Come and See - Again

When “soldiers” exterminate children, you know they deserve death. When they are boasting of it, humanity still demands to make it a clean, quick shot. As hard as that may feel.

In 1985, the Soviet director Elem Klimov released his unrivaled masterpiece. “Come and See” was – and is – among the grimmest movies ever made. There were reports of viewers fainting and collapsing. No wonder: Klimov had done the almost impossible. Unlike in war movies merely pretending to be “anti”-war – for instance, the homo-erotically romantic Bildungsroman “Platoon,” the daftly self-satisfied “Saving Private Ryan,” the stodgily patriotic “1917,” or the hyped new bro-movie version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” – Klimov’s film makes war look and sound repulsive, in every shot, every minute, every second.

Set in Belarus (or then, the Soviet Belorussian Republic) during the Second World War, “Come and See” lived up to its apocalyptic title (taken from the Book of Revelation). Its main protagonist is Flor, a teenage Belarusian boy, a partisan Resistance child soldier, who is driven insane with the trauma of what he experiences and sees: the massacre of his own village first (in his absence and maybe due to his joining the Resistance), and then of another one, where he escapes only because the Nazi perpetrators have a sense of “humor.” While almost everyone else burns to death in a barn, they pose with him, holding a gun to his head, but once the picture is done, they drop him like a used prop.

They get even funnier with another survivor: letting a very old woman live (for now; weak and clearly in need of care, she is sure to die of neglect, since her family and neighbors have been incinerated alive), they “joke” that she can still make up for all the losses by bearing more children. That is “witty” to them because they have just offered a deal: Before setting the locked barn alight, they promise to let those adults live who are prepared to let their children burn.

In “Come and See” no one gets away. The civilians are massacred. The partisans who fight against the Nazis prevail in the end, but at horrific cost to body and soul. And the genocidal invaders fall into an ambush and are wiped out. Some of them survive that battle and are taken prisoner by the Resistance fighters. Their reactions are different: Several plead for their lives, blaming others in their unit or simply “war” as such. One Nazi officer, however, makes a point of not asking for mercy. He is so fanatical – and realistic, too – to know that makes no sense. In particular, because he is identified as the German who “offered” parents the “choice” between surviving by abandoning their children or burning alive with them.

Instead, he gives a speech, making sure that the partisans understand every word by asking another German to translate into Russian. Here's what he has to say: He regrets nothing. And the reason why he regrets nothing is that Germany’s enemies – he means whole peoples of course – must die so that Germany can live. The children especially, he explains, must be killed. Because if they live, the “enemy” will grow back again (like a lawn, maybe, in need of constant mowing, to use a popular Israeli simile), and German victory will never be complete. Only total annihilation is good enough for him.

I have often had to think of Klimov’s film recently. For one there’s the “fun” the Germans have with their massacre. It is the same revolting “sense of humor” we see among Israeli troops (and civilians, too): So vile, it gives sadism a bad name, and so arrogant in its shamelessness you constantly wonder if those who make, self-publish, and enjoy these jokes are entirely insane or absolutely evil. Most likely, both. Take for instance, the IDF genocide trooper who thought it witty to have himself filmed knocking on the door of a Palestinian house bombed into a ruin by his fellow killers and “comically” shrugging when no one is there to answer.

And then there is the transparent Israeli obsession with wiping out Gaza’s future. By now, the IDF genocide armada has murdered at least 20,000 Palestinian civilians (the real figure is bound to be higher, with many victims buried under rubble and not yet registered), 70 percent of whom are children and women. In addition, Israeli strategy – never missing out on a chance to be as criminal as it gets – is to devastate vital infrastructure, including communications, water, bakeries, and the health care system – and use a starvation siege to promote death by hunger and disease.

Perverse highlights, such as letting infants starve to death and decompose in an intensive-care ward round off a picture of sick murderousness and callousness that competes with Klimov’s village-burning monsters. Especially since we also have Israeli officers (and again, not only officers, but civilians, too, again and again) openly “justifying” the murder of children, because, in these perpetrators’ view, too, complete “security” by total “victory” requires hitting “the nursery.”

 And those who still won’t see, process, or acknowledge these facts – out of their evil siding with the perpetrators, cowardice, or general, careerist lack of moral spine – they deserve no more arguments, only contempt: This is not “merely” war with “side effects”; it is a deliberately genocidal war, fully within Zionism’s long, indeed essential, tradition of ethnic cleansing and massive lying.

In “Come and See,” at the end of the Nazi officer’s speech, some partisans want to burn the captured genocide perpetrators alive, giving them a taste of what they have done to their victims. They spray them with gasoline and one fighter is already holding a torch. Yet the Resistance – by no means romanticized in “Come and See” – remain human even in the face of genocidal monsters. They do not burn them; they execute them quickly with a salvo from their guns instead.

In interviews, Klimov explained that his film was not only about Nazis and Germans, but about what he called the “Hitler” in all of us that we must “kill”: our very worst potential to enjoy cruelty and applaud it. His partisans resist their inner “Hitler” by doing only the very minimum justice demands. They mete out a quick, merciful death to the mass murderers.