Cinema on weekends. Righteous in the Belarusian forests

Sergei Ursulyak’s film The Righteous tells the story of the Belarusian Jew Moshe Tal (Mark Eidelstein), whom his parents (Konstantin Khabensky and Chulpan Khamatova) and his sister Miriam (Katie Solvay) sent to the forest with the hope of being saved.

Moshe and Miriam did not manage to get out of the ghetto before the action. How they escaped and why Moshe with a rifle ended up in a small partisan detachment of Nikolai Kiselyov (Alexander Yatsenko) with a mission to save Jews, it is better not to retell. Here, no matter how you describe it, everything will look untrue.

And on the screen everything is very believable. Two hours and twenty minutes of screen time fly by in one breath.

Commissar of partisan detachments Timchuk (Fyodor Dobronravov) first persuaded Kiselyov, then gave the order to withdraw two hundred Jews from occupied Belarus across the front line.

The combat experience and skill of the economist Kiselev allows you to replay the regular parts of the SS. You have to make many difficult decisions. The Germans are quite surprised by such tragic episodes as a Jewess from Germany with a children’s German song, saving her children at the cost of her own life. Or an elderly Hasid with a Shlomo grenade (Nikolai Khmelev).

The Jews got out of the ghetto into the forest, they had no other way to salvation. There are partisans in the forest, and for the partisans weak old people and crying children are a dangerous burden. The occupying troops received the order “juden fry”.

With whom the Nazis are actually fighting, the question is extremely simple. Only this is not a war. The Jews came up with an adequate Greek word for “Holocaust” – “burnt offering”, and it became commonly used along with the more accurate term “genocide”.

In Western Europe, the Nazis destroyed communists, Jews and gypsies, and after the occupation they demonstrated compliance with the Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land. It was initiated on behalf of Tsar Fyodor Martens. The materials of the Holocaust Foundation under the leadership of Ilya Altman showed a fundamental difference with what the Nazis were doing in the occupied territories of the USSR. Although everything was very colorful, but in general the rear was more dangerous than the front. There were concentration camps on both sides of the front, but they were also different. Unlike the Nazis, the Communists did not set the task of mass extermination of people. A different motivation dominated. Sadomasochism was present everywhere, but also in different forms.

To discuss such issues, they must be freed from presumptions and misinterpretations of the terms fascism and Nazism. It’s far from the same.

It is unlikely that humanity will be able to solve the terminological problem in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I would note that the image of the Jewish people in the historical novel by the Israeli writer Larisa Sklyaruk “The Captive Judea” is presented without embellishment and more honestly than in the film “The Righteous” by Ursulyak. Here it is somewhat smoothed, although not too far from the truth.

In my subjective assessment, the semi-fantastic novels of Skryaruk are closer to reality than the undeniable works of Lion Feuchtwanger. Let professional Jews take offense at me, Jews fought in the Wehrmacht, became the best Orthodox priests and advisers to the head of state and carried out the will of their master, in different eras of their ancient history they showed both Nazism and cruelty. I repeat, these are different things.

Madeleine Albright and George Soros contributed to the new Holocaust, although they themselves grew out of the victims of the previous Holocaust, when they had very different names.

In the film The Righteous, the role of the main factor in the Holocaust is quite convincingly played by an SS Hauptsturmführer, who is also a professional photographer.

Where his camera is aimed with a flash, it is better not to list.

To the front line in a straight line eight hundred kilometers, taking into account the terrain, the whole thousand.

Commissioner Tkachuk quite prosaically selects a candidate for the role of the mission-assignment to save the Jews. It turns out, except Kiselyov, there is no one, the rest one or two and counted, very unreliable. They will drown the Jews in the swamp, and that’s all.

To help Kiselyov, Tkachuk gives Anya (Lyubov Konstantinova), a Russian girl with knowledge of Yiddish.

