Sam (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film Come and See, which came out in 1985. It was directed by Elem Klimov. The screenplay is by Ales Adamovich and Elem Klimov. It’s based on two books. One of them is a novel called Khatyn that came out in 1971, and the other is a collection of survivor testimonies that came out in 1977 called I Am From the Fiery Village. These are both by Ales Adamovich, who also worked on the script for this movie. and I am from the Fiery Village is available for free on the Internet Archive under the title Out of the Fire. It’s the story of a teenager who joins a partisan unit in German occupied Belarus during World War II. Adamovich himself was in a partisan unit in Belarus during the war, so undoubtedly his experiences helped to shape the book. And the book and the film depict fictional characters against a backdrop of real events. The film was originally titled Kill Hitler.

The title Come and See comes from the Book of Revelation. So there’s a part in the Book of Revelation where the horsemen of the apocalypse are being introduced. So it’s like come and see, and then you see the destruction that’s being wrought by these four horsemen of the apocalypse. So very fitting with this movie. And it’s available for free on YouTube. What did you think of this movie?

Maartje (01:30)
I thought this movie was like a bad trip in a good way. I don’t know if that makes any sense, the events of the movie are terrible, like actually terrible, terrible. but it’s a good movie. It kind of drags you along with this main character who seems to be in a nightmare that he cannot wake up from. it’s really intense because there’s a lot of eye contact between the characters and the camera, so they’re looking at you and their faces do all the acting in this. And I was kind of not looking forward to watching this one because I was sure it It was gonna leave me feeling kind of depressed. And it did. But not in a way I expected. I thought I was gonna just not like it, but it is a really good reminder of the stories that we perhaps don’t hear that often that did actually happen pretty much in a similar way in real life. So a good one to remind you that war is Terrible. How about you?

Sam (02:31)
Yeah, this is an anti-war film that really nails it for me. War is this vehicle for people to commit abominable acts against each other. There’s no honor in it. We’re seeing the depths of human depravity. It chews up the main character who’s effectively a child. He’s fourteen or so. It chews him up and spits him out. It tears the world apart at the seams. It’s totally incomprehensible. we know the violence would have happened to him anyway because we know the context, but from his perspective, the act of picking up a rifle leads to a realm of horrors. He loses everything. And there’s no pornographically violent displays of killing. But almost worse is that we get so many close-ups of the lead actor’s face, and he does such a good job of getting across. what he’s feeling and how he’s reacting to having everything fall apart around him. and as you say, the movie is nightmarish. There’s a certain section of the movie where the main character loses his hearing because he is close to an explosion. And so he’s walking through this terrifying situation where he’s missing one of his key senses and Everything around him makes even less sense than it normally would. And there are parts where there’s almost like this sound of insects that you can hear. And in reading the book, there was quite a few people who described the sounds of people screaming from far away as sounding like bees or like bugs buzzing. And we get that kind of sound in the movie, this really unsettling insect sound that’s like puts you in mind of, you know, bugs eating something dead or something like that. Like it’s very kind of sickening. It it throws you off. the Germans will just emerge from the fog. There’s doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to when the main character is gonna be experiencing violence. And so I think this movie is super well made. One or two things of that I’m sure we’ll talk about as we go through, but overall I really enjoyed it. I think it’s probably one of the best anti war movies that we’ve seen.

Maartje (04:32)
For me it kind of comes in the same realm as Son of Saul. it has a similar kind of close up intense way of going through the motions of the war where it almost feels like involuntary all the stuff that’s happening.

I guess it is kind of involuntary because we’re going from place to place trying to not die in the meantime. the sound of the bees made me immediately now that you’ve just talked about the four henchmen and the apocalypse, made me immediately think of locusts like a plague of locusts as well. Which is interesting now in context. I hadn’t thought of it when I was actually watching The film, but that that and being at a a concert where people are just screaming so loudly that you can’t really hear anything anymore, so but that’s obviously a totally different situation than this one. another thing I thought was it didn’t feel like like a movie from eighty five to me. I thought it was newer until I looked at it.

I don’t know what made it feel sort of contemporary, but it did feel a little bit contemporary. Maybe because it’s shot a little bit as an art house film. every shot is composed in a certain way that’s really l modern and feels on purpose and I enjoyed that about it. So yeah, overall good experience.

Sam (05:55)
Shall we provide the people with some context?

Maartje (05:57)
Yes, let’s, because I feel like not all of us know a lot about Belarus in World War two.

Sam (06:03)
Belarus at the time was a part of the Soviet Union. It’s on the western border of Russia and the northern border of Ukraine. It sits directly between Poland and Russia, so directly in the path of the German advance eastward, if you’re picturing it from a World War II context. this movie is All the Characters Speak Belarusian, which is a mutually intelligible language with Russian and Ukrainian. As you can imagine, all of these people, all these borders have been very fluid over the past few hundred years. So a lot of these people are culturally and linguistically very similar. Belarus was invaded by Germany on June 22nd, 1941. Throughout the next three years, Belarus was never fully pacified. Many of its inhabitants fought a fierce partisan war against their would-be German occupiers. which we will see depicted in the film. And in June 1944, Operation Bagration began. It was two weeks after Operation Overlord, so right after the Allies have invaded the continent. And the Soviet Union defeated the German army and they eventually liberated the capital city of Minsk on July 3rd, 1944. Operation Bagration left the Germans with around 450,000 casualties and another 300,000 troops isolated. So This is sort of the beginning of the end for the German forces in World War two.

Maartje (07:21)
Yeah, it’s the first time that they’re fighting effectively on two fronts. So they’re being obviously Normandy has been and gone and they’re also fighting the Soviets on the other side. So they’re spread a little thin, thank God. I mean finally.

Sam (07:39)
Yeah, definitely.

Maartje (07:40)
Are you ready to get into the movie?

Sam (07:42)
Let’s do it.

Maartje (07:43)
Let’s get into the movie.

We open in Belarus or Belarus in nineteen forty three, where we see a village elder played by Kazimir Rabetsky as he yells at two local boys for digging up buried buried rifles in the sand. and he’s telling them that rifles are sure to invite trouble because These boys need rifles to be able to join the partisans and the Germans destroy literally any village associated with the Partisans, so it’s not a good look. we see a Focke-wulf one eighty nine Recon plane and we see this plane often during the film.

