Film, 1945 -- The Importance of Confronting History

Refugees, fear, guilt and mistrust, heavily colored by bigotry and nationalism. This is what I see when I read about Hungary today, lead by virulent nationalist Victor Orban and the ugly blocking of refugees fleeing Syria. It's a story with deep roots that I can relate to personally. My grandparents, Aladár and Regina Reich fled Hungary in 1920 with the ascendance of Miklós Horthy and the rise of ultranationalist anti-Semitism. Horthy was an early fascist and allied with Germany in 1938. The few of my relatives that migrated here, though they were labeled “enemy aliens,” survived. Most of the rest of my family died in the Auschwitz death camp, with the exception of three individuals.

When the war ended and the Soviets liberated the camps, two of my relatives, a great aunt and a cousin, walked back from Auschwitz to their village in Hungary. There they were met with hatred and could find no refuge or home to return to. They subsequently married to preserve the lineage and migrated to Palestine.

I was reminded of this recently in watching a movie called 1945. This film by director Ferenc Török, shot in black and white, takes place in s rural Hungarian town in the summer of 1945. The war as ended and we see the presence of occupying Soviet soldiers, though not in a threatening way. Villagers seem to accept the inevitable and look forward to a different kind of less hierarchical life in a socialist system, “as long as you are Hungarian” says the towns dominant and bullying citizen, István (Péter Rudolf) upon the arrival of two orthodox Jews. These two, a father and son arrive at the local train station with a mysterious cargo. Their arrival sets off a chain of events rooted in guilt, fear of reprisal and anger.

As the film continues we see people living in a nice home, still decorated with Jewish décor including a menorah (candelabra) but angrily declaring that this now, along with a connected pharmacy business, legally belongs to them. We come to learn that the bullying “Istvan” pushed another of the townsfolk into publicly denouncing and turning over a local Jewish family to the nazis. We further learn of a web of complicity which includes much of the village, including the local priest. Only one character has any remorse – too much for him to bear even as his wife hides stolen valuables just in case her ownership is challenged by returning victims.

This is not a story about Jews and only incidentally about Hungary. It is a story about the psychology of living with complicity in crimes against humanity. It is a story of displacement. An irony is that the holocaust victims who, like my relatives, resettled in Palestine repeated the same crime of theft and displacement. Some have recalled feeling a sick deja vu entering the newly taken homes of Palestinians chased out, finding food still on the tables just as in the homes of displaced Jews in Europe. War is a big driver of brutal displacement and theft but not the only one. Corrupt economics like the housing bubble pre-2008 with “underwater” mortgages displaced many from their homes, in some cases to the streets while other claimed that property.

Nationalism is a virulent social mental disorder purposely driven by self-serving corrupt leaders. They use scapegoating, fear and hyper-patriotism to distract the public from their own crimes and to build their own power. This inevitably leads to sociopathic, often violent behavior, massive human rights abuses and genocide. We've seen this repeatedly in Europe, African countries like Rwanda and Sudan and in Asian countries like India, Indonesia and Burma. We are seeing the rise of this toxic phenomenon in our own country with the roundups and displacement of immigrants, the rise of hateful tribalized politics, racism, and the corrupt extremism embodied by Trump and his cabal of corporate thieves. As in other places where fascism has taken root, we have partisan media driving a bigoted, war-worshipping nationalist perspective with libelous hate speech and dangerous, paranoiac misinformation.

One thing that struck me in the film was that very few in the town ever felt any remorse for their participation in the horror of genocide. This remains true in places like Hungary, Croatia and elsewhere where such crimes are not confronted. Germany is a better society today for having faced and examined its history and for having brought some of the worst perpetrators to justice. Hungary is not. And then there is our own country. We Americans have failed to adequately confront and learn from our own history of massive violence, displacement and genocide of Native Americans. We have yet to adequately confront the history of slavery and continuing institutional racism toward African Americans. Few Americans even know about the brutal military coups, dictatorships, genocides and crimes our country has inflicted -- and continues to inflict on countries around the world. We cannot begin to change our behavior or the sick psychology of empire unless we face up our our crimes and our complicity. Like the Hungarian villagers, too few of us feel any remorse. Thus history repeats itself.