Quite natural human passions are played out in Kiselyov’s detachment. Comes to the wedding under the Chuppah. Lucky groom with a chauffeur “Queen” (Eugene Tkachuk) from Nizhny Tagil, orphanage without the slightest sign of Jewish blood. For the sake of his beloved, the Queen is ready for the ceremony, but Comrade Kiselyov begged Rabbi Baksht (Andrey Golikov) to simplify the procedure and not to perform circumcision for initiation into the Jews, because only ants are disinfectants in the forest. Ants are poorly applicable to this particular part of the male body.

He called his wife Tova Lipnitsky (Maria Zolotukhina) “my big-eyed queen” …

The psychologically difficult role of an intermediary between the Hauptsturmführer (Pavel Tsitsylin) and the Jews went to Lyuba (Yulia Vitruk). She is not Lyuba at all, but a Jewess, and without her, the life paths of Moshe and Miriam diverge, and with her they would be lost.

In the end, the very elderly Moshe Tal (Dovale Glikman) ends up in Israel, but flatly refuses to remember Kiselyov and to say anything at all.

Without the testimony of Moshe Tal, it is impossible to confer on Nikolai Kiselyov the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”. The change in the mood of the absurd old man is inadvertently caused by a Jewish girl Dina from Boston, named after her grandmother’s sister.

The names coincide with Moshe’s native people.

As is now customary, in the film The Righteous, classical dramaturgy is replaced by the mosaic-associative dynamics of human sleep. The tension does not drop from the first to the last frame. Ursulyak attracted both well-known venerable actors, and they ended up in roles that are unusual for the viewer, and newcomers. Particularly good is the “eyed queen” Maria Zolotukhina, and this is her first role. In any case, Ursulyak’s film is a fairy tale, although scary, but all imbued with kindness.

Yes, that was also the case at that terrible time. And I believe in this, because I know from the stories of eyewitnesses. The motivation of good in retribution with evil in one’s own conscience is shown in the film “The Righteous” on the example of the character Lyuba.

In life, of course, it was not so contrasting. But even in the film, human relations are not built very definitely, although in general they are logical and consistent. Almost like in life. An elderly Hasid with a grenade is very exotic. But then human life was worthless and often brought all sorts of surprises.

There have been scarier films in the history of cinema. For example, “From Hell to Hell” by Dmitry Astrakhan. Also based on real history, only in Poland. Ursulyak’s film is terrible not so much by its similarity as by its obvious parallels with modernity. The Munich Security Conference, in which Russia has not participated for the second year, has turned into a forum for the consolidation of danger. In my opinion, the US war party is preparing a new Holocaust for the world. The current story is also built on the basis of collaboration and sadomasochism. All this frightens, first of all, with its inexplicability. After all, people have become completely different. The value of human life has increased significantly. And the decision-making motivation is the same.

There are many facts about the salvation of the Jews.

In general, the “righteous among the world” turned out to be poor families without Jewish origin. It was deadly mercy.

One of the most unique cases was described by Daniel Kluger, author of the ballad “The Hasidic Waltz”. The rabbi was taken out of the concentration camp to the United States by a Wehrmacht officer at the request of the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. There was also such a case when a German officer took a truck full of Jews out of the Minsk ghetto for the sake of a woman with whom he studied at school in a past life. Described in the story of Joseph Gerasimov “Escape”. The most persistent and capable Jews could buy a place in a partisan detachment for a bag of medicines and a typewriter. Or even organized Jewish partisan detachments, which were reunited with the Red Army with battles.

Single Jews, unsuitable for military service, the partisans could shoot for reasons exhaustively described in the film The Righteous. True or not, one must look in the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus.

For comparison. In the autobiographical novel by Elena Kotova, an episode is described when a train full of refugees without discrimination of nationality, instead of the promised Soviet rear, was sent to the German rear just to unload the station. Their fate is unknown.

The life of the Jews in the Belarusian ghettos at that famine time did not differ much from the rear. In Leningrad or Stalingrad it was worse. But only from stock to stock and only to locals who had some supplies, gold jewelry and connections to trade for food.

