This morning
I watched 1945: A Savage Peace, a BBC documentary on what happened to the ethnic German civilians
living in Eastern Europe immediately after the war.
A brutal
film.
I knew that
they suffered, that the Russians raped and killed many as they moved west, but
I had no idea about how the Poles and Czechs took vengeance on these German
civilians.
Some of the
documentary footage of Czechs shooting and hanging German civilians is very
disturbing.
Also the
interviews with the German children who survived this brutality are hard to
listen too.
My only
complaint is that there is too little made of the German atrocities committed
during the war that inspired this revenge. That seems forgotten, and I wonder if this is simply another way of changing how the world sees the Germans and the war.
Overall,
the film tells me once again that war is shit.
The film is
available on Netflix.
I recommend
it.
Here's a
link to a Daily Telegraph article about the documentary. Just click here: Link.
Thank you for your blog. I, too, am writing a novel (slowly) that is loosely based on my family's experiences before and during the war. My family were taken from Ukraine to Germany as Ostarbeiter and, in their recent history, had also been Jewish, although they identified as Russian Orthodox. I look forward to reading more of your work as I continue with mine.
ReplyDelete