Green Border 2023 Agnieszka Holland's New Film

 

Green Border
A new film about Europe's migrant crisis is making headlines

 

Green Border, in Polish, Zielona Granica, is a 2023 feature film. The film depicts the Belarus – European Union Border Crisis that began in 2021 and continues today. Polish film industry veteran, 75-year-old Agnieszka Holland, directed Green Border, co-produced it, and co-wrote the script. Polish government officials condemned the film. Holland has received death threats and she requires security. Green Border champions activists who provide food, medicine, foot massages, and legal advice to migrants. This reviewer believes that Green Border is well-made and well-meaning but incorrect.

 

Belarus is a small, poor country. As recently as 1959, 70% of its population was rural. Belarus is located between Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Baltic nations. For most of its history, Belarus was part of larger political entities. Between World Wars I and II, Belarus was divided between Poland and the U.S.S.R.

 

Belarus suffered some of the worst devastation during World War II. As Wikipedia summarizes, "Belarus lost a quarter of its pre-war population … including practically all its intellectual elite. About 9,200 villages and 1,200,000 houses were destroyed … Minsk and Vitebsk lost over 80% of their buildings." Randal Olson's chart places Belarus as the worst affected nation during World War II. After World War II, the entirety of Belarus fell under the U.S.S.R.'s borders.

 

Belarus gained nominal independence in 1991 after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Alexander Lukashenko has held power since 1994. He is called "Europe's last dictator." Citing Lukashenko's oppressive government, Western nations have limited relations. Lukashenko has increased reliance on Vladimir Putin.

 

In 2021, Belarus began orchestrating a border crisis with the European Union nations of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. In an act of "hybrid warfare," Belarus invited Middle Eastern and African migrants to Belarus, and urged these migrants to crash through the nation's borders into the European Union. Forests and swamps straddle much of the border. Bialowieza is a remnant of primeval forest. It includes one of Europe's last remaining populations of buffalo, as well as wolves, lynx, moose, and wild boar. Swamps and rivers dot the area. It takes an experienced outdoorsperson safely to traverse this terrain.

 

Polish border guards returned to Belarus migrants who made it through the border. The international community and the press condemned Poland as a racist and heartless country.

 

Belarus' callous exploitation of desperate migrants served Putin's goal to humiliate and overwhelm the European Union. Putin and Lukashenko, both autocrats, could point to European Union countries' attempts to protect their borders and say, "See the chaos? See the cruelty of the border guards refusing entry to desperate wayfarers? So-called democracies are no better than autocracies."

 

Agnieszka Holland has been an activist as well as a productive artist for decades. Nazis murdered Holland's paternal grandparents, who were Jewish. Her father, Henryk Holland was, as a youth, a Communist activist. He became a journalist and sociologist. When Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939, he participated in Poland's defense. He was an active Communist in post-war Poland. Eventually the Party turned on him and, during an extensive interrogation, Holland committed suicide, or, perhaps, Communists defenestrated him.

 

After her father's death, the young Agnieszka "went dead for a while." "Certainly the mystery of my father's death has played a big role in my art," Holland told the New York Times in 1993. "It gave me a kind of rebellion, I think." Holland's sister reports, "Because of what happened, there is a kind of fear at the center of our lives. A feeling of something not cleared up. A sense that things could always turn for the worse."

 

Holland's mother, Irena Rybczynska, was Catholic. Rybczynska fought Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising. "My mother was a very young girl … She was in the Polish underground. She helped several Jewish people, and she's held the title of the Righteous among the Nations. In some way, you know, those two sides of the stories are part of my identity," Holland told NPR in 2012.

 

Holland witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 and was imprisoned in Czechoslovakia. Holland has resisted not just Soviet Communism, but also Hollywood consumerism. She went on strike when Hollywood's "sausage policy" threatened the quality of her 1993 film The Secret Garden.

 

Holland doesn't just make good movies. She inspires good movies. She was uncredited as assistant director on Andrzej Wajda's 1977 film Man of Marble. Public acknowledgement of her role on that historic protest against Stalinism might have damaged her career. Man of Marble stars Krystyna Janda as a crusading filmmaker who is thwarted at every turn as she attempts to expose Stalinist manipulation of the masses. The crusader is named "Agnieszka," after the real life crusader who inspired her character.

