Film "Come and See": Impossible to Forget
The picture was released in 1985. In the USSR, it was watched by 29.8 million viewers. It had a wide resonance abroad as well. She made such a shocking impression on Western viewers that some were taken away by ambulance after the session. This film is a prayer for peace and freedom, for justice and mercy. For every nation. For every person.
It is impossible and necessary to watch it.
Yu Burlan
These are words about another film, but from the same row. “Come and See” is a film that is painful and difficult to watch, but everyone needs to watch it. Regardless of age and nationality. The film is a shock. The film is a masterpiece. The film is a reminder of the horrors of war. That it is impossible and impossible to forget. Never!
From the history of the film
The picture was released in 1985. In the USSR, it was watched by 29.8 million viewers. It had a wide resonance abroad as well. She made such a shocking impression on Western viewers that some were taken away by ambulance after the session. And nevertheless, no one denied that such brutal pictures of the war were not an invention of the director, but a reflection of real events that took place in German-occupied Belarus in 1943. It is a historical fact that 628 Belarusian villages were burned along with the inhabitants.
One elderly German after seeing the picture said: “I am a soldier of the Wehrmacht. Moreover, he was an officer of the Wehrmacht. I went through all of Poland, Belarus, reached Ukraine. I testify that everything told in this film is true. And the most terrible and embarrassing thing for me is that my children and grandchildren will see this film."
The film was directed by Elem Klimov, who for a long time conceived such a true picture of the war. First, because he himself witnessed the terrible events of the war, since he spent his childhood in Stalingrad. Secondly, psychological pressure was exerted by the contemporary Cold War and the associated possibility of unleashing a third world war. I wanted to tell the world that this should not happen again.
The works of the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich "Khatynskaya story", "Partisans", "Punishers" were taken as a basis. But the main source for writing the script was the book "I am from the fiery village", which is documentary evidence of the horrors that Belarus experienced during the occupation by the German invaders. The book was co-authored with Yank Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik based on eyewitness accounts. That is why the film turned out to be as accurate as possible, heavy, without embellishment, like the war itself.
The boy is eager to fight
The plot of the film is a war through the eyes of a teenager, a resident of one of the Belarusian villages. At the very beginning of the film, he is going to leave home for a partisan detachment. The mother does not let her in, convinces her to feel sorry for herself, but Fleur is eager to perform feats, to defend the Motherland. With enthusiasm, he leaves his native village, where his mother and his two twin sisters remain, and arrives at a partisan detachment.
He rushes into battle with a smile on his lips, like any boy who grew up in the USSR - in a country with a heroic collectivist and communal mentality, which Yuri Burlan talks about in such detail at the training "System Vector Psychology". It was the Great Patriotic War that showed the whole world the strength of this mentality, when everyone - both old and young - rose to defend the Motherland.
Hitler did not stand on ceremony with the inhabitants of the conquered territories and released the Nazis from responsibility for any actions in relation to the peoples inhabiting the USSR. The Fuehrer's official directives on this score equated the atrocities of the fascists with state policy. But they failed to break the spirit of the people.
One of the pages of the mass heroism of the Soviet people is the partisan detachments in Belarus. All local residents who could hold a gun went underground, into the forests, in order to destroy the enemy by any means, imperceptibly, unexpectedly, irrationally - as only a Russian person can.
“The partisan does not ask how many of them are fascists. He asks - where are they, - says the commander of the Kosach detachment in his parting speech before the battle. - It depends on each of us how long it will last - the war. Each of us will be asked what you were doing here. They did not think about themselves, all their thoughts were only about what they can do to protect the Motherland.
Fleur is sorry, they do not take in the first battle, leaving him in the camp. While still a boy, he sheds tears of resentment and powerlessness and runs away from the camp. In the forest, he meets the girl Glasha, also from a partisan detachment. They find themselves at the center of a punitive operation against the partisans. The first bombing, shell shock, acute experience of the horror of war. But childhood still prevails. The next day, in the forest with Glasha, they merrily run in the rain.
When childhood ends
Returning to the village where Fleur lived, they find desolation and silence. The food in the oven is still warm at home, but there are no residents. “Gone,” the guy decides. They run to the swamp to reach the island where Fleur thinks his family is hiding. But the girl, turning around, sees a bunch of bodies of shot civilians. With some difficulty they get to the land to find out that the boy's family has been shot, and the surviving neighbors are hiding on the island.
Psychologically, it is a very difficult moment when a boy grows up at one point. Childhood is over. From that moment, suffering freezes in his gaze. The director found a very strong technique to show the metamorphoses that occur with the psyche of a child during the war. From a blooming rosy-cheeked boy, he turns into a withered, wrinkled, gray-haired old man. Looking at him, you understand what kind of inner path he went through in these moments. From happiness to suffering. From the carelessness of childhood to adult responsibility for the fate of other people.
