"The Sorrow and the Pity"

As yesterday was cold and rainy here in Dallas, and I was sick, and I was thinking about France and the Holocaust re: that Sarkozy story, I decided to commit myself to something I'd intended to do for years: watch the 4 1/2-hour long 1969 Marcel Ophuls film "The Sorrow and the Pity." It's a documentary -- actually one of the greatest documentary films ever made -- about the Nazi occupation of France (here's Ebert's review, if you're interested).

I'm not sure what I expected from the film, but it was more morally complex than I imagined. First, the obvious: I knew that France had a long history of anti-Semitism, and I expected to see some of that here. But nothing quite prepares one for learning that in some instances, the French did the Germans -- the Germans! -- one better. The Paris police decided not only to fulfill their German masters' request to round up Jews one night; they even went after Jewish children. The thousands of children were shipped off to the death camps. None came home.

The most unsettling thing about the film, though, is not the examples of villainy or heroism, but how most people simply made their peace with tyranny (this is why the French government, which had commissioned the film through state television, didn't want to show it: it exposed the myth that France had by and large nobly resisted the Nazi occupation. What you get from the film, which is mostly interviews with a variety of people who had been involved with the drama of the time (most of them inhabitants of the French city Clermont-Ferrand) is a sense of how difficult it would have been to have done the right thing. To be sure, the film does not excuse the collaborators. But it does reveal them to be human, all too human.

I can't stop thinking about this one man in the film, a French Catholic aristocrat who, get this, joined the Waffen-SS and earned an Iron Cross for fighting on the Russian front. This man, Christian de la Maziere, dispassionately admits to having been a fascist before and during the war. He now (well, he then; this was the late 1960s) called himself a liberal, and said he warns young people to be wary of ideology. He explains that back in the 1930s, French politics were run through with far left and far right ideology. One felt one had to choose. Being an aristocrat and a Catholic, and having seen daily stories in the papers of nuns raped and massacred, and suchlike, by the left in the Spanish Civil War, he concluded that he should join the side that fought communism most fiercely. And this is how, in time, he came to wear Germany's uniform.

This interview is the most haunting because you can see how people made the choices that they did. One never falls victim to the idea that to understand all is to forgive all, but one does understand what the former British prime minister Anthony Eden says at the film's end, when asked to pass judgment on Petain, the Vichy leader. Eden says that no one who didn't have to endure the horrors of occupation should propose to judge the actions of those who did. When one of the interviewees observes that the respectable bourgeoisie made the best collaborators, because they had something to lose, I winced.

I tried to imagine how I would have behaved under those circumstances (really, it's impossible to watch this movie without wondering the same thing). I would like to believe I would have been brave, and done my moral duty, but I can't know, and neither can you. I was telling Julie after the film was over that I often wonder how I would have behaved had I grown up in my own Deep South town at any other time in history (I was born in 1967, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed). Would I have done the decent thing toward black folks who lived there? What would that have meant, in practical terms? Would I, as a white person, even have known what the decent thing to do was?

It's impossible to know. I thank God I have never been put to the test. But you know, I wonder what our descendants 100, or 200 years into the future, will say about us. If they say, "How could those people back then not have known how horrible that was, and done something about it!?", what do you suppose they'll be talking about? Abortion? Pollution? Or something that strikes most of us as completely normal and acceptable today?

UPDATE: Here is a portion of the interview with de la Maziere: