Zwartboek.

Tonight I watched “The Black Book,” a Dutch film set in Holland during the Nazi reign in World War II. It stars Carice Van Houten as Rachel Stein (under the alias of Ellis De Vries), a gorgeous Jewish woman who must use her feminine wiles to survive. She dyes all the brown hair on her body blonde, seduces the head of Gestapo, and cracks down on post-WW II crime. Basically, she is the femme fatale, without all the negative connotations.

But at what price? She watches her family get shot, falls in love with a German officer who eventually dies, is almost executed or killed countless times, and—in one of the final acts of humiliation—has a cauldron filled with feces poured onto her body. And somehow, she manages to persevere and press on.

The same can be said of millions of people around the world today. People around the world much younger than I have to deal with issues that I hope my family, friends, and I will never have to go through and somehow, they manage to wake up in the mornings and continue with their days.

Living in middle class America, I’m allowed to sit around and ponder whether or not I should be an English teacher or a journalist; I don’t need to feel obligated—says this society—to think about the families that have been torn apart by war or brutality. I can contemplate whether or not I want to lose five or ten pounds this summer, while there are mothers my age wondering if they will have enough to feed their malnourished children. Is there something wrong here?

By the end of the movie—and this should be no shock, as we all have taken a history course at some point in our lives—the Canadians come in and free the Dutch from Nazi power. Up until this point, the movie had been filled with lavish, hedonistic Nazi celebrations for the Fuhrer’s birthday or simply for the heck of it. Once the war was over, though, the tables turned and the Canadians, Dutch, and others who had been victimized by the Nazis set out to party. What ends up happening is that they turn around and act exactly as Hitler and his Third Reich had acted beforehand. They put the Nazi sympathizers in cages, shave the heads of Nazi women, and even force the Nazis to bear their extremities during a drunken stupor. One doctor even stands on his balcony like a miniature Adolf Hitler. The similarities are rather pathetic.

Is that what we are destined to do for the rest of existence—repeat the mistakes of those who came before us? Are we as human beings always going to believe that our problems and the sins that were committed against us merit our retaliation? And—not meaning to wax romantic dreamer here but—are we going to always ignore the struggles of those less fortunate than us, or will we step up one of these days and help?

Watch “Zwartboek” if you get the chance. It’s a well-made movie and incites quite a bit of thought, it seems.