an Army platoon in Iraq is filled with hours, days, weeks and months of utter boredom, broken up by occasional hours of frustration over what we are doing to that country and its citizens, jarred by minutes of sheer terror, always unpredictable, and topped off with grief and despair when something goes badly wrong.
On September 11, 2001, Gallagher, in his college dorm room, slept through the entire attack and the fall of the towers. He eventually became an officer in the Army and was put in command of a scout platoon in Iraq, leading men with years more experience and several combat deployments. He tells the story from the viewpoint of a junior officer, with insight into some of the decision-making, but always out front with his men where the bullets fly and deadly ghosts lurk behind every shadow.
Gallagher keeps inserting his feelings about Iraq and its people. Here is a sample of his writing:
And the kids. And the kids. The ones with eyes like black pools of sorrow. They didn’t even know what they didn’t have, but they did know they didn’t have it.
Like a lizard and its tail. One can either kill the lizard or take the tail, but only the fools and the clowns don’t realize the tail will grow back. That’s how it was for America and Iraq. We wanted to slice off the chaos tail without smashing the lizard’s head, hoping a democracy tail would grow in the meantime. We learned firsthand that wasn’t how lizards or their tails worked.
This is the best book about the war in Iraq that I have read so far. I feel like I have been there and I know what it is like. I am left with the enormity of the mistake made by Bush when he led our country into this unwinnable war. Hannity does not know what he is talking about. Olbermann does not know. Palin does not have a clue. Rove makes me sick. Listen to the many thousands of soldiers that were there. They know. Matt Gallagher was there for fifteen months. He knows. And in Kaboom he tells us about it with candor, clarity and wisdom.
Reading Where Men Win Glory profoundly changed the way I think about honor, duty, our U.S. military, our media, these crazy wars we’re in and our political leadership. Most importantly, Where Men Win Glory puts a spotlight on how terribly frightening war is when you are the one that’s in it. War kills people, and no matter how much our leaders tell us about serving our country, when the bullets whiz around your head you are the one that’s on the line.
Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun were warlords. George W. Bush was a warlord along with his minions Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove. The difference is, Alexander and Attila were on the front lines, leading their soldiers into battle, shoulder to shoulder. If Bush and Cheney had had to drive a Humvee into Afghanistan or Iraq, these wars would never have happened. It’s easy to give orders to send thousands of people into battle, so they can win glory, when you are sitting safely behind a desk in Washington.
Jon Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, is a masterful journalist, researcher and author. I have read all his books, and all get four stars. In Where Men Win Glory, Krakauer tells the unlikely story of a true American hero, Pat Tillman, the NFL football player who enlisted with the Army and eventually lost his life in Afghanistan.
Pat Tillman playing for the Arizona Cardinals
Tillman was born in the Bay Area in 1976. He was an exceptional athlete and passionate young man in high school. Smaller than the typical football player and passed over by coaches as a child, Tillman nevertheless, through goal setting, perseverance, intelligence and integrity beat all the odds, became a high school start player and got a scholarship at Arizona State University where he played for the Sun Devils. Eventually he joined the Arizona Cardinals and became a star player on that team and attracted national attention.
The Cardinals paid him a salary of $361,500 for his services in 2000 and gave him a contract for a single year to continue. On April 13, 2001, the St. Louis Rams, who had won the Super Bowl the year before, offered him a 5-year contract for $9.6 million, with $2.6 million upfront, upon signing. Tillman, however, felt loyalty to the Cardinals who first took him in and gave him his chance in the NFL. He turned down the Rams and stayed with the Cardinals for a one-year contract at $512,000. His agent was beside himself. Never had he experienced somebody turn down such a package on principle and loyalty before.
