William Neil

I just happened to be reading Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands," which is an account of the crimes of Stalin and of Hitler in Central Eastern Europe: Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the opening chapters of Simon Schama's "Landscape and Memory" which covers some of the same terrain, forest and marsh that were the scene of the horrific crimes of both sides. In the sense of the inner civil wars in these regions, the movie 72 hours captures a good part, and accurately, of the viciousness and betrayals that went on, not only during WWII under the Germans, but before the war with Stalin's purges. The female judge of this 1956 "trial" seems to be cast in a more humane way that what occurred under Stalin; after all it is during the Khrushchev thaw in internal Soviet rampages against its own citizens. If it's understated in this way, and linking it to the two books I mentioned, it meshes with the mood and techniques of the earlier movie "Come and See," which I also highly recommend. Not intended as such, I am sure, yet it is a warning to we Americans, my sense here, to wake up and realize what civil wars and ideological wars mean in the end. In the German WWII sense, where racial demonization by unscrupulous leaders can lead. And in the Stalinesque sense, where the religious intensity of the 16th century translated in political ideology might end up. It's very hard for the average American to comprehend these years, the closest we having come was the guerilla fighting during our own Revolution, and during our Civil War, and if historian Rick Perlstein has it right, a milder version during the domestic strains over the Vietnam War. We don't want to go there, and these two movies show us why. For tens of millions died without the justice which is finally served up here at the end of 72 hours. Thumbs up: Look and see.