Surely, as a film about the Holocaust, there are plenty of scenes that lingered on in my mind for a few weeks. The arbitrary slaughter of a whole family with no reason, the “line-up and be killed game” happening at every second, the hunger that turned an old man into a robber and made him lick the dirty ground when the food was spilt during the fight, the tears that burst out of Szpilman’s eyes when Hosenfeld hid him instead of shooting him…I didn’t cry as Mag did when she saw the film the first time, but the scenes haunted me on and ever.

However, the greatest sighs this film suggested, for me, is that humanity repeats itself over and over, just like history. The simple but staggering fact was that the Soviet people treated all the Germans very similar to, if not exactly like, how the Germans once treated the Jewish. One might argue that there had not been another bloody massacre, but alas! How many things are underneath the hood that history did not record. Failing to be released by any of the Jewish people he once helped, Hosenfeld died after harsh labour and torture from from a rupture of the thoracic aorta in the Soviet Captivity.

Admittedly there are something that rules the wars in general, which way they’re “good”, and which way they’re “bad”, etc.. But by some analysis, those rules can possibly all be deducted by the conflicts, the battles, and the balances of interests. We appreciate and cherish the fact that there are many people who are kind and sensible, but we also have to see that human minds are easily distorted, and every human being doing horrible things believe nearly 100% that they are righteous and just. We have to admit that there are some corners in every human’s deep recesses of mind that hides a Satan, and once our minds were distorted to the extent that we let them out, they would bring us strange pleasure of attack and hurting. We cannot really define this as anyone’s “fault”, however, since this is how humanity is. In a “less bloody” example as on today’s social media, there are billions of people who, once think they are “at the right side”, and more importantly, “will do all these things anonymously and still retain the interest of themselves”, slander and hurl malicious abuse all around, and–every day. These people, who don’t carry guns or swords, are actually killing, since we cannot hear about too many cases that people die from public rumours–but we cannot just be looking at “these people” in contempt, because anyone in us cannot assert that we are not doing such things ourselves sometimes. The pleasure of hurting, once triggered, could turn a normal person into a devil. And this “hidden evil feeling” is omnipresent, regardless of nationality. But we can’t say arbitrarily that “we must tame and eliminate it to make this world a better place”, because in some extreme cases this devil might be useful–that’s how we live in this world. Like Sisyphus, we are just constantly wrestling with our inner evils, and sometimes disasters happen because we lose control.

We earthly creatures!

One other thing that makes me feel bad about this film was that Szpilman seemed to have forgotten Hosenfeld really quickly and didn’t bother much to search for him. But upon some further research, this might be just how the film was–Szpilman actually searched really hard and still couldn’t change the tragedy; he did many other good things instead. But that’s another story. History is just like a sieve that rushes through every human being, and there are souls who shine after this cruel process, although they may or may not win over the fate that is looming large, which is determined by the behaviour of the mass, rather than the individual.