TRANSPORT FROM PARADISE

One year when I was trying to get a college education in between the hours when I also operated the comic shop I owned, worked at night on a loading dock at RPS, and tried to find time to eat and sleep in between all of that insane shit, I took a class in film appreciation. The class was a lot of fun. I don't particularly recall much about the professor who taught it, but I did manage to learn a lot about movies and I got to watch some films I might otherwise have never seen.

One of these was a movie called TRANSPORT FROM PARADISE. The movie was written and directed by Zbynek Brynych who was a Jew of Czech extraction. The film takes place in the concentration camp called Theresienstadt. Brynych was actually a survivor of that camp, having emerged from it as a teenager at the end of the war as the Soviet Red Army rolled across eastern Europe liberating the extermination facilities and opening the concentration camps. Oh--and also killing the fuck out of German Nazis and as many of their filthy collaborators as they could find and execute.

Brynych lived it. He was there. I got to talk to him a bit both before and after watching the movie. One thing that I recall is that a lot of people ended up leaving the film (we watched it in a small college auditorium). It disturbed me to no end that the group of Jewish students who took up the row behind me all left halfway through the movie. Why? To tell you the truth, I think they just got bored.

It's not exactly what you might think of when you compare it to US movies about the Holocaust. The movie is very low-key. Almost silent at times. There is brutality, but not the bestial, bloody type of thing you see when you watch movies about those crimes that were produced here in this country. After the war was over Brynych chose to remain a Czech citizen and became a movie director, lensing several projects about the subject of the Holocaust.

The nice bit about the movie presentation was that Brynych made himself available to answer any question concerning the movie. I remember that he said that he chose to cast the Nazis with Jewish actors and those of the inmates with gentiles. He also talked about how Stephen Spielberg had lifted specific images and scenes from his movie and reshot them for use in SCHINDLER'S LIST. Brynych had a fatalist's view of that. You could tell that it upset him to a certain extent, but with a shrug he passed it off. What was he gonna do about it? Nothin', that's what.

He told me that Spielberg had called him once to say that he'd seen and enjoyed TRANSPORT, but had said nothing about the sequences he'd borrowed for LIST. And that was all that he mentioned about that particular subject, which had been brought up when another student had asked him if he'd seen Spielberg's movie.

Anyway, the two are very different films. Of them, I prefer TRANSPORT FROM PARADISE for a number of reasons. One reason is that Brynych of course lived it, emerging from that concentration camp as a teenager. One chilling thing he told me about his experiences watching the rise of the Nazi juggernaut was that as he saw it all unfold, he found the power of the Nazi imagery to be "beautiful". That's the word he used to describe it. (He spoke English fluently and knew exactly what he was saying.)

Also, he told me of one his friends at the camp--a teenager like himself. The kid had been placed in the camp because his father was an SS officer, and his mother was a Jew, (which halachically made the kid a Jew). As an officer in the fanatical SS, his dad had given up his wife and son because they were Jews and he had continued his work as an SS officer.

Brynych said that--in the last weeks before the Red Army liberated them--the kid had gotten his hands on a pistol, somehow. The kid told Brynych of his plan to sneak out of the camp (there were still guards there at that point) and to find his father who was quartered nearby and kill him with the gun. Apparently the kid did get out of the camp, but returned later, dejected, having crept back in. The teen had tried to find his father, but in the chaos created by the advancing Soviet troops, the SS-man was nowhere to be found.

This opened up a whole notebook full of questions I wanted to ask Brynych, but I never got the chance as he had to leave for other meetings.

I still have those questions, but Brynych is no longer among the living, and I am left with the mysteries of them.

Carefully framed shot from Brynych's TRANSPORT FROM PARADISE.

This is the only video clip I could find from the film on the Internet. Closing shots, but it does give one an impression of the atmosphere that Brynych created for the movie.

History My Schools Didn't Teach Me

When I was a kid my mom used to sit me down and show me books with Jews in them. I'm talking when I was reeeeeeeeeeally young. Maybe five years old. She had books with pictures in them of people in various traditional Jewish garb and photos of people living in kibbutzim. Of course at that age I didn't know why she was doing this. Later I learned it was because she was half-Jewish and she wanted me to know a little about shared culture and heritage.

By the time I was eight years old she was teaching me about the Holocaust. Nothing too graphic, but letting me know that one group could try to exterminate another out of pure hatred over differences.

All during these same years I was tagging along with my father and older brothers on Indian relic hunts. That's what we all called them. My dad would load up shovels and earth sifters in the truck and let me know that we were going "Indian relic hunting". I loved these trips! We'd go to various rural spots. Sometimes deep woods, sometimes farms where land owners had given my dad permission to dig. My favorites were when we'd walk through corn fields or bean fields after a hard rain and the ancient tools would be sitting right on top of the ground waiting to be picked up.

My dad taught me that long before our people were here (the Europeans), the native folk had occupied the country. And he explained to me how their lands had been stolen from them and how they'd been exterminated--entire nations. Most kids might not have believed such tales, but I knew it for a fact, for I was walking on acre after acre, mile after mile of the things those ancient people had left behind. Almost everywhere you looked in the open spaces of the rural south one could find the signs that Indians had left. And it hit me:

There had been MILLIONS of these people! And now there didn't seem to be ANY!

In fact, I'd never seen a real Indian. My dad had once had a friend named Ben Gess who was a Cherokee, but he'd moved away. And my oldest brother's father-in-law was half Cherokee, but I'd never met a real Indian, nor seen one.

We'd killed most of them, and I knew it.

Not too long ago I went for a hike in a local state park. This park has exposed rock in it made of rhyolite which is volcanic in origin and very hard and very brittle. It makes good tools. With just about every step you take in that park you are treading on the remnants of tools. For thousands of years Indians went to this place to mine the rhyolite and make tools with it. The flakes of their industry are simply everywhere the dirt has been turned.

As I was hiking down a trail I spotted a big pine tree that had recently blown over. I decided to look into the root ball to see if there was anything interesting lodged there and pushed up by the fall of the tree. Reaching in, I immediately found what is known among the archeological set as a "blank". That's a bit of worked stone that can be turned into any one of a number of tools. It could be a hand axe, a knife, a spearhead, a drill, an awl, a scraper, a celt...you get the idea. This was a particularly good blank. For some reason the craftsman who'd made it thousands of years before had cast it aside. Why? Hell if I know. Maybe he had enough material to work with already. Maybe he was a perfectionist and there was some kind of minor flaw in the stone. I don't know.

What I do know is that this land was once filled with different nations than my own. And now they're all gone.

And because my parents were who they were and taught me the things they did, I know why those people are no longer here:

The Holocaust was not a new idea.

When I was finished looking at the blank, I put it back into the Earth.

And for those of you who get your news and history from the USA propaganda wagons, do yourself a favor and read this brief bit about Haiti.