Out of the Forest Limor Pinhasov, Ben Yusof & Yaron Kaftori Israel 2003
It is no surprise that the opening shots of this documentary show gauze lacy windows. What secrets do these houses hold? Beyond is the forest where a massacre took place. Systematic regimented slaughter on a scale taught to us by the Second World War. In excess of one hundred thousand Jews were shot in the wood outside of Polnar, a small non-descript Lithuanian town near the Polish border, during that conflict. Out of the Forest as the name implies leaves the hellish location of this mass cull behind, examining the damaging consequences of living outside yet around an executioners block and charnel pit on a scale unknown until then.
Galvanised by the discovery of a hidden diary discovered in the 1990s, written by Kazimierz Sakowicz a Pole living nearby, Out of the Forest examines the effect residing so near to the origination of the not so strange noises coming from the wood had upon those who knew or suspected what was actually occurring. The filmmakers interview the residents old enough to remember this period with the simple question lodged in the back of our minds and theirs: Why did you tolerate this? Unasked until the end, the documentary uses Sakowicz’ diary as a framework to look at the situation, by interviewing mostly those who recall it and some who react to the macabre history of the town.
Unflinchingly and brutally reminiscent of the works of Claude Lanzman, several survivors relate their near miraculous escapes yet this isn’t their story, marking Out of the Forest as nearer to Marcel Ophüls’ epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity. No one interviewed goes as far as admitting guilt, but the evidence is a damming portrayal of insular, deliberate, ignorance recognisable to the present day in debacles such as the recent incident where a collapsed unconscious woman was ignored by at least a dozen passing motorists on a South-East London street.
Confusion leads to collaboration as interviewees disagree over who the executioners were: German, Czech or the unpalatable truth, Lithuanians. Lots of dirty little, near anecdotal details follow form the sons and daughters of this community now old themselves. Culpably free by virtue of their age the details accumulate over who sold the clothes of the victims, who bought them, who billeted the executioners and on and on. Sparing the hard questions until Partisan activity rose in response to the German retreat the film then starts to question outright the thoughts an audience has been led to: why didn’t you do anything. Even remembering that these are the offspring of the wartime residents makes for uncomfortable viewing in the extreme; a village is gently given enough rope to hang itself with enough slack to implicate the rest of humanity, through repeated retellings of incidents where escapees are denied sanctuary and inevitably shot. All told repugnantly to the baying mantra of ‘what else could we do’.
How responsible we are for our friends and neighbours is at the core of many a political debate and the subject carries direct parallels through to the present with similar episodes of mass murder and ethnic cleansing taking place in both Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. In a similar vein to Schindler's List, Don Cheadle will soon be seen playing the proprietor of a Rwandan hotel in Hotel Rwanda. Thankfully few of us are placed in the dilemma of living near a death camp but as a consequence this film shows some of the effects. Notably one interviewee didn’t marry until very late and shows clear signs of despondency in this film.
The following quote is far from original for this subject matter yet perennially apt not least for the wartime citizens of Polnar who had to live alongside some of the worst abnegations of humanity imaginable.
‘When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
