Much has been said about Dunkirk, and Oriental TV also interviewed the film's director, Christopher Nolan. I just remember him saying that it was difficult to make a film of the retreat of hundreds of thousands of British troops, and where to start.
In my memory, Britain used all the means of sea transport, from warships to yachts to fishing boats, but Churchill estimated to have withdrawn only thirty or forty thousand people at most. Why Hitler shifted the direction of the strategic offensive at the last moment is probably something that no one can explain to this day; but in just eight days, 338226 people returned from Dunkirk to British mainland in the air battle and bombing of aircraft, in the sinking and burning sea of battleships, which cannot but be said to be a miracle in the history of human warfare.
Everyone sees different images in the film: I see hundreds of thousands of fugitive soldiers who don't know each other, and the collapsed soldiers are still lining up in an orderly manner to board the ship, I see them each person taking only one piece of dry food at a time, I see the order and speed of the escape, the cheers and gifts of food from the people on the shore; and of course, the arguments that make the French not get on the ship and the anger of holding a gun against a Dutchman who doesn't speak English. When they saw the British horizon in the distance, what came out of their mouths or whispered was "home." Another post-90s girl looked more carefully, she said, "In the sea of scrambling to escape and on the ships that are about to sink, there is no heroism and self-sacrifice to save others, whether it is panicking or subconsciously reaching out to the help of her peers, it is a noble or instinctively self-serving act made by human nature at a certain moment." The first words spoken by the pilot who was shot down at sea and were lucky enough to be rescued were 'good afternoon'; the boy who did not know how to follow the old captain to save people, with great ambition, wanted to become famous in one fell swoop, but was accidentally pushed and shoved and fell on the ship and died, not even seeing the coastline of Dunkirk, it was his companions who 'beautified' his deeds and published them in the newspapers. The order for the British homeland was to bring back only its own soldiers, and when more than three hundred thousand British troops withdrew, the commander who commanded the port and never lay down when the German planes roared by chose to stay and rescue the French army that had not yet fled. ...... The soldiers who survived on the train worriedly imagined how to explain the rout to their families, but in the end it all turned into a sentence, which is 'just come back'. This generosity heals the ugliness of war itself, soothes pain, remorse, and humiliation, circumvents the convention of kings and defeats, and expresses the most lenient goodwill of human civilization. 'It's good to live', this is the recognition that living is victory - let those who have the ability to save the world save the world, let ordinary people live with a clear conscience.
The surviving soldier in the movie "Dunkirk" is on the train and thinks about how to explain the rout to his family, but it all ends up in one sentence: "Just come back." (Infographic/Figure)
The other side of "greatness" is embodied in the celebration of "Toast to Being Alive".
What is it about people who live? For the truth? For justice?
When you have doubts about truth, justice, and cause, are you not alive?
You still have to live, but you always have to do something for something, right?
We keep this requirement as low as possible, leaving only love, for the sake of the remaining conscience, for the sake of giving an account to the dead.
When I watched the 2014 German film "The Labyrinth of Silence", with the thoughts of the characters in the film, I also thought about how to reduce the standard to the minimum and the lowest, but there is still a moment worthy of "toasting to life".
What exactly is this "still worth it"?
The protagonist of Labyrinth of Silence is Radmann, a young district criminal prosecutor in Frankfurt. Originally, I only did the review of traffic violations, which was a very easy job and did not have much pressure, but I accidentally learned about this place in Auschwitz from other people's mouths. Without watching this movie, we would have thought that Germans in the 1950s and 1960s knew about Auschwitz and the crimes of the Nazis in the concentration camps. After watching the film (it is a completely real movie, except for the name of the virtual protagonist, all the characters are explained at the end), only to learn that their young people actually know nothing, not even the name of Auschwitz.
Slowly, a number of names and events emerge, the most famous of which is a Nazi doctor named Mengele, who specializes in experimenting with living people, especially twins, and Simon in the movie, whose two daughters died. Where is Mengele? He ran to Argentina; in Argentina there was Eichmann; the last commander of Auschwitz, Richard Bayer, lived in Germany, while Schultz, another Nazi who had fallen to his death on the spot, was still working as a teacher at the Goethe-Secondary School.
This needs to be slowly checked out from thousands of tons of historical data.
Stills from The Labyrinth of Silence: Nazi secrets, hidden in thousands of tons of historical archives. (Infographic/Figure)
More than 8,000 German soldiers worked at Auschwitz. If it is not murder, any other crime has expired and will not be prosecuted. murder? Who was killed? Who are the witnesses? Who testifies? Gurica, a journalist who had the best relationship with Radman and has been working on the matter, said: Is it murder for a prisoner to escape and finally be killed? How could he have thought of this? Because he had worked at Auschwitz when he was 17 years old, he witnessed Nazi officers throw a Jewish hat outside the guardrail, ask him to pick it up, then say he escaped and shot and killed the Jew. And he was standing by and watching. He was ashamed of it. So I never told anyone about it. Even his best friend, who has a history, and his own father, who was stationed in Poland when he was a soldier, and his girlfriend's father, who was also a Nazi, and... German Chancellor Adenauer said that the scars of history should not be uncovered, let the past things pass, and now everything is fine?
Born in 1930, Radman would not have been involved in and would not have known about the past, so the Attorney General (the Jew) asked him to investigate the matter. But he gradually discovered that almost all of his father's generation had participated in Nazi wars and atrocities in some way, or, at most, watched in silence like Ginica.
Can germany judge its own entire generation of people?
Radman was determined to quit the job. But he also remembered Simon's last wish: to read a funeral note in Yiddish for his two dead daughters at Auschwitz.
He and Ginica went to Auschwitz. A cell surrounded by barbed wire. Meadows everywhere. What's buried in the grass? The most immediate answer is that the bones of the victims are buried; but further, we think that there is a sound buried there, a sound that can never be made if it is not allowed to be emitted. Without this voice, all people can live as if nothing had happened, even though everyone is a criminal in some sense.
The final trial took place in Frankfurt in 1963. Twenty-one Nazis were prosecuted and 17 convicted, including commanders like Bayer; many more were involved. But the demon doctor Mengele escaped and drowned in Brazil while swimming, while Eichmann was escorted back to Israel, where a thick copy of "Eichmann in Jerusalem– A Report on the Evil of Mediocrity" was placed there, making all the dead make their own faint voices. From then on, Auschwitz was no longer a deliberately disguised place name, of course, along with that history.
Yes, no one writes, no one will ever know, those innocent victims will be buried deep in the ground forever, no one will know them, and no one will know who killed them.
No one knows how it all works, because there is no law, no judge, no prosecutor, no jury, and no newspaper propaganda. Some people, like Adenauer, say: Let the past pass, it is too complicated, too difficult to figure out, why uncover the scars of history that have been healed, and only dwell on what the past is done? But in fact, can the "past" really pass that way?