It almost seems like this is the same shot we see every time, I’m not sure if it is, but the sky’s clear and basically all you see is that plane. And Sam has something to say about the book.

Sam (08:41)
Yeah. so the book is framed a little bit differently. In the book we’re introduced to the main character, Flyora, as an older man, and him and his wife, Glasha, who we will also meet in the film, as well as Kosach, who we will also meet in the film, and some other people are going back to visit the village of Khatyn and a lot of these villages that were destroyed and go he’s bringing his son with him and it’s kind of like the old generation teaching the new generation what happened during the war type thing. And interesting because the older version of Flyora is blind and we really don’t get a great sense what the people around him are thinking, how his wife for example feels about returning to these places, how, you know, Kosach experience life after the war, how he feels about any of this. And so it almost feels like Flyora is returning to these places with his ghosts, with these people who are real living, breathing people in the context of the way we see them in his memory as young people, but now that they’re older, they’re kind of just around him and he’s very isolated in himself. so I thought it was interesting that they took that framing device of the novel completely away. They didn’t include it in the film at all.

Maartje (09:54)
It’s interesting because the movies focus so much on his eyes and I do get the sense of isolation a lot because we are with him a lot, but we also get to see the other character, so it’s certainly different and we don’t get to see him grow up at all in the movie, so we don’t know what happens to him after.

Sam (10:15)
Yeah, and I don’t object to it necessarily because I find and I don’t know if this is a translation problem because the original book is written in Belarusian. I don’t I don’t know if this is a translation issue or if it was intentional on the part of the author, but there’s parts of the book that are kind of confusing because there are no chapter breaks and so older Flyora will be explaining something that happened during the war and then In the next paragraph he’s talking about a discussion that in the present day he’s had with one of his younger students about current events, and he’s talking about like Vietnam and all kinds of stuff that happened way after World War Two. And all these kind of get blended together. so yeah, I don’t know I don’t know if it’s was strictly necessary to getting the point of the story across.

Maartje (10:58)
Is it like he’s telling the story from beginning to end all in one big go? Does it feel like that?

Sam (11:06)
no, not really, ’cause he’s going back and forth between the timelines so much.

Maartje (11:10)
so weird, what a choice, what a strange choice. I I reckon it must have been like difficult to read as well because you’re so used to like reading a chapter and then saying one more chapter and then I’ll stop. But there’s no chapters.

Sam (11:24)
Yeah, I didn’t mind that setup particularly, but Yeah, no, you would think it would feel like he’s just telling you the story in a stream of consciousness, but it does and it doesn’t. I don’t know.

Maartje (11:36)
Interesting though, it’s nice to see a difference set up in a book.

Sam (11:39)
Yeah, for sure.

One of the boys is our main character, as we discuss, Flyora Gaishun, played by Aleksei Kravchenko, who soon leaves to join the partisans despite his mother’s wishes. His mother’s played by Tatyana Shestakova. She doesn’t have a name in the film, I don’t think. It’s obvious that Flyora doesn’t fully grasp the seriousness of what he’s undertaking. It’s very much a teenage boy thing where his mother’s like, You’re gonna get killed, we’re all gonna get killed, and he was like, Ugh, you’re overreacting.

Maartje (12:06)
Everyone is going I need to go Yeah, I felt like that. The mother I thought was portrayed kinda weirdly in a way because she lets the partisans enter the house and it seems kind of chummy for

Sam (12:09)
Yeah.

Maartje (12:21)
a tiny tiny second and then she’s like crying and screaming and asking them not to take away her boy and it’s I can tell you understand. But also at the same time at the beginning of the movie I’m not sure as if you were if you’re quite aware of the danger that he’s also putting his family in by leaving. I don’t I’m not sure if I was. it kind of crept up on me a little bit that Even though the old man had warned him about the horse that would become them if if he left with a rifle, I kind of I guess I’m always hopeful that there’s a good ending or something, but for these people in Belarus there really was no happy ending whatsoever.

Sam (13:05)
Yeah, the other piece here too is that the Germans very much used partisan activity as an excuse to raise villages to the ground. So whether or not you had someone in your family who was with the partisans, they would be like, some partisans came and stole some water from your well. You’re helping them into the fire. Like it very much was just a reason that the Germans gave.

But I mean when the Germans first started raising villages to the ground in Lithuania and Belarus during the summer of nineteen forty one, there of course was not any partisan activity yet. so it’s a flimsy excuse at best, I think. But I think it’s interesting that they bring it up in such a way that it does make the main character feel guilty. He does feel responsible for what has happened to his family.

Maartje (13:48)
Yes. And this is the the scorched earth policy that we’ve talked about in other episodes where the Germans would come and just burn entire villages. We’ll get to just how many at the very end, but it’s not good.

Sam (14:02)
Yeah. the cool thing about Belarus is that they did have an extremely active partisan movement and the Germans fully did not expect this to happen. They viewed Belarusian people as likely to be placid and to accept what was happening to them and that absolutely did not happen. And so there were quite a few organized partisan units. in his book Adamovich Notice it notes 1,255 units in operation and it’s comprises almost 500,000 people. And they were extremely effective at making things difficult for the Germans. And so if you kind of think about where the Eastern Front was, the Germans would have liked to be able to move supplies and troops through Belarus and without having to devote a significant amount of troops to keeping the area pacified. And the Belarusians did not allow them to do that. And so the Germans were always having to take units away from the front to try and pacify the Belarusians, to try and ensure that they could get supplies safely through Belarus. The partisans were especially good at destroying railroad tracks and delaying German supply lines and so Yeah, they were definitely a thorn in the German side throughout the war.

Maartje (15:15)
Lots of sabotage, I do like that. Imagine though, like half a million people. a lot.

Sam (15:20)
Yeah.

Maartje (15:21)
At the camp in the woods, Flyora encounters the partisan commander Kosuch played by god Liubomiras Laucevicius or something, a really difficult name, I’m very sorry, you were great. and he’s the absolute archetype of a folk hero and Flyora aspires to be like him, but he’s so left behind as the rest of the men go on a raid.

And he’s not very pleased. He has to give up his boots to another man who has holes in his boots. And I don’t know what it is about military boots in movies, but they’re always such a source of pride and honor. And this poor boy has to give them up. And he gets to be upset over it with Glasha, who’s a young woman who works at the camp.