He sees hungry fellow villagers, crying children, a man rotting alive - a talking corpse. Only this makes him come out of the personal grief that covers everything from the loss of loved ones. Together with three other men, he goes to look for food. “There people are dying of hunger …” He is the only one left alive. Even a stolen cow cannot be saved. The last time he cries from despair.
How much more grief can an average teenager endure? But Soviet teenagers at that time could, took on this burden, because everyone lived like that, gave everything they could and even more. The personal was dissolved in the general. Otherwise, where to get the strength to continue to live, to stand to death in the enemy's way?
Come out, who is without children
Then everything is perceived as a nightmare. An incredible cacophony of sounds - the sound background of the film creates a depressing impression. I want to shut my ears, not to hear, not to see this horror, because it seems unreal, impossible in this life. This is what the boy experiences. And only his eyes open wider.
Flera again ends up in the center of a punitive operation in a Belarusian village. Residents with children are herded into a wooden church to burn. But before that - a sophisticated mockery - it is proposed to leave those "who are without children." Not a single person moves. Nobody leaves children. It is not only the maternal instinct that works here, when the child's life is more valuable than his own. Children are the future, one for all. There were no other people's children in the USSR, all the children were ours.
Only Fleur climbs out of the church window and another young woman with a child. The child is immediately thrown back, and she is dragged for the amusement of the soldiers. The guy watches with horror as the Nazis set fire to the building.
The punitive operation is over, the village is on fire. The Nazis leave the village, but the suddenly appeared partisans break up the detachment, capturing several German officers and their local hangers-on. This scene is the strongest in the film. It most clearly shows the difference between the two worlds that collided in World War II.
The officers are allowed to speak. How can you restrain yourself from killing everyone right after what they did? One of the officers, the one who said to go out without children, says: “Everything begins with children. You have no right to the future. You shouldn't be there. Not all peoples have the right to the future."
Kosach commands the partisans who have surrounded the captured prisoners: “Listen! Listen to everyone!"
Listen to understand that we have no other way but to fight to the bitter end. Otherwise, the Russian people will not exist. Energize with the passion of righteous revenge.
But at the same time, there is no cruelty in the Russians. And when one of the policemen is forced to kill German officers with his own hand and he pours gasoline on them to set them on fire, he does not have time to do this, because the partisans, out of mercy, shoot them so that they do not suffer.
Fleur becomes the personification of this mercy. Before joining a partisan detachment, he shoots a portrait of Hitler lying in a puddle. The documentary newsreels accompanying these shots make us feel all the hatred he feels for fascism. Before the viewer are pictures of the key moments of the formation of Nazism in reverse chronological order: concentration camps, the beginning of the war, the Beer Hall putsch, riots … But suddenly Fleur freezes, seeing the portrait of young Adolf on his mother's lap. He looks into the eyes of his mother and, despite all the atrocities of the Nazis that have passed in front of him, he cannot shoot the child.
War lessons
Newsreels show us two worlds. The first is Germany, which idolizes its Fuhrer, holding its breath, listening to his speeches, throwing flowers. Germany, in which slaves, driven from the occupied territories of Europe and the USSR, work in the most ordinary German families. The second is the USSR, where the bloodiest and most terrible war in the history of mankind is unfolding. What happened to our country and other peoples is the result of the support of the German people for the regime that unleashed this war.
I would like to draw a parallel with modernity, when neo-Nazism arises on the territory of Europe, when city streets are named after traitors, punishers and criminals against humanity, when fascism is romanticized and history is rewritten. When policemen and traitors who participated in punitive operations suddenly become "heroes". So, with the support of one people, the path to great troubles for all mankind can begin. This film must be watched so that personalities such as Hitler could never come to power, so that history does not repeat itself again.
You have to watch this film to know the truth. The truth about those who carried death and suffering, meanness and betrayal. The truth about those who, at the cost of their own lives, have won freedom and peace for us. This film should be watched so that in the modern chaos and confusion of the information war, no one dares to impose opinions and interpretations, to manipulate the feelings and memory of the feat of our grandparents.
This film must be watched so as not to forget. Do not forget about the burned down Belarus and the destroyed country, about the victims of Khatyn, about the tortured partisans and atrocities against prisoners of concentration camps, about children and women taken into slavery. Do not forget about the besieged Leningrad and the unbroken Stalingrad, the Brest Fortress and the Nevsky Piglet, the millions of heroes who will forever remain on the battlefield. Do not forget that this does not happen again, so that you do not have to defend the right to the future, the right to life with blood and irreparable losses.
This film is a prayer for peace and freedom, for justice and mercy. For every nation. For every person.
They say that wars are unleashed not by the people, but by politicians. But all the horrors of war have to be sorted out by everyone, both ordinary people and soldiers. Therefore, we simply must not give support to the forces that can destroy the world.
