| | Tibor,
I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds as if it fits the cynical pattern of always looking in our culture for a flaw, for feet of clay. So as not to be thought of as a "sentimentalist".
And, going further than suspecting the worst of (or writing only about the worst among) the smugglers, it fits in with the lack of respectful attention given to those who resist or have resisted a dictatorship at great risk and cost. One of the most inspiring books I ever read (and an example of great writing) was the true story of the Hungarian Revolution and the heroic people who emerged from all walks of life, risking everything. Parents defying the informers and risking slave labor camps by systematically undoing what the schools had done and teaching their children 'counter-revolutionary' ideas about freedom late at night at home for years prior to the revolt. Young adolescents fighting heavily-armored tanks with their bare hands and "Molotov cocktails".
It was pieced together after the fact by the famed writer James Michener acting as journalist, not a best-selling fiction writer this time: "The Bridge at Andau". (I taught it to my literature and composition class this past year.)
The title comes from a tiny footbridge over a swamp near the Austrian border, which happened to be a chokepoint across which hundreds of thousands of Hungarian freedom fighters and other refugees fled as the revolution was crushed. And where the world press, including a world famous author gathered to interview them (and in Michener's case, to help some of the weaker one across the bridge and past the barbed wire and dogs and guns.) Michener's words:
"It was about the most inconsequential bridge in Europe, but by an accident of history it became, for a few flaming weeks, one of the most important bridges in the world, for across its unsteady planks fled the soul of a nation."
Moving and powerful writing to a fourteen-year old mind.
And to the adult mind those words played a part in molding, they echo still.
(Edited by Philip Coates on 1/21, 2:04pm)
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