Played by Olga Mironova.

And she does not like being perceived as being remotely interested in Kosach.

This character of Glasha, she introduces herself at first to him as Rosie and then she says, no, it’s actually Glasha. This character was kind of strange. In the beginning I had I had trouble figuring out what she was trying to do with him and she has a weird little monologue in his face.

For a while I was like, What’s going on?

Sam (16:35)
Yeah, the book I think is much clearer with the fact that she is effectively Kosach’s girlfriend. and she follows them around because she’s yeah, she’s sleeping with him. and I don’t feel like the movie hits that note quite as hard. It almost seems more like she has a crush on him, but he doesn’t give her the time of day.

Maartje (16:52)
No, and they seem really young as well. Like they make it seem like they’re just two kids caught up I guess they are two kids caught up in a war, but it’s kind of innocent still. And she’s all dressed up in like a fancy dress and he thinks it’s to impress Kosach, I think. And she’s like, No, it’s not. I’m just wearing this dress, leave me alone.

Sam (17:13)
Yeah, and there were women involved in the partisan movement too, which we should definitely mention, so it’s nice to see at least one of them in this movie. but yeah, they are I mean, they are really young. Adamovich, the author, was fifteen, I think, when he joined the partisans during World War Two, so this is definitely based pretty heavily on his experiences.

Maartje (17:32)
Mhm. I can’t even imagine just living through that, to be honest.

Sam (17:37)
Yeah, and this is really in an era where the Germans are going from village to village, massacring people, raising villages to the ground, setting everything ablaze, and the partisans are doing their best to prevent that from happening, but also to sabotage the Germans wherever they can. so these are people who are living in the woods, because it’s not safe for them to live in any of the villages. It’s not safe for them to even visit the homes of their families because if anyone tells the Germans that a partisan has been there, then their families are gonna be killed. so yeah, you’re you’re living in the in the Belarusian forests throughout rain, snow, sleet, or hail for a period of a couple of years. I mean, it’s it’s a tough life.

Maartje (18:20)
Another thing that I quite liked about this movie was how heavily isolated it felt. we don’t see a lot of people as soon as they kind of leave the partisans. They’re by themselves a lot, the surroundings are trees and sometimes fields and there’s not a lot to see or shelter or do and I’m like god Imagine being fifteen and just Where the heck are you even going? But yeah.

Sam (18:47)
The woods are suddenly attacked from the air by German dive bombers, forcing Flyora and Glasha to flee and hide together. Flyora is temporarily deafened by an explosion. He urges Glasha to come to his village with him, where he is sure they will be safe, because he has lived in that village all his life, and his family home has always seemed safe to him.

Maartje (19:08)
He has two twin brothers or sisters, right? I don’t know if they’re sisters, also the explosions in the trees are quite cool in this movie. Not unlike in Band of Brothers. There’s just a bunch of exploding trees. And it’s all very terrifying and good movie making, I think. It really puts you right in the middle of it.

Sam (19:12)
Sisters, I think.

Yeah, and it’s kind of amazing to think of the fact that the Germans because there’s no real central gathering place, the the partisans are not a regular army. And so the Germans are having to bomb the forest hope that they hit some people. I I thought it was interesting when I was reading the eyewitness accounts in Adamovich’s collection of accounts there, a lot of people were talking about how the Germans were afraid to go into the woods at night. They were afraid to go into the woods in a small group. they knew that the woods were the landscape of the partisans. And so it’s just such an interesting like you know, for for the German army that that perceives itself to be the strongest, mightiest army in the world having to

Maartje (20:11)
Mm.

Sam (20:12)
You know, take on these gorillas who live in the woods and and and and being frightened of them.

Maartje (20:16)
Are you afraid, Germans? yeah, I know what you mean. they arrive back at his village at his house and they go into the house and it’s empty and there’s flies everywhere and there’s still food on the table, which they eat and then Glasha throws up. And you as a viewer get the immediate sense that Not all is as it seems. He’s like, well they will have gone out somewhere and we’ll find them. But you know, they are no longer alive. And as they walk away from the house, Glasha turns around and sees all the bodies of everybody in the village behind the house just all massacred. But Flyora isn’t actually seeing any of this. He’s convinced that they are hiding somewhere in the in the middle of the bog on an island and he drags Glasha into the bog with him and nearly drowns her accidentally. And sure enough there are people on the island, a lot of refugees, but not any of Flyora’s family. And at that point the village elder who’s dying puts the blame on Flyora’s feet for joining the partisans. He’s like, You brought this upon us, this is all your fault And he does perceive it to be this way himself. So it’s a tough scene.

Sam (21:30)
Yeah, I distinctly remember the the the lead actor’s face and he’s just surrounded by all of these people who are crying and shouting and he’s just incredulous and horrified that he might have caused this to happen to his family and just some great filmmaking and some great acting.

Maartje (21:48)
Yes, I agree. This boy’s face, guys, you have to go and watch it. It’s just he’s a he’s really striking in a completely ordinary way and it’s so good because his acting takes it to a whole different level. It’s really, really good.

Sam (22:06)
And this is this was the actor’s first role as well. and he was I think fifteen when they made this, so it’s very impressive.

Maartje (22:14)
Was he really only fifteen? That’s the thing, I can’t tell looking at this movie, I can’t tell how old anyone is in this. I feel like it’s also such a cultural divide, like the people are all dressed up in old timey villager clothes. I’m like I realise I’m I’m so used to living in a western society where people all dress alike and all they’re all modern and stuff and I’m like, I I have no idea what These people’s lives would have looked like in Belarus.

Sam (22:43)
Yeah, I mean I think they were really hard for sure. yeah. And I think that after the war, in a lot of the eyewitness accounts that I was reading in that book, a lot of the people ended up working on state farms. because obviously Belarus was part of the Soviet Union and a lot of things were communal. And I genuinely think that

Maartje (22:45)
Yeah.

Mm.

Sam (23:04)
It almost had to be that way because so many of these people lost their whole family or most of their village or whatever, and it just would not have been humanly possible to maintain their own rye fields and keep up with all their own livestock and everything when just everyone who used to help you with that is gone.