 

In 1997, the Washington Post warned, "Don't look for happy endings in Agnieszka Holland's movies …  she's been exiled from Poland, jailed by the Czechs and condemned as an antisemite even though she's half Jewish … At 21, she went to jail for six weeks for her work with the underground press … Holland's cell was between … two inmates who had fallen in love. It became her job to pass erotic notes from one to the other. 'It was like phone sex and I was the cable,' she remembers."

 

The Post quotes Holland. "I think that anyone's life is not something that should lead you to the optimism … You are born … you get older and older and older, and sick and you die and it's nothing optimistic in this story."

 

Holland's films include Europa Europa, In Darkness, and Mr. Jones. The first two films concern the Holocaust; the final film addresses the Holodomor, a Stalinist-imposed famine in Ukraine. Holland's films have won several prominent awards; a full list is here.

 

Agnieszka Holland has long been one of my personal heroes. I don't just admire her; I love her. I met her once. It was at a screening. I approached; she was one in a knot of women dressed in black in an emptying theater. I was shy and whatever I could summon the courage to mutter did not impress her retinue. That awkward, disappointing, and brief encounter did nothing to diminish my admiration.

 

The first Holland film I ever saw was 1981's Kobieta Samotna, A Woman Alone. A poor single mother who is not especially rich, pretty, or connected struggles with a life of petty roadblocks and humiliations. Solidarity is reviving Polish society's hopes but Irena may as well live on another planet than the one occupied by young people marching through her street chanting about a new world. Eventually (spoiler alert) her none-too-bright lover places a pillow over her face and sits on her till she stops struggling.

 

I next watched Angry Harvest from 1985. A Polish farmer, really wanting to do a good deed, hides a Jewish woman, who ends up dead, anyway. Mr. Jones, 2019, includes an unforgettable scene where a crusading Welsh journalist, the real Gareth Jones, travels through famine-stricken Ukraine. Children invite him to share their meal. When he asks where they found this meat, they reply, laconically, "Kolya," the name of their brother. When Jones discovers just what this means, he vomits. Grim? Sure. But I love Holland, and her films, because she depicts people most filmmakers never pay any attention to.

 

And I love her courage. She took on an untouchable powerhouse, Claude Lanzmann, director of the 1985 documentary Shoah. He denounced her as an antisemite. She gave as good as she got. "He's an incredibly unpleasant man … a megalomaniac."

 

I also loved Holland because when I was working on my book about the Brute Polak stereotype, it was easy for me to find Jews who criticized Poland, and easy to find Poles who defended Poland. It was hard to find that voice that was not tribal, but invested in truth. In response to Lanzmann, Holland said, defiantly, and truthfully, "Mr. Lanzmann thinks he owns the story of the Holocaust, and I suspect he hates every living Jew … The fact is there were Communist Jews who worked for the secret police after the war and tortured Polish patriots, and so on, and so on. Jews are not without guilt."

 

Green Border is different from most of Holland's other films. It's different in the amount of attention it is receiving. Holland's films are often for smaller audiences. Holland's other films are often ambiguous. The 2011 film, In Darkness, dramatizes the real Polish sewage inspector Leopold Socha. Socha rescued Jews from Nazi murderers. In Holland's film, Socha is an imperfect hero. In Holland's 1999 film The Third Miracle, a candidate for sainthood is equally imperfect. She abandons her teenaged daughter so that she can live in a convent. The film's hero, a priest, begins and then aborts an affair with the saint's daughter. In Green Border, in contrast, there are clear-cut good guys – the activists aiding migrants – and bad guys – the Belarussian and Polish border guards. The migrants are all pure as driven snow.

