The SorroW And the PIty

There's a 1960s French documentary called "Le Chagrin et La Pitie" (translation above), that I finished seeing on Wednesday night (it's like, 4 hours long). It paints a very realistic, riveting portrait of France during the German occupation. The filmmakers were smart enough to confine their study to the small town of Clermont- Ferrand, and the personal-ness of the events that went down, given the intimate confines of the locale, made for a compelling story.
They also interviewed extensively: from Anthony Eden, the British envoy to the French government, to the son-in-law of Pierre Laval, the President of the collaborationist Vichy regime, to a French aristocrat who joined the Wehrmacht, to two farmers who became influential members of the resistance, to a gay British secret agent who'd been parachuted into occupied France.
What interested me most was the vastness of human emotion captured: bitterness toward the less brave townspeople displayed by grizzled old maquisards (members of the resistance). The convenient memory loss of a woman who'd been outed as having fraternized with Germans, and therefore got her head shaved when the war ended. "Ah, je ne rapelle pas", "I don't remember" was her litany, but her eyes told a different story.
The German soldiers who insisted that their prisoners were well treated and that they had no idea about concentration camps. That fascinated me: this utter whitewash of their roles in the war, and what their leader was trying to do, which would surely have been apparent to anyone with a grain of sense, even if no one in command had actually explained it to you. And the son-in-law of Pierre Laval, who insisted that his beau- pere was a "good man", despite the fact that he'd signed what was essentially the death warrant for thousands of French Jews... The Nazi government would request a quota and Pierre Laval and the French Head of State, Marechal Petain, would comply, excusing themselves by saying that those lives consigned to Buchenwald, Aushwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, were a small price to pay for survival of thousands of others.
But can we truly be mad at them, these people who made what in retrospect were horrific choices? We all imagine that were the occasion to arise, where we were called upon to make a life or death decision to help, we'd do so unhesitatingly. But in the crux of such a moment, facing your own possible death, what would really happen? Would we morph into the heroes we imagine ourselves to be?
I am obsessed with the Holocaust and World War II these days. I have been reading and watching everything I can on those subjects: Hitler, Goebbels, Roosevelt, Churchill. Perhaps in the middle of my own... don't want to use such a strong word as hell, but very nearly,in these past several months, I want to understand betrayal. I want to comprehend how seemingly decent people can act in evil ways, without a qualm. How some people can speak, knowing as they speak it's all lies.
And most of all, I want to know how to survive it all.

One of the most memorable scenes for me in "Schindler's List", which I have seen at least 6 times, is the one at the very end, where the actors escort their real life counterparts out into the sunshine. I always cry at this point, because each character had suffered so and it was a miracle they'd lived through it all. Then the clincher would be this mass of people walking over a hill.
The descendants of all the Jews Mr. Schindler had saved. His legacy.
The realization that there was a hell-for-leather attempt at total extermination, but this one man, aided by the tenacious lust for life employed to its utmost strength by one thousand souls, made sure that a significant pocket survived and in time, grew.

Always at that point, a tiny spark is lit within me...that perhaps it is possible to endure, after all.