Maartje (23:09)
Mm.

Were the Soviets any better to the people of Belarus than say the Polish? I’m guessing they would have been, but I don’t actually know.

Sam (23:32)
Yeah, I think it’s a different situation because when Polish people were in charge of the area that’s today known as Belarus, there was like an an aristocratic landowning class, which is that’s what the Polish were, and the Belarusians were effectively serfs who worked the land. and then after the war it was more like collectivization. People worked on these

Maartje (23:48)
Yeah.

Sam (23:54)
grouped farms or they worked in these factories or they you know, they had more of an opportunity to, I guess change their station in life a little bit.

Maartje (24:03)
Which is a wild thing to think about because they would be changing it from having absolutely nothing to having the bare minimum, probably. That’s pretty such a weird thing to think about.

Sam (24:14)
Yeah, I i I think it’s difficult too because this country was very agricultural. Most people lived in remote rural areas and small villages. you know, these were people who were still plowing their fields with with animals. They they didn’t have machinery, they were this is a very I don’t know a society that had not changed over much in the past few hundred years at this point.

Maartje (24:38)
It was probably what we would call a simple life here. Like if we would call it a simple life. It was for them it was probably just all they knew. But for us we would say, these people live a simple life.

Sam (24:50)
Yeah. I’ll just read this passage from the book when Flyora and Glasha go to his village and he goes to where his house was and the gate in probably is still standing and the gate is open and so I’ll just read you this passage. Glasha walked softly towards the stove, but I still did not enter the wide open gate. Whose hand had opened it? and what had happened afterwards. Little tongues of flames shot up around Glasha’s feet, and she left behind her glowing red footprints. Smoldering embers clung to the toe of her boot, sending out a shower of sparks, just as her boots had done that time in the clearing. What was I thinking about? My thoughts kept on slipping away from me to one side, ignoring what was most frightening, resolutely and convincingly to make myself believe it as well and I told Glasha that everyone had run away, that they were all in the forest. Glasha bent over and was examining something. I tore myself away from the gate and ran over there, scared that I was running. I know only too well what white coals mean. For an instant it seemed to me that they were white like burnt bones. No, it was the reflection from the stove, our stove whitened by my mother’s hands, and the smell was that of charred potatoes and apples, only of potatoes and apples They have fled into the forest. Tomorrow I would find them. I would see them the next day.

Maartje (26:07)
my god, yeah, I know, I can totally I can actually imagine what there must have been like a little bit from their writing. It’s good writing. You can totally understand a child not wanting to look at the things that will tell him that his parents are dead and his family’s gone. Even though he knows, but his brain is trying to mask it from him and they did a good job of translating that into the movie, I think.

Sam (26:31)
Yeah, yeah, just so difficult to take in that everything that you knew is gone.

Maartje (26:37)
Yeah. Yeah. I am glad that they don’t show you specifically his family in the pile of corpses that we see. I’m really glad that there’s no emphasis on that. It’s horrible enough to just see it as a collective and I think if they had chosen to like show his mother, I guess, and his sisters, it would have been too much to bear.

Sam (27:00)
Yeah, and I I don’t think you need to see it to have the horror of it sink in.

Maartje (27:06)
No, I guess I guess we as an audience know immediately when there’s flies all around the house you just know that okay they are gone and they’ve not left voluntarily. It’s just some horrifying shit has gone down in this house.

Sam (27:22)
That’s the thing, the the silence and emptiness of the village is scary enough in its own right.

Maartje (27:28)
Yeah.

Rubezh, played by Vladas Bagdonas, he’s one of the partisans on the island agrees to take Flyora with him and two other men on a mission to find some food. He’s kind of a tough looking guy who knows what he’s doing. And they drag along a creepy dummy of a Nazi that they put together from like a bunch of clay and other stuff and it’s terrifying. they drag it along just to mess with the Germans. In a way that seems really not very handy to me.

Sam (27:58)
Yeah, it’s definitely Flyora vibes it very frightening to look at this uncanny valley dummy’s face.

Maartje (28:04)
Yeah, I think what they do really well is they make it look like a skeleton being built up into an even more mangled looking thing that I think would wouldn’t be unlike a burnt body. Like it kind of gives me the shivers as well.

Sam (28:23)
Yeah. there’s a part here where originally Rubezh is not going to take Flyora on the mission, but he happens to have a rifle. So they try and take his rifle from him and he refuses to let it go. And it really reminded me of the scene in the beginning where he’s digging up bodies on the beach so he can take one of their rifles and he’s trying to pull this rifle out of the sand and it’s and it’s stuck and he’s like and he’s like really trying to pull it out.

And it really reminded me of that in this moment and just all the symbolism of like he’s already dead effectively, you know? And yeah, I just I can’t I can’t say enough how good the the filmmaking is in this movie. And this this part too is where you get these really loud insect noises and it’s very unsettling.

Maartje (28:56)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And in in in the way the movie’s made, it’s not unlike not unlike the pianist, but is obviously much more modern, but it’s it’s got a similar sense of being on this current that you can’t get off of for this main character. He’s also just being dragged from place to place in a way that’s not really up to him. And I think it’s really compelling to tell a story in that way.

Sam (29:36)
The warehouse where the food is ends up being guarded and the Germans are not willing to give up their food, so our guys have to retreat, and as they’re retreating, the two other members of their raiding party are killed. Rubezh and Flyora steal a cow from a collaborator farmer, but the Germans can see the white shape of the cow in the dark and they fire at them with a machine gun. Rubezh ends up being killed along with the cow.

Maartje (30:01)
I was more sad about the poor cow than I was about Rubezh. I’m sorry, it was just so sad I was like god, no not the cow.

Sam (30:09)
Yeah. In the book, it’s just Flyora feels absolutely terrible because he’s trying to catch this cow in the woods, but he can’t catch the cow, and then the cow ends up getting shot. And then he tries to retreat to the safety of the island and he’s almost there. And then he realizes I can’t go back empty-handed. I didn’t go and get the food I was supposed to get. And you know, never mind the fact that everyone else in his little raiding party has been killed and he’s like a fifteen-year-old boy and he has no idea what to do.

But he has he turns around and he’s like, Well, I guess I better go back and try and get some food for everybody. it’s just brutal.

