The first thing I discovered is it was based on a novel by a certain Vercors, pseudonym of Jean Bruller, a man who lived the occupation of France by the German and even became a member of the resistance. I already have the novella too, it is extremely short so it is possible that any day soon I will have read it as well.
Katrina lived the occupation of Prague by German soldiers, so I perfectly know how the French felt when the German occupied France. The country doesn’t matter, nationality doesn’t matter: a bunch of strangers burst in our works and our homes, exactly as happens at the begining of the movie. They hijack your life and your future. You can accept it and it will be bad. You can resist and it will be even worse. Katrina lived with a German man and I have reasons to think he was her father, though he never wanted to acknowledge it. So she worked for him, while she was studying to become a nurse. I guess before the war it was normal that European citizens emigratred from some countries to other ones; and once the war was declared, then you were not a welcome citizen anymore. Now you are the enemy.
The silence of the two dwellers of the house before the presence of the captain in their own home reminded me a lot of the situation we used to live at the hospital. Growing tension and fear, a lot of fear, because you don’t know whether or not you are safe, you don’t know whether or not those military men are «decent», as the grandfather rightly mentions at the beginning. Even someone with a decent appearance might end up transformed into a monster or simply being forced to do something they don’t want to.
The rest, they are just humans trying to survive in unusual situations, and making decisions more or less dangerous according to each one’s sense of justice. Exactly the same as I saw in my memories: no more than lost humans; suffering, being cold, hungry and scared; a woman like me feels fortunate if one more day comes to an end and nobody has sexually assaulted her; trying to survive in a world gone mad, in which the valor of life has gone down to zero overnight. Beneath the uniform there are still ordinary people, with their mundane professions, with their dreams and yearnings, people that, like me, keep the picture of their loved ones among the yellowish pages of books that have become their most precious possession.
When I was a kid and knew nothing about all this, I wrote a short story about a terribly tired and ragged young woman who ended up in a beach to see her last dawn. A very bright light began to grow in the sky and carried everything away, as if in some kind of apocalypse. Now I have no doubt this was a clear reflection of my memories, still subconscious. Perhaps the morning of my last day in France I visited the beach to say goodbye to the sea and humanity; perhaps I had already made my mind and that night I would die by the hand of a German soldier who would shoot me down as soon as he felt me as a threat. Now I know right after my death I woke up surrounded by a calming, peaceful and very bright light.
That silence, filled with sadness and rage, would accompany me during all my adolescence and a great part of my youth in my current life. And it is still a part of my soul, the one that tears apart every time I gaze at a humanity that walks straight to commit the same mistakes.