 

Green Border is perhaps Holland's most highly praised film. In early July, 2024, Green Border enjoys a 92% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. "With pulse-pounding sweep and moral fury, the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland turns her camera on injustice at the Polish-Belarusian border," raves the New Yorker. Godfrey Cheshire says, "Green Border strikes me as the best and most important film to be released in the U.S. so far this year." The Globe and Mail insists, "If enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border -- and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible -- the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit." Manohla Dargis, in the New York Times, reports that she "wept," an uncommon statement from her.

 

Holland was denounced by government officials; they called her both a Nazi and a Stalinist. Average Poles "review bombed" websites with negative reviews; see here.  

 

Green Border is a two-and-a-half-hour long, black-and-white docudrama in Polish, Arabic, and French, with subtitles. Part One depicts the attempt by a Syrian family, who unite with an Afghan woman, to enter the European Union by crossing the border from Belarus into Poland. The film opens with the family on a plane embarking on a trip that excites and delights them. They are clean and nice. Nur, the young son, is an adorable scamp. After disembarking from their plane, they wait patiently for land transport for which they have already paid.

 

Everything changes when they reach the border. Suddenly their driver demands hundreds of dollars that they don't have. Suddenly men with guns are barking at them.

 

Eventually we will learn that father Bashir (Jalal Altawil), mother Amina (Dalia Naous), Grandfather (Al Rashi Mohamad) and their children, including son Nur (Taim Ajjan) are Syrians victimized by ISIS. Bashir was whipped; we see scars on his back. They have been living in a refugee camp for five years, where their children receive no education. Their entirely reasonable and understandable desire is to travel to Sweden, where a Syrian relative will take them in.

 

Leila (Behi Djanati Atai) is an older Afghan woman traveling alone. She attaches herself to the Syrian family. Her brother worked with Poles during NATO's involvement in Afghanistan. Because of his association, she is marked for death by the Taliban. They make their way through forests as best they can. They have no food or water. Amina cannot breast feed her baby. Polish border guards brutally push them back to Belarus.

 

We see border guards, both Belarussian and Polish, commit atrocities. One smashes a thermos, and then tosses it to a migrant tortured by thirst. The migrant drinks, only to spit up blood. The smashed thermos is full of fragments of broken glass. Border guards torment refugees by demanding large sums for water and then pouring that water on the ground. Migrants, including a pregnant African woman, are beaten, causing injury and death. Grandfather is beaten and possibly dies, off camera. We never learn his fate.

 

The border guards portion of the film focuses on Jan (Tomasz Wlosok). Jan is a young man with a heavily pregnant wife at home. Scenes of the wife's prenatal care are contrasted with scenes of the previously mentioned pregnant African migrant. While the African migrant must suffer through forests while heavily pregnant, and she is eventually beaten by border guards in such a manner that might cause her to miscarry or die (we never learn her ultimate fate), Jan's wife receives her prenatal care from tender professionals in clean, brightly lit, modern facilities.

 

A trainer informs trainees, including Jan, that migrants are not people, rather, they are bullets in hybrid warfare. Jan makes a face.

 

Jan is building a new house in a wooded area. Migrants repeatedly break in and use his belongings. Jan is building a still in this house. He and his fellow border guards party raucously in the house and drink his moonshine. They curse profusely. A hefty female guard challenges Jan to arm wrestle.

 

One night Jan's wife watches a video online. It shows border guards beating migrants. She recognizes her husband and confronts him. In a later scene, Jan screams in his car.

 

Jan confronts a wolf. This calls to mind a scene in a previous Holland film, Mr. Jones. In that film a wolf confronts Jones as he investigates famine. The suggestion in both films seems to be, "I won't eat you. There is plenty of other easily acquired meat around." Or perhaps the wolf is an allusion to the Latin proverb, "Homo homini lupus." Man Is Wolf to Man was the title of a memoir by Janusz Bardach, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazis and the Gulag. Or, perhaps, in both films, the wolf is saying, "You think wild animals are bad? Look at your own behavior."

 

In another scene, migrating cranes fly overhead in a graceful skein. The cranes symbolize freedom. They can fly between countries without being beaten to death, or so the film would like to suggest. (In fact migrating birds are often killed by humans in large numbers.)

