Europa Europa

 Just took an online, timed test on the movie Europa Europa. Wow, powerful and disturbing. Not for the squeamish. It's a true story I shall never forget it. Here's what I wrote in 60 minutes.

   Jews lived throughout Europe surrounded by different ethnic groups, and those with various political and religious beliefs and agendas.  The movie Europa Europa shows a microcosm of this in the story of Solomon Perel, a young German Jew during the Second World War.  The filmmaker, Agnieska Holland, seems to show the Jews being buffeted from one place to another by all these various "outside" forces, most of which having nothing to do with the Jews daily practice of belief and existence.  The movie begins with a sweet scene of Solomon's mother and sister preparing for his bar mitzvah that was to take place later that night.  They are preparing the house while laughing and enjoying a carefree, innocent moment.  Unknown to them, that night, the “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht), would destroy that innocence, and Solomon's sister's life.  And it marked a foreshadowing of darker days to come.  

    Solomon embarks on a hero's journey of self discovery of identity and purpose.  By odd incidents of chance and luck, he is buffeted from one unfamiliar place and experience to another.  He experiences first hand the ideologies of the forces that moved the events of World War II.  But not only does he witness them, they begin to change him.  While living among the communists in the Soviet union, he becomes enamored with a pretty female leader and some of her words such as, "communism is beautify", while watching candy shower down upon the children of the orphanage.  He even repeats her words, "religion is opium for the masses", with conviction later in the movie.  But these lessons got harder and more difficult for him to embrace as time went on, such as the time he was living as a German soldier.  He and his comrades were looking at murdered Russian children, hanging by their necks, while one said with great disgust, "look at the animals, you must learn to hate!"  These could have been his friends from the orphanage, and now he was to hate and kill them.  For the first time Perel asks himself, "who was my friend, who was my enemy?  How could they be kind to me and at the same time kill others so horribly?  What set us apart?  A simple foreskin?"

    His next leg of the journey was to live as a Hitler Youth masquerading not just as a non Jew but an elite "Aryan" German.  He learns there, that the students have complete freedom and equal opportunities regardless of whether they are rich or poor.  Yet at the same time Perel is taking frequent trips through the Jewish ghetto searching for his family.  What a stark opposition of "opportunities" he is experiencing.  Ironically, at the end of the movie he is nearly shot at point blank range by a liberated concentration camp survivor, only to be saved at the last moment by his brother who was also recently liberated.  

    What has he learned from his journey, which ultimately takes him to the newly established Jewish land in Palestine?  He follows a path of seeking his own, looking for that connection of love he once knew.  The movie beautifully ends with the actual Solomon Perel as an old man singing a song, "How sweat is it to sit surrounded by your brothers, how sweat is it to sit surrounded by your brothers".  The Jews of World War II  seek their own, and the freedom to follow their religious practices in peace, yet are buffeted from place to place subjugated to the various surrounding forces which attempt to keep them from doing so. And the Jews are forever changed.