Last night I watched a really interesting movie; as some of you may know, I don’t watch a lot of films, and when I do, I prefer documentaries, but this was based on a true story, so it checks out. It’s called The Zookeeper’s Wife, and it’s the story of the zookeepers at the Warsaw Zoo during the invasion of the Nazis, who are non-Jewish Poles that end up using their zoo as an underground sanctuary to help Jews escape the Warsaw ghetto. It would have been a powerful film regardless, but in the context of the current war it wasn’t hard to draw the parallels. The film actually, I believe, tried to pull its punches in terms of the depiction of war; it was fairly sanitized. But for all that, the atmosphere of claustrophobia and the culture of deceit came through strongly. One of the subplots involves the wife trying to fend off the advances of the German zookeeper that takes over their zoo, and you can feel her personal sense of despair as she is trapped between highly unpalatable options, just as the Jews in her basement are literally trapped. What comes through strongly is how desperate these people feel and the quantity of lying and deceit that otherwise honest and straightforward folk were forced into. At one point one of the characters explicitly calls this out, saying that they are part of a new world, and there are new ethics and morals. I thought of this in particular in the context of the liberation of some of the Ukrainian cities that happened recently, and the challenges of identifying collaborators. Of course some Ukrainians no doubt genuinely collaborated and took the Russian side, but I also imagine a huge gray area of those who just wanted to get on with their lives and felt compelled to do some unsavory things.

Of course, the only real takeaway from any of these movies is the terrible inhumanity of war. And when I say “inhumanity”, I literally mean that it causes people to act in a way that I see as un-human; the lying, the deceit, the misery. It is the most inhuman thing we do.