 

Jan strips naked in front of a mirror, confronting himself. In final scenes, Jan is shown aiding Ukrainian refugees. Someone recognizes him and accuses him. "You were one of the border guards who abused Muslim migrants." Jan denies ever having been there.

 

The activists portion of the film depicts mostly young Polish people who travel to the border area, in spite of possible arrest, and aid migrants with food, water, health care, foot massages, and legal advice. Activists also film the migrants attesting to reasons they left their Muslim homelands. Those testifying do not identify money as motivator. Rather, they left their homelands because of persecution, by ISIS, by the Taliban, by homophobia. Green Border clearly celebrates the activists as the uncomplicated light in the darkness.

 

Julia is the final act of the film's four parts. Julia (Maja Ostaszewska) is a beautiful, middle-aged therapist. Her husband has died of COVID. She has purchased a remote retreat. She counsels clients via the internet. Bogdan is one of her clients. Bogdan rants about Poland's Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc or Law and Justice party. This populist and nationalist party opposed the migrants.

 

One night, Julia hears someone in the forest calling for help. Julia does not hesitate. She enters the forest and discovers Nur and Leila sinking into a swamp. Julia is able to extract Leila but Nur drowns. Julia becomes an activist, risking her life and property to enter the forest, find migrants, and provide food, medicine, and shelter. Julia is arrested and jailed. A brutish female guard, smiling sadistically, strip searches a naked Julia.

 

Bogdan, Julia's patient, also donates his house to the cause. He makes sure to cook chicken when hosting Muslims, as he knows they are not allowed to eat pork. His family and African migrants perform a rap song together. The lyrics reaffirm their shared humanity.

 

The film closes with a dramatization of Poland's immense generosity to Ukrainians escaping war. These scenes are poke-in-the-eye obvious. Holland is telling her audience in all caps, that Poles are white supremacist and Islamophobic.

 

There are graphic scenes of activists massaging migrants' feet. These scenes call to mind Jesus washing his disciples' feet. In the film itself, and also in multiple interviews, Agnieszka Holland compares the border crisis to World War II.

 

Many of the World War II allusions in the film might not be obvious to non-Polish audiences. For example, in 2013, historian Jan Grabowski published Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland. Nazi occupiers, using punishments and rewards, incentivized Poles to hand over escaped and hiding Jews. Accounts of such behavior describe Poles searching forests for hiding, desperate people. When viewing Green Border, and watching Polish border guards discovering and rounding up desperate migrants in hiding, and forcing them over the border to Belarus, many Polish viewers will think of Grabowski's gut-churning accounts of Poles "hunting" Jews.

 

Other details will remind viewers of the Holocaust, including starving and thirst-maddened migrants paying brutal opportunists extortionate sums for a sip of water. The Polish border guards get drunk to facilitate their brutal work; the Einsatzgruppen similarly got drunk before Aktions, or massacres. Bogdan is careful not to feed a migrant a large meal. When asked why, he explains that when someone is starving, that person cannot safely assimilate a large meal. This vulnerability is called "refeeding syndrome," and it killed some concentration camp survivors. I saw Green Border with a friend whose four German grandparents (not Nazis) were sent to the Russian Gulag. Only one survived. When he returned to Germany, he was greeted with a meal, and died.

 

Holland has made the World War II analogy explicit. She filmed Green Border in black and white because, "We thought that black and white would be metaphorical, and somehow connected to the past, the Second World War, documentary-like." Holland compared Muslim migrants to Jews fleeing Hitler. The green border area is close to Sobibor, a Nazi death camp. Prisoners escaped from Sobibor. "When they escaped, the people from that camp looked exactly like these refugees did … and they escaped exactly to that forest," Holland says.

 

When interviewed by left-wing, Muslim journalist Nermeen Shaikh, both agreed that it is less important to make any new films about the Holocaust because the Holocaust is in the past, and the border crisis is the early stages of a Holocaust happening now. "I saw in their situation something poignantly symbolic and perhaps a prequel to a drama that could lead to the moral (and also political) collapse of our world."

