A dark history
‘1945’ offers a powerful view of a deeply unsettling year in Hungary’s guilty history
The film opens with a Hungarian radio news report that it’s Friday, Aug. 12, 1945, and the United States has dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan. World War II is finally over.
It was over a few months earlier in Hungary, where the folks of a remote little village in the boondocks are still adjusting to the Russian occupation, even as they’re preparing to celebrate the wedding of the Town Clerk’s son.
The Town Clerk (Peter Rudolf) — equivalent to mayor — is a portly, pompous chap whose sole matrimonial advice to his son (Bence Tasnadi) is: “Be hard on her at first, until you get her tamed.”
Meanwhile, a train arrives at the town’s railway station, and two mysterious strangers in black — obviously Orthodox Jews — get off with two large crates. Much alarmed, the stationmaster dashes off to inform the Town Clerk.
Word spreads fast. Why are they all so agitated? What’s in those crates?
Co-written and directed by Ferenc Torok, “1945” zeroes in on the painful period in Hungary’s history when people gave bottles of Champagne to Soviet soldiers and muttered “Drop dead” behind their backs, and when a precious few Jews lucky enough to have survived were coming home to find their former homes legally assigned to their erstwhile gentile neighbors.
“I’m not leaving!” declares one such lady, typically rushing to hide or defend their ill-gotten gains against expected Jewish demands to reclaim property. The local fat priest is among these increasingly freaked-out citizens — variously fearful, remorseful or vicious — forced to face the recent horrors they perpetrated (or just silently tolerated) for their own benefit.
The gritty black-and-white cinematography of “1945” is exquisite. The terrific soundtrack comprises eerily spare, mournful, Asiatic musical tones, befitting Hungarian culture, with a touch of klezmer for the Jewish side — plus ticking clocks, clip-clopping horses and lingering silences. The final Kriah — a tearing of clothing, in an ancient biblical expression of grief and anger, is heart-rending.
Mr. Torok’s powerfully absorbing tale juggles multiple characters and themes — guilt, greed, justice. It’s imperfect, but it has a crucial message about the complicity of “little people” in the context of unfathomably bigger crimes — people who facilitated the last (and most brutally senseless and “efficient”) stage of the Holocaust, just 14 months earlier. Its two great parallel moral outrages:
No. 1: With the Allies rapidly approaching and the end of the Third Reich in sight, Hitler, in his insanity, was more concerned with the genocide than the war: Between May and July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were rounded up and sent to die in Auschwitz. Their deportation was organized and executed entirely by Hungarian fascists themselves, in eight weeks. Their devotion to the cause surprised even Adolf Eichmann, who needed just 20 SS officers to supervise the operation.
No. 2: The Allies’ priority was precisely the opposite. By then, the Americans and the British were well aware of the rapidly ongoing exterminations, and a few bombing raids on the railroad lines would have stopped it. But they were more concerned with saving resources for military targets.
Hungary and Hungarian life is rife with “unprocessed trauma,” not least its fast, mind-numbing switcheroo from fascism to communism. The tragic fate of Hungarian Jewry in WWII is more horrendously riveting in the 2016 Oscar-winning Holocaust drama “Son of Saul.” But “1945” is a sociocultural, not political, examination of the sad subject.
Multiplied by millions throughout Europe, there’s still a helluva lot of bad karma running around loose among those complicit folks — and their heirs. And still, endless Lamentations among the heirs of the victims. You can’t bury 6 million, but by God you can symbolically bury one.
(In Hungarian and Russian with English subtitles. Playing at AMC Waterfront.)