Nazi nightmare.

Byline: Mahir Ali

A FEW days ago, I chanced upon a brief feature in The Guardian containing Vanessa Redgrave's lockdown recommendations - movies that one might watch while sheltering from Covid-19. Apart from Ken Loach's entire oeuvre, they included a couple of Soviet war movies.

One of them was The Cranes Are Flying, which I first saw in the 1970s, about 20 years after it was made. It is a harrowing yet inspirational black-and-white masterpiece that has earned its place in World War II filmography alongside Fate of a Man and The Dawns Here Are Quiet. Redgrave also cited a film whose title was unfamiliar to me: Come and See.

An internet search revealed that, not with standing the film's unequivocally anti-fascist theme, its director Elem Klimov struggled with Soviet censors for years before its release in 1985 - whereupon it won several international awards. In Soviet cinemas, some in the audience reputedly fainted or threw up while watching it. For Klimov, this particular filmmaking experience was so traumatising that he never attempted another movie.

The title is evocative of Pablo Neruda's Spanish Civil War poem I'm Explaining a Few Things, which concludes with the invitation: 'Come and see the blood on the streets...'. Coincidentally or otherwise, that civil war was a kind of dress rehearsal for World War II. Who can say how the fate of Europe in the 1940s would have turned out had the EuroApean powers closest to Spain intervened to avert its descent into fascism in the 1930s.

The World War II narrative remains contested territory.

Come and See views Soviet Byelorussia's experience of Nazi occupation through the eyes of a fresh-faced teenager who joins the anti-Nazi partisans, and by the end of the movie resembles an old man. Towards the end, a text on the screen reminds us that in what is today known as Belarus, 623 villages, along with their inhabitants, were incinerated by the Nazis and their collaborators.

One such instance of the genocide is memorialised at Khatyn, not far from Minsk, with the site dominated by a haunting sculpture of one of the very few survivors holding his son's corpse. I gazed upon it as a teenager during a January blizzard many decades ago, and the stark image remains indelibly imprinted on the memory, alongside many of the horror stories surrounding it.

Its experience of Nazi occupation was hardly unique, but Soviet Byelorussia's population diminished by one-fourth between 1941 and 1945. And whereas across...