Maartje (30:42)
He’s had no luck either, has he? It’s like disappointment after disappointment. And I say disappointment when I obviously mean devastation after devastation.

Sam (30:52)
Yeah.

Maartje (30:53)
attempts to steal a horse from a second farmer that he runs into, but then the Germans start arriving. So he must hide his partisan jacket and his rifle and pretend to be a villager in Break village is where they are at this point. And this is also I think where some of the eyewitness regards are from.

And I will warn you going forward it’s not a good time.

Sam (31:18)
Yeah. So the Germans got really good at surrounding a village so that by the time you realized that they were there, there was no way out. And then they would go around to all of the houses and they would tell people, You have to come into town, we’re having a meeting, and you have to bring your kids and bring your paperwork, your passport, everything like that. And then people would go into the center of town and of course it was not a meeting. it was a a ruse to round people up with minimum panic so that the Germans could exterminate them all. and that’s what we’re going to see very shortly in this film.

Maartje (31:52)
They make real good use of fog In this scene to show you the Germans kind of surrounding the village and you have no idea where the frick they are because it’s so misty and foggy and it’s terrifying and you just already know that something similar that has happened to Flyora’s village is going to happen to this village. It’s bad.

Sam (32:15)
Yes. So Flyora drifts along with the villagers as they’re herded toward a wooden church. Despite his attempts to warn them of what will happen, he ends up barricaded in the church with them. The soldiers tell the trapped villagers that there is only one escape. They can leave the church if they leave the children behind. most people don’t want to do that. Flyora takes the opportunity to jump out the window.

Soon the church is in flames and Flyora is left behind as the Germans leave town. and this was a pretty common thing for the Germans to do. They would put everybody in a building. this whole thing where, you know, you can leave if you leave the kids behind. That came from eyewitness accounts. That did happen. and it was this whole thing where the Germans were really focused on. removing the possibility of the non-Germanic peoples of Belarus having a future. So there’s a a part in the movie where these Germans jokingly leave this old woman alive and they make some crack about the Soviet Union can use her to repopulate or something like that. And this was also a thing that happened according to eyewitness accounts. They would sometimes leave old people alive because they thought it was just such a great joke that you know, these old people would s would soon die and there wouldn’t be any children left to carry on this culture.

Maartje (33:31)
Yeah, this scene in which the Germans burn all these people and are so freaking blasé about it is so scary. They’re like it’s happening as though it’s the most common thing in the world. They they don’t even blink twice. They just do it and then go on with their business as the people burn and scream. It’s absolutely horrifying.

Sam (33:54)
Yeah. And this is very much part of a systematic program by the Germans. They had decided that, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but the Germans had this whole thing, this program of of Lebensraum or living space, and so they wanted to expand into all these countries where there were already people living and replace those people with Aryan peoples. And so their goal was We have to get rid of seventy five percent of the Belarusian population. and we’re gonna resettle them, but it would be easier to resettle them if there were a lot fewer of them. So this was definitely a systematic program of extermination. And Belarus was one of the places where this policy was carried out to complete fruition. The Germans exterminated and destroyed entire villages, and this would have been the ultimate result if They had been allowed to take over more countries if they’d been allowed to consolidate their power. And I have a quote from Himmler here where he said, Our task is not to Germanize the East in the old sense, that is, to inculcate the German language and German laws, but to see to it that only people with true German blood live in the East. So they really were not, you know, in interior Nazi circles, they were really making no secret of the fact that we’re trying to kill as many people as possible. because quite simply we want this land and the the fact that there’s people already living on it is annoying to us.

Maartje (35:12)
they were particularly successful, I wanna say, in Belarus, the Germans, because around a quarter to a third of all Belarusians were massacred during the war. And it’s absolutely unimaginable I don’t remember how many that makes, but too many, first of all. And it’s just a horrible thing because they didn’t discriminate between men, women or children. Everyone had to go. And as you already said, the children were the future of the race, so they this officer that says it in a film that tells the women they can leave if they leave the children behind. Later also says that he did in fact say it and he also admits to saying it and feeling the way he feels about the children being the future of this race and therefore they must be exterminated. And it’s impossible to think about that there’s actually people who feel this way about other people.

Sam (36:12)
Yeah, the scene in the movie is Difficult to describe, honestly. there’s almost like a party circus atmosphere. The Germans are listening to this loud music while they’re killing off civilians, children. it’s especially nightmarish. I mean, I think they did a a very effective job of depicting just how ghastly that was without even showing inordinate amounts of bloodshed, without showing us you know, close ups of people dying. You really get a sense for how awful and horrific this was, without having to go there, without having to make it, you know, hyper violent. And I think like really hats off to to the director on that one.

Maartje (36:51)
I think it’s actually more effective this way by not showing it. You can hear it though, like they don’t shy away from having terrible terrible audio while the Germans were celebrating a great deed. I can imagine this being in people’s nightmares for the people that survived. I don’t think they were ever going to get Away from the sound of people dying in a burn while being on fire I can’t even think about it without feeling slightly sick to my stomach.

Sam (37:22)
Yeah, and there were of course a lot of people that left this area or these areas after the war. but there were also a fair number of people who remained, people who lived in the same villages they lived in all their lives and they had seen all of their family and friends and neighbors be exterminated, but they didn’t they didn’t want to leave. That was their home and they stayed there.

Maartje (37:42)
Yeah, I I reckon not all of them had the means to even leave because they had nothing, right? the stuff they did have was taken away from them in huge amounts. And like we said, it’s a fairly simple life so you don’t have any extra money laying around to move yourself, even if you wanted to. And

Sam (38:03)
actually, there was a couple of different accounts in the Adamovich book that I read of the Soviet, which was like the local, you know, administration, the local government, would try and get old people to leave if they were living in like you know, if you have a c a couple of old people living in a couple of cottages in the middle of nowhere, it’s not ideal, right? And so The Soviets would try and get those old people to leave. There’s even one story that I read where they offered to pay the son of one of the old women to come back and persuade his mother to move into like a home that they were going to build for her that had all these modern conveniences and she didn’t want to go. and there was quite a few people after the war who ended up in housing that was built for them by the collective. And so there were a lot of elements of communist society that people you know did actually find helpful after the war that did help people to rebuild their lives.

