'Night And Fog' & 'Come And See'

Two films that project the darkest time in modern history in different ways.

Night and Fog is a French documentary. Released 10 years after the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. It was written and scored by Holocaust survivors.

It's dark (as you can imagine) and it includes stock footage from the camps in addition to current day (1955) footage from the camps.

Come and See is a Russian film released 40 years after liberation, but 46 years after the event of the picture. It is the perfect film, if there is one. Let's just say if there were a tournament, my entry would be Come and See.

Set in Belarus during the 1941 Nazi blitzkrieg toward Moscow, the film shows two boys attempting to find a buried rifle in order to join the Russian partisans fighting the German invaders. Our protagonist finds the rifle. He later meets a young girl and the pair set off for his home. There he finds his family has been slaughtered. Later, when the Germans arrive in a neighboring village, he hides out and escapes death while watching an entire village perish in a church fire, trapt.

This is a heartbreaking film. We see our hero -- a young boy -- grow old and weary with age. He become an old man within hours as a lifetime of disaster and death passes before his bagged eyes.

Belarus had 209 of its 290 cities and villages wiped off the map. Between two to three million Belarusians perished, nearly a quarter of the overall population. The country's population numbers didn't recover until 1971. The Jewish population of the country never recovered.