By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – The AMC in La Jolla and the Angelika Film Center in the Carmel Mountain area will begin screening on Friday, June 1, the suspenseful Hungarian film 1945 in which the arrival on a train immediately after the Holocaust on an elderly Orthodox Jewish man and his son throws a provincial town into a panic.
As soon as the father and son (respectively portrayed by Ivan Angelusz and Marcell Nagy) arrive, they hire a horse and wagon to take two large boxes to their destination. Rather than ride in the wagon with the driver’s older son, the two Jews walk solemnly behind the wagon, hardly ever looking to their right or their left.
The stationmaster (Istvan Znamenak) tells the wagon driver to go slowly; he wants to get to the village first in order to warn the residents, who coincidentally are preparing for the wedding between Arpad (Bence Tasnadi) and Kisrozsi (Dora Sztarenki), who secretly loves another man. Arpad, now the owner of a drug store previously operated by Jews who had been arrested by the Germans, is the son of Istvan (Peter Rudolf), the town clerk whose position is like that of a small-town mayor.
The wedding would have been enough to occupy the village people’s thoughts—which otherwise tended to focus on their resentment against their new Russian Communist occupiers—but the pending arrival of the Jews quickly became Topic A. Rumors flew about what might be the contents of the two large boxes – could there be new supplies and cosmetics for the drug store now run by Arpad? And what were the Jews’ intentions? Were they agents for the Jews who previously had lived in the village? Were they going to try to reclaim the confiscated property?
The memories of the Jewish townspeople having beien dragged away by the Nazis still were still very fresh and raw in the village people’s minds. Although anti- Semitism was an indigenous disease, the virulent Nazi German variety had not been experienced until 1944, just a year previously. Although the town clerk and other important villagers had conspired with the Nazis, not everyone was in sympathy with the unjust manner in which the Jews’ livelihoods (and later their lives) were stolen from them. Certainly, young Arpad was appalled by what had happened; and so was Kustar (Jozsef Szarvas), who had been given the home of one Jewish family. Guilt-ridden and alcoholic, Kustar was thrown into a moral panic as the Jews approached.
As suspicion, guilt, and fear take over the mood of the town, viewers—especially Jewish viewers—may feel the tension rising within them as well. Will the townspeople preemptively strike these two vulnerable Jews, who have come for who knows what reason?
Director Ferenc Torok has created a masterful account about postwar life outside of Budapest. Little details in this black-and-white period piece—such as the dusty, unpaved roads, the party-line telephones that don’t work, a gloomy little tavern where beer is pumped into a stein, and villagers still relying on horses and bicycles for transportation (although the Russian soldiers have jeeps) – paint a realistic picture of the period.
This is one movie every member of our community could benefit from seeing.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
The Russians had quite a bit of American hardware that the US supplied during the war, so having jeeps is not unconceivable. Now if you watch the great movie Patton, there are tons of errors in equipment. It really takes away some credibility for an otherwise amazing movie.