Maartje (38:57)
Wild. I don’t know how as a people you come back from what happened to the Belarusians. It’s just so I don’t wanna know how much trauma there still is today just from having lived through that as a people.

Sam (39:12)
Yeah, I was looking at there are memorials of course across Belarus to these vanished villages. you can look at them and a lot of them will have the names of the victims carved on them and you’ll see twenty of the same last name and you’re like, that’s a whole bloodline. Like that is a whole group of people that are gone.

Maartje (39:30)
Gone, yeah.

Yeah. Insane. You have something to read, I see?

Sam (39:36)
Yeah, I’m gonna read from I’m from the Fiery Village. This is the book where Adamovich undertook this project, which I’m so grateful that he did. It’s such an odd thing because you know, he traveled around Belarus with his co-writers for a number of years. I’m not sure exactly how long it took them, but it was definitely like a three or four-year project. And He went into remote areas and he would ask people about their memories of what had happened. And then if they mentioned someone else, he would say, where does that person live now? And they would tell him, and then he would go and speak with that person. And so in that way he got a lot of almost like corroborating evidence. And he would also pull German reports, because the Germans were very, you know, bureaucratic. They would report when they exterminated a village, we killed this many people, this is how many cartridges we used up. etc. etc. And so he was able to pull all this evidence and kind of put it together. and if he had not gone around and done that, if he had not gone around in the early 70s and spoken to a lot of these people who at the time were aging, of course, then we just simply wouldn’t have any of these recollections today. And the fact that this has been translated into English is another extraordinary thing. Like, how is it that this came into my hands? You know, the words of A woman who lived in Belarus in nineteen forty-three, and I’m able to read about her experiences. Like it’s just incredible. and so I I totally recommend going on the internet archive and checking this out. but I I pulled a little passage here, and Adamovich says, You sense that some of them have told their tale many times to their neighbors, perhaps to their children, told their new children about their brothers and sisters who were killed.

But now some strangers have come from far away with various equipment and asked them to relate everything in as much detail as possible, and their neighbors are also there listening to what they’ve heard many times already, or even seen with their own eyes, filling in certain details or reminding the tellers of others. And it happens then that another section of memory comes into play, the memory of those sleepless nights when the narrator saw and remembered it all over and over again, down to the last detail.

How her neighbor, seeing that the Germans had surrounded the village and hearing the cry, They’ll kill us too, suddenly said to her eight year old son, Sonny, Sonny, what did you put those rubber boots on for? Your little legs will burn for a very long time in rubber boots. Or how some people sat hiding in a field of rye while the killers ran around looking for them, their helmets ringing against the ears of grain. Or how, after shooting the inhabitants of the neighboring village, the members of an execution squad took shelter from the rain and Under the eaves along two walls of a house in which people were hiding, and could hear the Germans’ helmets banging hard against the walls. Or what those whom the bullets had spared thought, lying among the dead and how afraid they were. The snow isn’t melting on those who were killed, but on me it is, they’ll notice. Or I shivered with cold and thought they’ll see it. Again and again their memory keeps bringing up from its depths, things that struck the narrators themselves with their unexpectedness and They’re awful incongruity with all that was going on.

Maartje (42:34)
It’s really impressive that it’s also it’s also beautiful writing from him. So it’s really poignant to read his description of things and then hearing the words of the people obviously translate it. But it’s really effective. I will put a link to the book on the Internet Archive on the website.

Flyora soon stumbles across where the partisans, including Kosach, have ambushed the very Germans he’d just witnessed commit a mass murder. This happens quite quickly in the movie. Kinda confused me for a second or two. But the polizei members of the murder crew, who are local collaborators, try to claim it was all the fault of the German members, or they’re like I was only a bystander, I didn’t do anything. And one of the Nazis An unnamed Oberstrom Fuhrer played by Jüri Lumiste openly admits that he gave the orders and says that he doesn’t believe their country deserves to have future. This this is the same guy who told the women that if they left their children behind, they were free to go.

Sam (43:41)
the eyewitness accounts I read are run through with mentions of these polizei and a lot of them were Belarusian or Ukrainian or Russian. So these were people who were if not local, then at least you know, from the general area. And they would lead the Germans into a town and if they had family members there, they would try and, you know, obviously save their own family members from being killed, type of thing. but there was also situations where it really was for the Germans a marriage of convenience. Like the second that they were finished making use of these people sometimes they would just simply kill them. it’s interesting to think about the fact that, on the one hand you know what Nazis are like, but on the other hand you’re like

Maartje (44:06)
Mm,

Sam (44:22)
What motivates a person to turn on their neighbors and to work with the Germans to exterminate their fellow countrymen?

Maartje (44:26)
Mm.

Yeah. Survival, survival of your family. It doesn’t make it right, but the thing is that I can sort of understand. I mean, I hope if the occasion ever came that I would not be the one to do it to save my own skin. But at the same time, survival is a thing that motivates people in weird ways. So It makes it all the more scary to me that it could literally be anyone that you know that is could be a nice person but still decide to you know, turn you into the Germans. Good luck with that.

Sam (45:02)
Yeah, and I also think that for a lot of these guys it was politically motivated. Like there was a not insignificant number of these guys who wanted to stamp out Bolshevism. You know, they were anti communist. And so they were like, Well, if we fight on the side of the Germans, at least after the war, we don’t have to be a part of the Soviet Union, you know?

Maartje (45:24)
you’re totally right. I think stuff like that still happens today a lot, where people don’t necessarily agree with all the policies and thoughts and stuff, but they agree with enough that it makes them choose that side, even though they do horrible things and are horrible to other human beings. But they agree with a portion of it that’s big enough for them to motivate them to go and support them. So we’ll see it again and again even in in the current day, I think.

Sam (45:56)
Yeah.

Kosach orders the polizei to kill their German compatriots. he’s basically like, these guys gave the orders, you have nothing to do with them, well then you can murder them. hands him a canister of gasoline so he can set them on fire. The character Gaisel, played by Evgeniy Tilicheev, he’s the collaborator who’s been translating all this time and saying like yeah, it wasn’t me, they made us do it kind of thing.

He readily agrees to dump petrol on the Germans, but the angry villagers shoot all of the Nazis before he can set the blaze.

