Today we introduce a movie based on real events, Persian Lessons.
The story takes place in France in 1942. At the beginning of the story, a cart of Jews is escorted to a grove and shot. The hero, Reza, exchanges bread for a Persian book in the car, and just as Reza is about to be shot, he lies that he is Persian, and a Nazi captain named Koch at the time needs a Persian teacher, so the hero survives.
Reza was assigned to work in the kitchen, where he taught Koch Persian outside of work, and he racked his brains to make up Persian words while working.
The reason Koch wanted to learn Persian was that he wanted to open a restaurant in Tehran after the war. Koch proposed to learn only 4 basic words a day, a setting that greatly reduces the hero's word preparation.
As seamless as it all seemed, Corporal Max had already recognized Him as a Jew by Reza's physical features, but Koch, in his own cleverness, did not believe Max's words. Not only that, but he also gave Reza the job of a scribe for Stoff, who rewrote the prisoner's name into Persian in order to cope with the increasing number of word learning.
The replaced Stoff held a grudge and falsely accused Reza of being Koch's male favorite. Fortunately, Koch kept a hand, and things were smoothly confused. But soon after the upswing, Max captures a real Persian, and Max captures Reza to confront the real Persian, only to find that the Persian has been killed by a Jew of Italian descent (reza had helped the Jew before).
In the process of transferring the Jews to Poland, Reza replaced the dumb brother of the Italian Jew. Just at this time, the Germans received orders from Berlin, under pressure from the Allied offensive, to destroy the Jews on the spot. Koch escaped from the camp with Reza while the Germans destroyed the evidence.
In the end, Koch was caught on the spot while crossing the level, and Reza was in the Allied barracks, accurately reciting the names of 2840 victims.
Looking at the whole film, you will find that the logic of this film is not very self-consistent, such as talking about the tragic life of the captain on the one hand, and talking about his ruthlessness on the other hand. The whole film seems to tell the story of a clever Jew playing a Nazi officer, but the details are interesting.
The first is Captain Koch's cleverness. Max was a clever corporal, and he saw at a glance that Reza was not Persian. But in the vertical system of the army, a corporal cannot be smarter than a captain. The secret of survival in a vertical bureaucracy is that you should never believe that you can rise to power by relying on ability and wisdom, and sometimes your ability and wisdom may make your boss uncomfortable. So Captain Koch's first outburst was when Max questioned Reza's identity. Captain Koch has been stressing: "Do you think you're smarter than I am?" Are you making a fool of me? This plot not only vividly shows the superior-subordinate relationship in the military system, but also shows the stupidity of stupid people and the mismatch of stupid people, a phenomenon that abounds in any organization that adopts a vertical bureaucracy.
The other is that any bureaucracy hates whistleblowers. Dislike whistleblowers does not mean that whistleblowers are not needed, but whistleblowers should never try to exchange secrets for their positions. For example, Captain Koch thinks that the informant in the kitchen is a revenge-loving bitch, and the content of the whistleblower is only used by the boss as a bargaining chip to blackmail. Max eventually informs colonel, Captain Koch and Reza escape, and the captain falsely accuses him of leaving his post.
Finally, I ask the reader to ask themselves, will anyone remember your name a hundred years from now? The film ends up talking about a name, is there anyone who can remember or miss your name? Is there any evidence that you have ever existed in this world? We say that in the end Reza saved the Jews, in the sense of symbolic death, he resurrected them. In the same way, you need a symbol or a set of symbols to organize your position in the system, just like Reza in the story concocted Persian, which is an important means of survival in the face of tragic reality.