 

Holland theorizes that the Holocaust vaccinated the world's conscience, and the vaccine is wearing out because of the September 11 terror attacks. "The Holocaust was a vaccination for humanity, especially for Europe, against nationalism and racism. For respect, for human rights. And the vaccination created the European Union. And now it's evaporating. It's over. It doesn't work anymore." The same "serpent's egg" that gave birth to Nazism gave birth again. Suddenly it was okay to dehumanize Muslims. To associate Muslims with terrorism is "fascist." After associating Muslims with terrorism, "The next step … could be just to kill those people."

 

Europeans, she says, are "rich, white, and lazy." "Europe is deadly afraid of the arrival of people where the color of the skin, the religion and culture are different," she says. "And that was immediately used by populist right-wing governments to create an atmosphere of fear and danger." White people are also afraid, she says, of "climate changes, gender changes, technological changes, demographic changes, poverty."

 

Right wing populists, according to Holland, are the bad guys, because they have no empathy. Holland and her crew overtly link the Polish border crisis to Donald Trump. For example, in one interview, cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk wore a cap on which he had written, "Make empathy great again." Holland says, "Populist politicians say, 'Oh, it's our political goal to make you safe, we have fantastic solutions to make you rich and happy and important.' Make America great again and all that s---." She also says, "border officers in Texas are pushing children back into the river and purposefully denying them water."

 

"We made" Green Border "to open hearts and heads," Holland says. To "give back faces and voices to those who became voice less and faceless." Holland points out that "the Polish government forbade access to humanitarian organizations and all media … Kaczynski, the main political force in Poland, said something that was revelatory to me. 'Americans lost the war in Vietnam when they allowed the media to go there and send back pictures of children burnt by napalm. We will not allow images to go out.' So I felt it's my responsibility to try to tell that story while it was still going on."

 

Before I give my own reaction to Green Border, I will provide some biographical information. I'm a lifelong Christian and my faith inspired me to want to use whatever power I have to relieving suffering. My first long-term job, in high school and college, was as a nurse's aide working with the elderly, severely handicapped, and dying. My first job after gradation was with the Peace Corps. I lived in tiny villages in Africa and Asia in countries often described as among the poorest in the world. I came back to the states and taught in a dangerous and impoverished city. Holland uses her expertise to make films that matter. I have used my writing to address issues that matter. She and I have that much in common.

 

I'm glad that a skilled filmmaker like Agnieszka Holland made Green Border. Clearly, for many audiences, it is the right film at the right time. Jalal Altawil as Bashir, the Syrian father, gives a superstar performance. Behi Djanati Atai as the Afghan woman fleeing the Taliban, is tremendously charismatic. I want to see them both again and again in other films.

 

I felt nothing while watching Green Border. I didn't see the puppet; I saw the hand inside the puppet. The Green Border I saw was painfully obvious agitprop. From the first scenes, where, on the plane trip, Holland went out of her way to invest the boy Nur with more personality than most of the migrants, it was obvious that he would come to a bad end – we watch his cute little face disappear into the night waters of a swamp. The contrast between the pregnant migrant beaten till she miscarries and the Polish housewife enjoying first rate medical care; the thirsty child sucking raindrops from pine needles: touches that moved many. I felt manipulated.

 

When I was in Peace Corps, I almost died a few times. In Africa, I was in a small group of travelers traversing rain forest, far from human habitation or the reach of the law or any kind of rescue. My fellow travelers spoke Sango, which they assumed, wrongly, I did not speak. They were plotting to murder me and the Muslims onboard, because whites and Muslims are the enemy. I think the plotters got bored with their plan and we were not killed.

 

I did not get angry at the Africans plotting to kill me and the Muslims. I understood. Whites and Muslims have devasted Central Africa. If you travel to someone else's country, it makes no sense to get angry at people who have been wronged by people who share your skin color or belief system.

 

In a tiny outpost in Nepal, a few days trek by foot from so much as a dirt road, I succumbed to an excruciatingly painful bacterial infection. My temperature skyrocketed to 105. I could do nothing more than lie on my pallet and wait for a welcome death that would end my pain. I attribute survival to a miraculous answer to prayer.