Maartje (46:27)
I got a weird kick out of the fact that the Nazis for once did seem kind of afraid. Except for the one dick who was like, Yeah no, I I did say that to the women that they can leave their children and he didn’t seem too afraid, but everyone else seemed kind of like, shit, we’ve done an oopsie, we’ve to get out of here now.

Sam (46:49)
Yeah. I think the the the way that you see all of their bodies slumped over, all of the life and agency and ability to commit atrocities is gone and they’re just dead, lifeless, harmless bodies. it almost reminded me of when you saw the dead villagers earlier in the movie. it’s just, you know, corpses on corpses on corpses.

The fact that these villagers kill these Nazis, doesn’t make our main character any less traumatized, you know, it just ends up subjecting him to more violence.

Maartje (47:18)
I was going to say the exact same thing about those bodies. That’s funny. and not unlike the the gun being set on from Flyora. There’s some mirrored images from different sides the entire time in the movie. I wonder if there’s more that we just haven’t noticed yet. But it’s very effective to kind of push the message home of the film. It’s very good.

Sam (47:39)
the Nazis too, like these bodies are the first ones that we really see close up and we really see the violence that has been done to them. Whereas the director gives us some distance and maybe accords some respect to the dead villagers that we aren’t being subjected to their their ravaged bodies close up, you know?

Maartje (47:59)
Indeed, although and we’re about to get to it, but we do get some images of actual villagers that are mutilated and burned and dead in a minute that aren’t actually movie people but actual people.

Flyora spots a painting of Hitler in a puddle. they’re kind of moving away at this point, the partisans are moving on. But he is seized by anger and grief and shoots at the painting of Hitler. That’s weirdly half submerged in water and it looks like he’s being decapitated in some way, which I thought was an interesting picture to look at.

But as he shoots at it, we see footage of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis playing in reverse. He goes all the way back to Hitler as a baby, at which point Flyora is no longer able to keep shooting the painting. And that’s when he heads off after the remainder of the partisans back into the woods and we follow them for a good maybe two minutes as they just walk around in the woods.

Sam (48:58)
Yeah, there’s really something about that whole segment where we’re seeing the rise of the Nazis in reverse where buildings are going from being destroyed to being whole again and people are going from being killed to being alive again and yeah, I guess just kind of poignant that no matter what he does, there will be no turning back the clock.

You know, in in as much as it’s necessary to use violence to prevent this from happening any further, all of the violence in the world is not going to, you know, bring his family back and bring back the the peacefulness of his village.

Maartje (49:33)
No, and it’s also maybe a reminder of the fact that Hitler two was once a young boy and just a baby and innocent maybe at some point. And I wonder if Flyora’s like because he’s violently shooting at this painting. If he realizes that he doesn’t want to become the monster and that’s why he stops shooting it. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into it, but there’s a bunch of things he can read into this scene and it’s a a really different ending to any movie I’ve ever I’ve never seen it done like this and it kind of it’s like a war in a flash. and evil in a flesh, but also evil before it was evil. So it just made me think a lot.

Sam (50:15)
Yeah, and I almost think too that it’s this sets him and the partisans, I suppose, by extension, apart from Hitler and the Nazis, because even though he knows that that baby is little Hitler, he still can’t bring himself to kill a child. Whereas for the Nazis the whole thing is to try and exterminate as many Belarusian children as they can.

Maartje (50:35)
Exactly, yeah, that’s exactly what I was trying to very properly express a minute ago, so thanks.

Sam (50:41)
I have a a quote from the director here, Elem Klimov. He said I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my screenplay co author, the writer Ales Adamovich, but he replied, Let them not watch it then. This is something we must leave after us.

As evidence of war and as a plea for peace.

Maartje (51:02)
Amen. And I think people should watch it. It it’s horrifying, but I think it’s good to remind ourselves that stuff like this happened and that we’re not out of the woods yet that stuff like this could happen again and we should be very aware of that and that we should try whatever is in our power to stop it from happening again and the movie’s a good reminder for sure that atrocities happen and that they’re almost unexpected in a way because it’s so impossible to imagine those kind of horrors and we almost don’t see them coming.

Sam (51:40)
We get an end card that says six hundred and twenty-eight Belarusian villages were destroyed along with all their inhabitants. And I would note that this only includes villages that were fully destroyed and all the inhabitants were exterminated. Thousands more villages were destroyed or partly destroyed, but left survivors. Like we’re talking almost 5,000 villages, I think. And then there were more villages on top of that where the villages were raised to the ground, but By and large, most of the population survived. you can see pictures that Adamovich included in his book, or you can go and look online at particularly the the Khatyn village memorial. They still have all of the chimneys that are there from the houses that burned down, and they have bells attached to them so that when the wind goes by.

You can hear bells from all the houses where people used to live. and it’s just quite a thing to look at effectively a huge meadow where you know that a hundred or two hundred people used to live and all trace of them is gone forever.

Maartje (52:40)
It’s criminal to think about that. I don’t wanna think about it for too long. It just makes me depressed with the human race.

We have some additional notes.

Sam (52:59)
we should talk about the village of Khatyn. This is the name of Adamovich’s book that Come and See is based on. and Khatyn is the name of one of these villages that was razed to the ground and all the inhabitants were killed. And it’s become a symbol for all the lost villages of Belarus. So, like I said, they have quite a substantial memorial there that people can go and visit. A hundred and forty nine people were murdered, including seventy-five children. this has effectively become this very symbolic place. They have they call it a cemetery of villages. And so they have a cemetery and it’s full of markings for each of the lost villages of Belarus, and it’s the well at the time of the printing of the book anyway, it was the only cemetery of villages in the world. And so there were quite a lot of these villages.

That were raised to the ground and most of the inhabitants were killed and people did return and build the village up again. But there’s also quite a substantial number where simply nobody ever came back, and there are no villages there today, and they are just an empty spot where there used to be a map dot. And Katyn in particular, it’s interesting that it was chosen as. this symbolic village because Adamovic completed his work in the postwar Soviet Union, so there’s politics involved here, obviously. and in the post war period, there was a real effort by the government to play up the role of the Belarusian partisans during World War II. they called Belarus, you know, the nation of partisans and These were people who very proudly fought for their country, etc. And this is true, but the efforts of these partisans were used for propaganda purposes quite a lot. And in this case, we have the village of Khatyn in Belarus, which is this huge, you know, symbolic village. However, Soviet forces executed twenty-two thousand Polish military police officers and intelligentsia in the spring of nineteen forty in what is known as the Katyn massacre.

