Holocaust | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Son of Saul (2015).

Aesthetically perfect movie with a protagonist’s tunnel vision style that works, an actual reasoning behind it – it’s the antithesis of the self-indulgent. Much more than a ‘noble’, culturally significant picture, it’s as honest with its brutality as you can get, and vice versa. It did recall for me One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and uses all the tools of cinematic technique to tell a story so gripping, relentless, and powerful in its immediacy.

A searing portrait of Hell on Earth, this is not a film you’ll forget.

Proper art.

Auschwitz – January 2015.

I arrive in Auschwitz the day after the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by the Red Army. I ramble around in a miserable blizzard, apropos of nothing. I find it difficult to connect myself to the suffering; it’s an alien place to me. An unspeakable crime, I struggle to put myself in that moment in time. Is this what human beings are capable of? It seems so. I depart in a foul mood, which is merely compounded by a flick through the news headlines later that day – murder, bloodshed, war, carnage. Welcome to Earth, I guess. I arrive back in Kraków and immediately hit the beers and vodka. Horrible history.