Then 9/11 happened. Many of his colleagues talked big about kicking al Qaeda ass, but like most of us, talk or write was all they did. Tillman’s ethics and sense of right did not allow him to just talk. After intense deliberation he decided to enlist in the Army with the goal of becoming an Army Ranger, the elite special forces branch. Even through, by virtue of having a college degree, he was eligible to become an officer, he decided to enlist as a common soldier. His goal was not to sit at some desk giving orders, his goal was to make a difference in the front lines. His brother Kevin joined him and enlisted with him.
The salary for a private in the Army was $1,248 a month. Just before he enlisted, the incredulous Cardinals offered him a contract for $3.6 million. Tillman turned that down.
Pat and Kevin Tillman in Saudi Arabia in 2003
He joined the Army as a grunt. Anyone who has served in the military knows that in that environment, initiative, capability, intelligence, motivation and enthusiasm do not count. Time on record counts. Pat and Kevin Tillman spent the next year going through boot camp and training in utter frustration. The dream of making a difference started looking a lot like a pipe dream indeed.
When the White House became aware of his enlistment, they wanted to make him a poster boy and milk the publicity. To their dismay, Tillman, in his entire time in the military, never once granted a single interview. He wanted to serve, and that was all.
Eventually Pat Tillman was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan in April 2004 by bullets to the head shot by members of his own platoon. This is called “friendly fire” or “fratricide.” Krakauer meticulously describes how fratricide can happen, first by a story of the invasion of Iraq in the first few days of the war, when American A-10 aircraft are called in for air support of a company of Marines on the ground under fire by the Iraqis. However, the soldier on the ground calling in the support does not realize that the target he outlines for the attack is another American company across the river, also under attack. The A-10 planes go to town on the Americans. Their cannons can fire rounds the size of Red Bull cans at a rate of 67 per second. They attack with rockets and missiles. The Americans on the ground are helpless. 17 marines died that day from friendly fire.
Friendly fire is a phenomenon that happens much more frequently than one might expect. Krakauer writes:
According to the most comprehensive survey of American war casualties (both fatal and non-fatal), 21 percent of the casualties in World War II were attributable to friendly fire, 39 percent of the casualties in Vietnam, and 52 percent of the casualties in the first Gulf War. This far in the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, casualty rates are 41 percent and 13 percent, respectively. All these figures are conservative estimates, moreover; due to endemic underreporting of fratricide by the military, the actual percentages are unquestionably higher.
And thus continues the saga of Pat Tillman. When discovering what happened, the superiors of Tillman’s platoons immediately put a gag order on all the soldiers that actually witnessed what happened. Through the ranks, all the way to the commanding general, to Rumsfeld and to the White House, it appears that the truth was systematically covered up. The Army had made Tillman their poster boy, and now they had shot him. The White House and military spin machine went into high gear, fed misinformation to the nation, and worst of all, to Tillman’s family. For months, nobody knew the truth of how he had died. Eventually the family persisted, and over the years seven different investigations took place. The family is still not satisfied.
Tillman wanted to serve, and the military used him. Used him up.
This is an astounding story, an extraordinary book, that puts a light on our wars that is not so glorious and honorable, that exposes how the military works, and it shows in glaring spotlight the machinations of the Bush administration.
Besides telling the story of Pat Tillman, Krakauer takes us through a quick history lesson on modern Afghanistan, starting with the time of the Soviet invasion and war, all they way to today. He explains the rise of the Taliban and how the U.S. actually welcomed them early on since it looked like they were going to unite and stabilize a war-torn nation.
When I was done reading, I put down the book and concluded that men will never win glory in war. People make money with wars at the expense of others. Yet, through the ages, men and women will sign up for the military to serve their countries, go to war for ideals that just a few years later are proven misguided, fight against troops their own country trained, outfitted and funded only years before during another conflict against another foe. Men and women lose their lives for that false glory. This will continue to go on through the ages.
Tomasz orchestrates a daring escape for the two of them, and thus effectively saves her life – and his. But being free does not mean being safe. Poland is war-torn, and there is no safe place to hide. Quickly the couple is separated again, and eventually both come to believe the other to be dead.