When the fascists came up with the idea to reduce the ghetto, they held an action and killed the extra Jews. It was dangerous to leave the ghetto, a German officer shot a child who ran after a bird.

There were no Jews left in the homeland of my grandfather Solomon Fainberg in Vitebsk. Unlike Kyiv, the surviving Jews did not return to Vitebsk.

Reference

The life story of Nikolai Kiselyov is described in Wikipedia.

The mass extermination of Jews began immediately after the occupation of Belarus. By the summer of 1942, 278 people remained alive in Dolginovo, mostly old people, women and children, those who managed to go into the forest or managed to sit out in the cellar. Belarusian peasants could not shelter them under pain of death.

The partisan detachment “Avenger”, to which the surviving Jews nailed and where Kiselyov served, had no way to accept and support all these people. The partisans requested command in Moscow and were ordered to withdraw the Jews across the front line. Nikolai Kiselyov was assigned to carry out the order. 270 people went with him, most of them old men, women and children. In addition to Kiselev, the group was accompanied by seven more partisans.

The transition lasted more than a month, twice the detachment ran into German ambushes, many were wounded. After one of the clashes, fifty people were missing, what happened to them; unknown. Two of the wounded – an elderly woman and a boy – had to be left in the forest, but they survived.

The smallest girl in the group was Berta, who often cried. As we approached the front line, it became more and more dangerous. During one of these dangerous moments, Berta’s parents got into such a state that in desperation they decided to drown the girl in order to save the whole group. Then Kiselyov took the child in his arms, reassured her and carried her to the end of the campaign in his arms.

After more than 1500-kilometer crossing through the occupied territory, Kiselyov led 218 people beyond the front line (through the Surazh Gates), after which he was arrested by military counterintelligence as a deserter. However, the people he saved stood up for him, and Kiselyov was released. The State Archives of Belarus contains an appeal of the saved Jews to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks P.K. Ponomarenko: “All along the way, when Comrade. Kiselev, we felt his care and consider him our father and ask you to present him for a government award.

Kiselev practically did not tell anyone about his feat. Documents about Kiselev’s campaign were discovered by the director of the Museum of the History and Culture of the Jews of Belarus, Candidate of Historical Sciences Inna Gerasimova. In the archive of the Communist Party of Belarus, she found the so-called “Kiselyov’s list”, his report on the completed assignment, which listed the names and surnames of the saved. The Belarusian historian Arkady Leizerov wrote about the same document. The main document that made it possible to confirm what was done by Kiselyov was the order of the Belarusian headquarters of the partisan movement dated January 14, 1943, found by Inna Gerasimova in the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, on awarding a cash prize (from 400 to 800 rubles) to 8 partisans under the leadership of Kiselyov N. Ya. for ” withdrawal of 210 Jewish families from the German rear”.

Biography

Nikolay Yakovlevich Kiselyov (1913, Bogorodskoye village, Bashkiria; 1974, Moscow); Soviet political commissar, partisan of the Avenger detachment in Belarus, who saved the lives of 218 Jews from the Dolginovsky ghetto by taking them beyond the front line in August-October 1942.

Awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations in 2005.

In 1941 he graduated from the Institute of Foreign Trade in Moscow and volunteered for the front. As a political instructor, he fought in the 29th Infantry Division of the 32nd Army, which was surrounded near Vyazma. He was captured, fled, went to the underground in the village of Ilya. At the beginning of 1942, he joined the Avenger detachment under the command of Vasily Voronyansky (Uncle Vasya), which operated in the Vileika district of the Vileika region.

In the summer of 1942, he received the task of ensuring the passage of less than three hundred survivors of the three thousand Jewish residents of the village of Dolginovo across the front line. After a more than 1,500-kilometer campaign, he brought 218 people across the front line, most of whom were old people, women and children.

Fought until 1944. After the war, in 1946 he married Anna, a liaison who accompanied a group of Jews with him.

He lived and worked in Moscow, in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, raised his daughter Tatyana and son Nikolai.

Lev Moskovkin.

Photo tvpr.ru