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November 27, 1998/ 8 Kislev 5759, Vol. 51, No. 10
'Truce' attempts realism, falls short
ANNE BRADY
Associate Editor
Imagine, if you will, a movie related to the Holocaust that is not told in black-and-white.
And when I say "not told in black-and-white," I'm not talking about whether the images are in shades of gray or full color. Rather, I'm saying that not all the Jewish victims, not all the prisoners in the concentration/extermination camps, are good guys. Imagine that the prisoners are portrayed as they must have been, as a mixed bag of people - some good, some bad; some generous, some selfish.
Next imagine that one Jewish character stops to consider what the experience of the Holocaust has done to the good ones, how it has changed them, and how it has changed the Jewish view of life and the world, possibly forever.
"The Truce," a movie that enjoyed only a limited big-screen release last April but is being released on video Dec. 15 (available in stores during Hanukkah week) from Miramax Home Entertainment, tells the story of Primo Levi's journey from Auschwitz to Turin after his liberation by the Russians near the close of World War II in 1945. In this story, based on the actual experiences of the Italian-born chemist who was deported to Auschwitz as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance in 1944, Levi considers just such questions, and experiences just such a variety of emancipated prisoners.
One former prisoner steals a violin from an Austrian woman who gives him food and drink. Others grumble and complain when a farmer who gave them a chicken won't let them stay inside his house.
Only one of several Italian refugees is willing to share his bread with starving German-Jewish refugees, and he even makes the German Jews grovel and scramble at his feet. (Watch for bread scenes throughout the movie - from Primo sharing his bread with a child early on, to his breaking bread at his home in Turin near the end of the film; bread is an important symbol here.)
At one point, when Levi is standing up for a former Auschwitz prisoner, a woman who slept with the Nazis at the camp, apparently to survive, Levi tells his colleagues: "At Auschwitz, the worst thing they did to us was not to deny us bread, torture us or take our lives. The worst thing they did was to crush our souls, our capacity for compassion, filling the void with hatred, even toward each other."
Yet even Levi manages to bond with this woman and then leave her behind at a Russian outpost, seemingly without a second thought, when the train arrives that will take him home to Italy.
No one individual is perfect in this film. And neither is the film perfect.
One thing conspicuously missing is enough character development to explain why Levi alone cares about things other than eating and sleeping. Perhaps I'd know if I'd seen the prequel.
My biggest problem with the film involved the use of languages. It was confusing. At the beginning of the film, the Auschwitz prisoners are speaking English, and the Russian soldiers are speaking Russian. If one assumes that English is being substituted for the common language of the prisoners, the question remains: What is that common language? The prisoners are Italian, Greek, Polish, German - some Jews, some gentile "radicals" and other anti-Fascists. The Nazis all speak German. At one point in the film, I assumed the people speaking English were really speaking Italian, since the protagonist is Italian and he finds someone to translate for him into Russian.
The Italian Levi also manages to speak Latin - so he can ask a priest for food. Later, he tells a Russian nurse his name is Primo, and she says (presumably in Italian, although in English on screen), holding up one finger, "As in One?" So is she really saying, essentially, "Primo, as in Primo?" We do know Levi can't speak Russian, but we don't know what common language they've found. Perhaps it is French.
Of course, they all speak English with accents from their countries of origin. The film would have worked better with English-language subtitles, and everybody speaking the language they actually would have been speaking.
You may wonder why this language problem would bother me. It's because the film, in several respects, is so real in ways that other Holocaust-related films are not. Yes, there are cads and saints from every country represented, but having everyone somehow miraculously speaking English distracts from that reality.
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