Unlike most war stories, this one actually takes place after
the war is over, in 1946-47 when orphaned German children separated from their
families attempted to make arduous journeys through Russian occupied territory
across Poland into Lithuania in hopes that distant relatives or friends might
take them in. Written by the director,
the story is inspired by true events occurring within his own family, where
many who successfully traveled to Lithuania were secretly forced to work for
farmers in exchange for food. While it’s
unfortunate the film comes on the heels of Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012),
an exquisite film that probes more deeply into the question of the heavily
stigmatized psychological shame of German defeat, it should also be pointed out
that some 12 to 14 million German people living in German occupied territories
during the war had to be transported back to Germany, becoming the largest
transfer of any population in modern European history. It was this group, mostly women and children,
which were the most severely mistreated before they were ultimately transported
back to Germany. Thousands died in
forced labor camps, millions died of hunger and deprivation, while as many as 2
million women and girls were raped by members of the Soviet Red Army, some as
many as 60 or 70 times. Ostermann’s
film, on the other hand, bears some similarity to Charles Laughton’s The
Night of the Hunter (1955), told almost exclusively through a collective children’s
point of view, having to make their way through a military occupation where
they were continually forced to outrun and escape from uniformed men with
rifles and guns, while also lingering in those quiet moments lying in the high
grass, or next to a tranquil lake, where in contrast to terror and fear, the pastoral
beauty evokes a transcendent harmony or peace.
14-year old Hans (Levin Liam) and his 9-year old younger
brother Fritz (Patrick Lorenczat) are forced to repeat their names in front of
their mother moments before she dies of starvation, a reminder of who they are,
insisting they don’t forget as she sends them on a harrowing journey to a
Lithuanian farm where they once stayed.
Also she makes Hans promise to take care of his younger brother to
insure they don’t get separated, where at night he reads out of geography book
an original description of what appears to be the initial discovery of the
Galapagos Islands, describing how different species of turtles can be traced
back to specific islands, where this peaceful narration of natural harmony is
interspersed between signs of death and deprivation. Almost immediately, under attack from Red
Army gunfire, the brothers get separated attempting to cross a river, where
Hans ends up with a young girl his own age, the overly maternal Christel
(Helena Phil), and two younger kids under her care. While they flee to safety, Hans is tormented
by losing his brother, but in no time that guilt is replaced by hunger, thirst,
and exhaustion, where they’re forced to travel off road as much as possible,
which slows down their pace to a near crawl.
When one of the younger kids gets bitten by a dog and needs medical
care, they have no choice but to entrust him into the care of the local adults
that do pass by on the road. He’s soon
replaced by another kid Paul (Til-Niklas Theinert) wearing no shoes, with Hans
carrying him on his back for most of the duration, looking after him much as he
would his own brother. These small
uprooted groups of wandering children were called wolf children.
There is no sense of time on this journey, as months and
even years may pass, but what’s eerie is how the accumulated numbers slowly
diminish, where kids like Fritz often disappear without a trace, getting
killed, sick, kidnapped by the army, or simply disappear mysteriously, where
the group can’t linger behind and figure it out, but must push ahead. One other observation is how kindly adults
help these kids out, though some may extract a form of payment in return, such
as taking a child’s doll away from them in exchange for food or safety. But the grim reality is a nightmarish odyssey
of brutality, starvation, and death, where these kids repeatedly witness traces
of the dead, the theft and slaughter of a farmer’s livestock, and the
brutalizing of women, where Christel’s maternal generosity soon becomes laced
with a paranoiac fear, where every man becomes a threat to her. Intermixed with the child horrors are
solitary moments of quiet and peace, where the cinematography by Leah Striker
reflects the kind of world Hans reads about in his book, where he curiously
observes frogs, lizards, and grasshoppers along the way, while moments later
he’s racing for safety. The continually
changing environment offers new challenges, where the kids are surprisingly
resilient and adaptive, and often choose to disappear with a helpful adult,
while the others stay together. In the
end, however, Hans ends up fending off dangers on his own, where he’s not the
same kid that set out on this journey, but he’s alive. Given the amount of time the kids wander
through dense woodland forest, there’s a mythical element of the inherent
danger of Hansel and Gretel,
especially every time they come upon a home where some new evil seems to await
them in this often beautiful but overly dour recollection of postwar atrocities.
