Comment by Alan Dale

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 18:40:31 EST

Temporal posted a thoughtful blog entry at Baithak about this review. I posted a response which I repeat here (with a few modifications): Thank you for your reference to my review of Fateless. I consider "involved, wonderfully mesmerizing" high compliments. All mass murders are to be deplored equally, of course. The Nazi genocide of the European Jews stands out, I think, b/c of a combination of a number of factors that apply only singly or in smaller combinations to some of the others you mention: 1. The European Jews were killed not b/c of anything they had done or believed (even unbelieving Jews were killed) but b/c of who they were. 2. They were killed with industrial efficiency pursuant to an official gov't policy in specially built extermination camps. (The 20 million dead Soviets you mention were military and civilian casualties of warfare and its attendant privations, in an underdeveloped economy run by a pathological butcher.) 3. The deportation and murder of the European Jews required international governmental collaboration. 4. The victims were drawn from territories ranging from the Balkans to the Baltic, from Russia and Poland to France and Italy. 5. The number of the murdered is greater, both in terms of the head count (6 million) and the percentage of the targeted population exterminated (75%). 6. The European Jews were singled out and murdered even in places such as Germany, Austria, Holland, and France after they had attained amazing degrees of professional and economic success and social integration. 7. The murder of the European Jews occurred in what had been advanced western democracies. The suffering of Kampucheans and Rwandans is no less disturbing and moving, but it is less surprising. 8. The Nazi murder of Jews was only the latest, most concentrated and coordinated effort in a long history of bloody persecution.

Blogcritics Comments on Movie Review: Lajos Koltai's Fateless: Death and the Children

Comment by Alan Dale