Maartje (54:36)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (54:53)
And this was considered a war crime, but the Soviet government denied all wrongdoing until 1990 and they blamed the Nazis for the murders. So there’s some discussion about whether or not the Soviets chose the village of Khatyn in Belarus as the symbol of all the burned villages to try and muddy the waters about their own atrocities in this other Katyn massacre.

Maartje (55:01)
Huh.

I mean I wouldn’t put it past them to have that in in their heads. Like Jesus Christ, leave the Polish people alone.

Sam (55:20)
so yeah, there’s there’s a lot of mass murdering going on during World War Two

Maartje (55:24)
the Polish home army was also pretty much a partisan army. So they weren’t all that different. And the Polish people were suppressed for years and years and years, even after the war by the Soviets. it almost feels super hypocritical to to choose the village of Khatyn

Sam (55:44)
Yeah, and what I always think is, you know, one of those little ironic notes of history is that the the people who discovered the Katyn massacre where the Soviets murdered all of these Polish people, the Nazis found the the burial place where all these Polish people had been killed in nineteen forty three, and they were like,

Maartje (55:57)
Mm.

Sam (56:05)
Looks like someone did some mass murder, shock, horror. And the Soviets of course were like, We didn’t do that, you guys did that and you’re trying to put that on us but we know now, of course, that yes, it was the Soviets that did it.

Maartje (56:16)
I think there is a movie called Katyn about the Katyn Massacre which I think we should watch just to come full circle on this whole Katyn business. But yes, my god, what a terrible terrible story on all sides even closing with this Katyn massacre message.

Sam (56:27)
Yeah.

Maartje (56:36)
We do not have any good vibes for you today, I guess, guys. It’s all just horrible.

Sam (56:40)
Yeah, it’s not great.

Maartje (56:41)
I guess we have to rate this movie, but before we rate the movie I would like to remind you that you can share this episode with a friend.

Sam (56:50)
Every time you share this episode with a friend, we come across a really good anti war movie that we weren’t expecting.

Maartje (56:56)
Excellent. That’s a really good one. I’d like to come across some more. I would like for not all of them to be this intense that, you know, do share with a friend. you can also, of course, follow us wherever you get your podcast. Before I forget.

Let’s rate this movie. We’re rating it secondhand rifles out of ten. I’ll go first. I have some thoughts. I will rate this movie eight and a half secondhand rifles out of ten. It’s just a really frickin’ good movie. The acting is good, the direction is good. The way it’s kind of artsy in a really deliberate way.

Sam (57:11)
Yeah.

Maartje (57:31)
that makes it really successful in showing you horror without actually showing you horror is great and I just think for how much I was not looking forward to watching it, I was really engaged and surprised by it. I didn’t look at my phone once, I just was g glued to the screen, glued to the main actor’s eyes specifically in this movie. It’s really good. I would Very much recommend you watch this. How about you?

Sam (58:00)
Yeah, I’m gonna rate it. I’ll give it an eight point seven secondhand rifles out of ten. It’s a great film. I know a lot of people mentioned this to us in passing, and it took us a little while to get around to it. not unlike the fact that it took the filmmakers almost ten years to get this movie made, if I recall correctly, for political reasons, as you can imagine, in the late stages of the Soviet Union. but I think it’s this really nice intersection of an important story that more people should know about and a well made film. And I love when that happens. And I do feel like this is one of those movies where they did film it specifically not as a war movie, you know? It’s kind of artsy, but it’s more a drama that just happens to be set against the background of this war. And it’s really phenomenal. it’s one of those ones that you think about it afterwards and you’re like, you know, this part and this part and that kind of thing, and the the pieces fall together, and it just leaves you you certainly don’t feel great at the end, and I think that’s kind of the hallmark of all good anti-war movies. You don’t want to come away thinking that war is glorious or anything like that. but it’s not one of those watching experiences that leaves you depressed. It just kind of leaves you thoughtful, I think. and yeah, I really I enjoyed it. It was good.

Maartje (59:12)
yeah. Yeah. Agree. Same. are you reading anything?

Sam (59:15)
my god, I’m reading all the things. I am.

Maartje (59:17)
All the things

Sam (59:19)
I am reading Tales from the Haunted South, Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War era by Tia Miles. And it’s a nonfiction book written by a black woman who became interested in this thing that tends to happen a lot, I think, in America, where a lot of the quote unquote most haunted cities in the US happen to be southern cities. And a lot of the ghost stories that people tell relate to this era of of slavery and genocide of indigenous people. You know, there’s this whole like trope of the the Indian burial ground and all that kind of stuff.

And so she became interested in visiting all these places and taking all these ghost tours in Savannah, Georgia, and in New Orleans and all these places and kind of digging into it a little bit deeper and trying to analyze why America as a culture is so interested in this kind of stuff. And I’m enjoying it.

Maartje (1:00:17)
That sounds really interesting. Anything else? You said you were reading all the things.

Sam (1:00:21)
I I’ll talk about the other ones next week if I’m still reading them.

Maartje (1:00:25)
Okay. I’m also reading a book. Surprisingly, I just read a book it’s nothing to do with with World War Two, but I do want to recommend it. It’s called The Names. I forgot who it’s by, which is typical for me. But look it up, it’s really good. And I’m currently reading a book called An American Marriage, which is about this black couple. in I don’t know what time we’re in, but he gets falsely accused of a crime that he didn’t commit and it he goes to prison for it and it’s about the lives of these people along with one of their friends as as they navigate what happens to him. And he eventually gets released. I’m not there yet in the book, but I’m enjoying it. It was apparently recommended by Obama as his favorite book of the summer of twenty nineteen. So, I don’t know, that’s a good recommendation to have. I feel like I’m back into the reading game a bit, which I enjoy.

Sam (1:01:26)
Hell yeah, that’s awesome.

Maartje (1:01:27)
I guess that’s it for this week. thank you for listening to yet another Rosie the Reviewer, you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us five stars. You can also follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast. or you can visit our website for more information and we’ll see you next week.

Sam (1:01:45)
Bye.