War Has No Good Side

LOUIS MALLE — GAUMONT –

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS — 1987

This film has great qualities and yet it has aged. War is the worst possible situation for any person who believes in freedom and honesty. War is a situation where lying is the norm, betraying the daily necessity to survive, and finding scapegoats is the only way to keep some sanity in a completely insane situation.

In January 1944 in France Lying was on all sides. The Germans were lying about the situation in Ukraine and soon Poland. French radios, Paris, or other stations, were lying about the real situation in Europe five months before D-day. Everyone, on all sides, was ready to betray their sides if the situation was becoming too harsh, and the film shows how the Jews protected by the priests of this school were betrayed by people working in the school, people who took advantage of their situation to steal food and other things and sell them on the black market. A nurse did betray the Jewish boy hiding under some blankets on an infirmary bed. A thief working in the kitchen of the school jumped from blind and mute, as long as he was authorized to go on with some dishonest trafficking, but he became the main traitor when he was summoned to stop and leave.

And that’s what is missing in this poignant film on painful events. There were traitors on the German side too, informers and accomplices for the Resistance, and this is not shown properly. There would never have been thousands of Jewish children saved from deportation if there had not been some people on the German or Pétain’s sides giving some information to the Resistance. They had to be informed of the movements of trains in order to blow them up; of German troops in order to ambush them, etc. That makes this film slightly one-sided, and it weakens its message. We have a war of this type right now in Europe, the second of this amplitude since 1945, in Ukraine, after Yugoslavia and Serbia.

Can we be sure all Russian-speaking people there are supporting the Russian forces? Can we be sure all the Ukrainian-speaking people there are supporting the Ukrainian president? I would say, of course not, and the whole calculation we need to understand such a situation is where the dividing lines run. How long is it going to go on? How long will the west be…