May 2003

Yesterday we went to see The Pianist, starring Adrien Brody.
I'm not at all a fan of war movies like this or like for example Schindler's List. It's not because I can't stand death, or a lot of blood. Even if I hate violence, I like to watch a good action movie at times. And it's completely lopsided, I know, but I used to like Jean Claude Vandamme very much, in his days that he was still off drugs and showing what he was really good at. But that was because I liked the way he performed a martial art: with grace and with showing discipline and style and control of the body.
But these movies, Schindler's List and The Pianist...
I guess I tend to close my eyes for what happened during those awful years. I praise myself extremely lucky that I was born long after the war and to be living now in a relatively safe place.
And yesterday, when we were sitting there and we saw the straight-on executions of innocent people it made me feel sick to my stomach.
The realisation that this had once happened for real is a thing too horrible to think of.
People picked out at random, ordered to lay face down on the ground after which they were shot in the back of the head.
A young woman asking where they were going... BAM... Shot in the head.
How can a human being actually live with the thought that he or she had killed another human being just because he or she asked where they were going. Or even worse: only because he or she was...
And then to imagine that things like that still happen in these days. In these supposedly civilized days.
This little story here looks quite like the Bowling for Columbine story, I know. But it just slaps me in the face every time I come across it.
There was one good thing in the movie, though.
It proves that there are still sincere human beings.
In the end of the movie a German officer helped the Jewish man. Gave him food and kept him hidden instead of killing him on the spot.
That made me feel a bit better. To see that not everything around us is hatred.
There's still hope...