charnel house in occupied Belarussia

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2004)

I saw this movie many years ago and scenes still remain imprinted on my mind. Though it was still made in the USSR, in was made when the winds of glasnost were starting to well and truly blow. The movie whilst still sticking to the maxim that the Soviets were the good guys, nevertheless portrays the casual brutality of partisan warfare in a realistic unromantic way.
The SS "action" in the Belarussian village is one of the most disturbing depictions of the second world war ever directed outside of the real footage of these things. The SS troops are on a anti-partisan operation and enter the Belarussian village. The next 10-15 minutes remained in my memory for many years after. Though the suffering of the occupied peoples under Nazi's was often used for pro-Soviet propaganda in art and film, even if it was the case in this film, the sheer horror of these scenes transcends the political.
2 scenes are particularly powerful in this section of the film:
The scene were the SS officer lunches in a village hut, in front of a cowering peasant family, desperate to placate the soldiers, is quite terrifying and suspenseful and all the more effective for the violence that does eventually occur.
Secondly, at the end of the slaughter,the Nazi soldiers are seen laughing carry out on a bed an old bedridden blind babushka lady from a burning farmhouse. They make some horrible joke about saving her to be a breeder, and as the village burns behind her she is observed blindly staring into the smoke filled sky full of incomphrehensible terror.
From memory the movie does lapse into propaganda abit heavily at the end. Nevertheless at the end of the film the credits list the number of Belarussian villages destroyed (buildings and people)....I cant remember the exact number but it was hundreds and it is quite a sobering figure....regardless of the Soviet spin the film is valuable in shining a light into a dark corner of mans inhumanity to fellow man.