Babiy Yar - The Forgotten Crime

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Movie
German title Babiy Yar - The Forgotten Crime
Original title Babiy Yar
Country of production Germany , Belarus
original language German , Russian
Publishing year 2003
length 108 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Jeff Kanew
script Artur Brauner
Stephen Glantz
production Artur Brauner
music Walter Werzowa
camera Sergei Bondarew
Tatiana Loginova
A. F. Rud
cut Artur Brauner
Jeff Kanew
occupation

Babij Yar - The Forgotten Crime is a German-Belarusian coproduction of a film by US director Jeff Kanew from 2003 about the Babyn Yar massacre on September 29 and 30, 1941 , in which 33,771 Jews were from the SS and the Wehrmacht were killed.

action

1941: The Lerner and Onufrienko families live in a semi-detached house on the outskirts of Kiev . Their children grew up together and the families can look back on twenty years of friendship. At first the young people are happy when a bomb strike kills all the fish in the river, but suddenly they find themselves in the midst of corpses floating in the river, because the advancing Germans have massacred the Jews. Grandfather Genadij doesn't want to believe that. He worked as a photographer for the Germans in Berlin and is very fond of the Germans. His attitude of refusal is only shaken when days later he discovers Jewish refugees in his stable talking about massacres. But the family continues to refuse to flee from the approaching Germans.

Your neighbor Lena Onufrienko has long been jealous of the more educated, Jewish family. Now their envy turns into greed and hatred. She thinks that if the neighbors had to flee, her daughter could move into the half of the house. But it is not so easy for the Lerner family to escape because Sascha Lerner was shot in the legs during the war. He is in the hospital and can no longer walk. Only when Genadij Lerner witnesses how the elders of the synagogue are burned alive on a pig cart does the situation change. Genadij denies being a Jew, throws horse droppings at the elders and barely gets away with his life. Together with the quartered refugee, the Lerners plan a daring escape, but their plans are overheard by the envious neighbor Lena Onufrienko. In the meantime the German soldiers occupy Kiev. Many citizens, including Lena Onufrienko, give them a warm welcome. This behavior leads to a row between Lena and her husband.

The German Colonel Paul Blobel hatches a perfidious plan to kill the Jews from Kiev. The people are brought to the Babij Yar Gorge (German: Grandmother's Gorge), registered there and then shot in the gorge. So that people come to the gorge voluntarily, they are told to be relocated. With the help of Lena Onufrienko's son Stepan, the Lerner family and the Jewish refugees manage to escape at breakneck speed. Stepan stole a horse and a cart from the horse smuggler. But Stepan's greedy mother Lena reports that the Germans' fugitive neighbors are partisans. She doesn't know that her own son Stepan is leading the fugitives.

The Germans quickly find the trail of the fugitives and put them in the forest. Only Stepan and Franka, who left the group to buy a boat, escape. Grandfather Genadij is shot in the forest, the rest of the group is taken away. In prison, the Germans feign friendship and claim that they have found it to be a mistake. But instead of being sent to a better future, the group ends up at the gorge and is shot. The greedy neighbor Lena Onufrienko is not doing much better. She is picked up by the Germans because she made a false report. As a punishment she was sent into the stream of the Jews and later shot.

Reviews

"An oppressive drama, the enlightening and emotional effect of which, however, is thwarted by the direction, which is overburdened both thematically and staged."

- Lexicon of international film

“All the characters only stand for stereotypes: the helpless Jew and the resistance fighter, the informer and the helper, the ice-cold Nazi. For the European market one would have wished for a more sensitive direction. Especially since the actors, especially Katrin Sass and Michael Degen, are left here all alone. 'Babiy Yar' wins, that is his major shortcoming, only then gains strength when his characters lose themselves in the mass of the massacre. "

- The world of July 3, 2003

“The strength and weakness of the film is the fact that Kanew never tries to approach the murder symbolically, like Roman Polański or Roberto Benigni . As if there had never been a debate about the problem of portraying the Holocaust, Kanew simply films the horror. And hardly a stereotype of the portrayal of mass murder should be missing - one would have thought that such a film is no longer possible today. […] As sad as all this is, as close as it is to one, the makers try to allow a few glimmers of hope in the story. "

- Bavarian television

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Babiy Yar - The Forgotten Crime. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed April 7, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  2. ↑ zdr: Relentless and radical: Artur Brauner's "Babij Jar". In: welt.de . July 2, 2003, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  3. ↑ http://br-online.de/kultur-szene/film/kino/0308/00023/ ( Memento from October 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive )