The Reader…black words on white paper and lots of gray in between.

Yesterday I saw The Reader, the post WWII Germany film starring Kate Winslet in her Oscar winning performance.  The film opens when a teenage boy, Michael, becomes ill and is helped home by a stranger, Hanna, a woman twice his age. The two begin a secretive love affair centered on the fact that Hanna loves being read to. Among the books Michael reads to her are “The Odyssey,” “Huck Finn” and “The Lady with the Little Dog.”  Hanna inexplicably disappears one day and Michael is left behind confused and with a broken heart. Eight years later, Michael’s law class is observing the Nazi war crime trials in Berlin.  He is stunned to see Hanna after all these years as a defendant in the courtroom. The memoir of a holocaust survivor has revealed Hanna’s past as an SS prison guard at Auschwitz. During the testimony Michael realizes Hanna’s secret, one that will clear her of the most severe of the sentences, the leader of the guards and the author of a damning incident report of a fire and resulting death of prisoners.  Hanna does not know how to read, but will accept imprisonment for the rest of her life rather than admit the shame of illiteracy.  The Reader is a story about truth and reconciliation, about how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another.

I watched this film in a very small and intimate theater, less than a hundred seats.  Next to me sat my lovely partner, a Jew.  I offered her as much comfort as I could as the story unfolded and the atrocities of a generation were laid open in front of us.  As Michael walked slowing through, Auschwitz, at this point in the movie closed 20 years, we are led on an emotional tour of hell on earth.   Thousands and thousands of shoes, both grown-up size and childishly small, represent the feet of innocent souls marched toward their untimely deaths.  Their crimes no more than the unlawful possession of unpopular DNA.   My loved one’s tears fell as a testament to her people, unknown, but family nonetheless, whose sacrifice was unfathomable.  But intimately knowing her vast and caring heart, I know her tears also fell for the woman, Hanna, who asked the question, “If you were I, what would you have done?”  She simply answered an advertisement in the newspaper for prison guards, a position that required no literary skills.

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The black and white of this story is the fact six million Jews along with the handicapped, the infirm, the gypsy, and the homosexual perished at the hands of Nazi Germany.  Unspeakable acts of cruelty were inflicted on innocent people.  How can you feel any pity on a woman, who in the name of doing her duty let 300 women and children burn to death in a locked church?  I believe the answer comes from the presence of humanity and the ability of a conscious heart to recognize the gray areas of life.

Though I could never know what it was like to grow up in a Nazi Germany, I was born into a segregated South. It is noted in several texts of history that based on his readings of how blacks were denied civil rights in the southern states in America, Hitler attempted to make life so unpleasant for Jews in Germany that they would emigrate, eventually culminating in the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race in 1935.

Southern blacks were subjected to brutal violence, unlawful judgments, and sentences of death.  There was no need for symbols of detection sewn to clothing, their skin was the tell.  Ironically the burning symbol of a peaceful Savior foreshadowed the horrors to come.   Didn’t the citizens of Dixie bare the same responsibility we level at the citizens of Deutschland?  Where was the outcry?

In a time of nationalistic pride and a war waged against an unseen enemy, America has engaged in the torture of recently proclaimed innocents.  The ones who dared speak out were voiced down with shouts of traitor, unpatriotic, and anti-American.  We had a Vice President who proclaimed at times of war you have to spend times in the shadows, to walk on the dark side.  How is this more right than wrong?  Because it’s the United States?  I believe our own personal history shows we are not that innocent.

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The black and white begins to blur as we paint large swathes across our own house.  These shades of gray become the impetus of that humanity and the heart I see in my partner.  I see her weep for the loss of her people, but I also see her weep for a woman who, to many, deserves no sympathy.  Though some acts of humankind are unforgivable we must continue to understand that as the black letters line the white pages of history, in between are the gray areas the heart must accept.