To Kill or Be Killed

2011_6_06 Kill or Be Killed

One of the great features of NETFLIX is it helps you catch up on films you missed when they were first released. “Descending Angel” was a HBO film that was released in 1990. I have no recollection of it at all, even though it stars George C. Scott and Diane Lane, a very lovely actress. I decided to order it to check it out and I am sure glad I did but for reasons I hadn’t anticipated. It was a story that looked back at the Second World War, and it reminded me of the novel by Jonathan Littell, THE KINDLY ONES, especially the opening chapter called “Tocata,” where a justification of the Holocaust was offered by an ex-Nazi, a German Officer, who managed to blend end with population at the end of the war. The main character of “Descending Angel,” Florian Strola (George C. Scott) who made it to the U.S. after the war, becoming a very successful antique dealer, was a Romanian Nazi collaborator and a now a prominent member of the local Romanian community. He has successfully covered up his past, just like the German officer of the novel, to the degree even his adult daughter, Irina (Diane Lane), knows nothing about it, seeing him as a survivor of Buchenwald, and that’s all, which was the story he has spun to cover his tracks. But trouble comes in the form of Michael Rossi (Eric Roberts), a young man Irina has fallen in love with and who she brings home to meet her father, hoping to get his blessing. The two men do not hit it off. He then meets a bitter survivor of the camps who witnessed the truth about Florian and his Iron Guard: he actually participated in the slaughter of local Jews. The Bishop at Florian’s church opens a file in the basement of the church and let’s Rossi read it; it further implicates Florian. When Rossi finds out the truth of Florian’s background he confronts the older man who explains what he did this way: “ Things were different then. I was in a world where there were only two kinds of people, those who killed and those who were killed. You have to understand that!” But Rossi finds the old man’s attitude a moral outrage; he has no patience with the old man, as such a rationalization turns his stomach. But it is exactly the explanation offered by the German Officer, albeit with more detail and shrewdness. When I first read the justification, which was so thoroughgoing and stated with such certainty, I was blown away by it. How could the human mind be so morally wayward as to accept the conditions of the Holocaust?

For the sake of comparison with Florian here is a portion of his explanation of why he did what he did.

“What I did, I did with my eyes wide open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may be. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and a German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by as much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame...I do not regret anything; I did my work, that’s all…I probably did go little far too far toward the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was off-balance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me. I wasn’t the only one who lost his head…”

And like Florian, the German Officer became respectable, married, had a family and became a successful businessman in, of all things, lace manufacturing.

The rest of “Descending Angel” was rather predictable, with Florian paying a heavy price for his big lie. But the main point of the movie for me was the monstrous justification both characters offer for their actions during the war. Yet, I would not like to be caught up in a similar circumstance. How do I know for an absolute certainty that is a killer isn’t hidden inside me? I don’t. We all have to recognize this as a possibility.