Beyond Brave Little Blighty I: Occupation

The breadth and length of the Second World War means that it was inevitably experienced in greatly varying ways. Unsurprisingly, this diversity is perceptible in the huge number of films that deal with the conflict, with each nation’s war narrative suffusing domestic productions to different degrees. Beyond the blitz, evacuees and Dunkirk, there is a wealth of other stories of heroism and suffering, and in a world where the memory of World War Two is being successfully employed as propaganda for renewed hostilities, it seems beyond doubt that we should be better-versed in the legacies that prevail on the other side of the Channel. This column considers post-2010 cinematographic non-Anglophone interpretations of the war, and seeks to centre narratives which are not part of the British war story.

German panzers never rolled through Kent, Nazi officials never laid down the law from Whitehall, and an enormous swastika banner was never unrolled down Big Ben. This is of course a cause for relief and gratitude to fate, but not having to live with the memories of occupation makes the British narrative of the war fundamentally different to those in other European countries. 

Naturally, occupation varied greatly nation to nation and year to year, and each film only gives us a brief snapshot of what life under Nazi rule was like for a certain group, at a certain point. But by watching them, we can begin to approach an understanding of the endemic anxiety, profound defiance, and deep trauma of living under occupation. 

To take the examples of Holland and Poland is to deal with two drastically different models of occupation, whereby the former - whose inhabitants were considered to be somewhat racially equal to Germans - were initially treated with a ‘velvet glove’, whilst the latter saw violent repression and an attempt to wipe out the country’s culture and subjugate its people. 

This difference is starkly evident in the films Bankier van det Verzet (2018) and Miasto 44 (2014); in the first, we are struck by the relative lack of intrusion of Nazism onto the lives of most Amsterdamers - garden parties are held, children climb trees, and bankers are allowed to keep their jobs as the national bank passes into Nazi hands. Not so in Warsaw, where the protagonist, Stefan, rides a packed tram, gazing at the emptier front section marked ‘for Germans only’, before arriving at work and promptly being assaulted by a Nazi official for his insolence. This is only a precursor to the wholesale brutality and destruction that characterises almost two hours of urban warfare, including scenes of barbarity such as the murder of Stefan’s younger brother and mother, witnessed by the protagonist from the window of his apartment. 

Whilst Wally, the Dutch protagonist, is pursued by the Nazis because he has chosen to support the resistance, in Poland, the innocent are massacred, underlining the profound difference in Nazi attitudes towards their subjects. Yet, the diverging essences of the two national war narratives are arguably most poignantly revealed on a minute scale, for instance through short exchanges of dialogue. 

Stefan’s mother, when she suspects her son of joining the resistance, becomes violent and emotional, repeatedly screaming ‘don’t leave me alone!’. This sequence is repeated later, when Ala (Stefan’s love interest) hysterically berates him from moving from the spot where she left him, using the same words as the mother. Tragically, it is Stefan who ends up alone as most of the population of Warsaw either die or flee (only 1,000 people remained in the city after the uprising) and this speaks to the narratives of national martyrdom and erasure of a generation that dominate Polish memories of the war. Throughout the film, Stefan’s comrades die in varying but equally horrific ways, eventually leaving him alone in front of a pile of dead bodies in a bombed-out hospital, symbolising the weight that each survivor carried on his shoulders after seeing so much bloodshed, and losing all those close to him.

In Bankier van det Verzet, Japp’s riddle; ‘what’s the similarity between van Tonningen (the Nazi installed head of the National Bank) and the Dutch flag?’ goes unanswered until the end of the film, when he reveals that ‘they will both hang after the revolution’. The optimism of this pronouncement comes in stark contrast to the dire conditions in which Japp and Wally find themselves, condemned to death in squalid prison cells. Indeed, this is the final message of the film, enunciated just before Wally is shot and the audience is given the true biographies of the characters, suggesting that their enormous sacrifice is what guaranteed the liberation of the Netherlands not included in the sombre ending of the film.

What struck me more than these moments of dialogue, however, was the brief but meaningful treatment of the plight of the Jews in the films. As sites of occupation, both countries saw the mass deportations and violence that formed the Jewish experience of the war, but as these films deal with the ethnically Dutch and Polish populations, shadows of the Holocaust are fleeting. In Bankier van det Verzet, Wally sits on a train as another passes by, the screams of concealed human occupants painfully audible. In this otherwise silent scene, no words are uttered by Wally nor his fellow travellers, but a deep sense of discomfort and guilt is perceptible on every face and another uncomfortable truth of the Dutch Second World War narrative is momentarily brought to the fore.  In Miasto 44, the resistance fighters liberate a large group of Jews being held captive, before one begs to join their ranks, explaining that he has no one left. The hesitation of the commander in accepting this new comrade left me uncertain - was this wavering a reflection of the leader’s uncertainty as to whether such a weak young man could make a contribution, or an admission of some kind of unconscious desire for a distinctly ethnically Polish victory?

To truly interrogate the mapping of the Polish and Dutch war narratives in these films, one would need a great deal more space. Nonetheless, by zooming in on these subtle moments and exchanges of dialogue, what this exploration hopefully does highlight is the way that these productions can open British eyes not only to the horrors of occupation, but to the diversity of experiences it produced, and the legacies it left behind.