 

In none of these encounters did I feel that "host country nationals" owed me anything. I was the one who made the dubious choice to risk my own life for a delusional goal – "saving the world."

 

In Africa and Asia, my students died of scabies, tooth aches, diarrhea. These would be minor childhood illnesses in the U.S. I remember once trekking beside one of many Himalayan rivers. The crops nearby were perishing from lack of water. There was no irrigation. A Nepali man approached me. He mourned the "nectar" flowing past in the river. He seemed to think that because I was an American, I had a magic wand that would redirect the river onto the village crops. And then of course there was, in both Africa and Asia, the astronomical gap between the lifestyle of those at the top and the 90% of the population that lived in poverty. Poverty, meaning, most people owned exactly one complete suit of clothes. Most people slept on straw mats. Most people understood where their next meal was coming from, but not beyond that. Meals might be roasted cow corn. Where did the rich get their wealth? Often from siphoned aid dollars, or from selling national assets and pocketing the profits. Both countries where I served underwent violent turmoil after I left. Governments were overthrown. Nepal's royal family was massacred. Maoists rampaged. Peace Corps ran away.

 

I lived in villages without running water, electricity, paved roads or any roads. There's not much to do so you spend a lot of time thinking about your pet student, a dyslexic like you, for whom you have been preparing special lessons, who died of dehydration a couple of days after drinking water polluted by human waste. In the village, Hindus refused to build outhouses. They defecated in fields. When Monsoon rains arrived, reliably, every spring, and that waste flooded water supplies, children died. No one addressed the issue.

 

You figure out that there is no easy answer to Third World poverty. Assuming that calling Europeans "lazy" "white supremacists" solves anything is an amateur move. If every European adopted a Third World family and sent them enough money to support a First World lifestyle, and also daily foot massages, you know what that would solve? Nothing.

 

The solution to Third World poverty must happen in the Third World. Outsiders can facilitate whatever solutions arise. Outsiders cannot force solutions. At times the best outsiders can do is say harsh and unwelcome things. Such comments begin and end with women. Societies that treat women and girls as brood mares damn themselves. Until girls go to school and girls can say no to marriage and forced childbirth, nothing will improve. Research has shown this conclusively. When the "development worker" tries to say this, she is condemned as an imperialist colonizer attempting to impose her values on the "indigenous" who "have their own traditions." Traditions -- like men illegally dragging pregnant wives and the nursing mothers of their babies conceived and born in refugee camps across borders, as depicted in Green Border.

 

Holland says she wants to give a face to the faceless. Here are some of the faceless Holland could give faces to. Holland can give a face to the 12-year-old Jewish girl gang raped in France by rapists who invoked "Allah." Holland can give a face to the 13-year-old Italian girl gang raped by seven Egyptian migrants. Holland can honor the memory of Martin Richard, an 8-year-old Catholic schoolboy coldly assassinated by Rolling Stone cover boy Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was standing right behind Martin before he, Tsarnaev, tore the boy's body to shreds with a pressure cooker bomb.

 

At least I am allowed to know Martin Richard's name. On Halloween, 2017, my Paterson neighbor, Sayfullo Saipov, who was given preferential treatment to enter the U.S., because of his "diversity," murdered eight people in Manhattan by running them over with his jihad-mobile. His victims received virtually no media attention.

 

"But," our Woke friends will say. "Islam is peace. It's only in recent days, because of Western imperialism, that Muslims are forced to commit acts of terrorism."

 

Holland, or an equally committed filmmaker, could give a face to Tarik, who, in 711 AD, rallied his Muslim jihadis to attack Europe so that they could rob Europeans' "pearls, jewels, silks, and gold" and rape Christian women on their "soft couches." Holland could give a face to the Martyrs of Cordoba. These were, in accord with the Quran, crucified by Muslims. Holland could give a face to the millions of Europeans, including Slavs, enslaved by Muslims. Or the Martyrs of Otranto, beheaded by Muslims. Or the Christian, Slavic children forced to fight as slaves in Muslim armies. Or the thousands, including Poles, killed in the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Or the Christian migrants thrown overboard in 2015 by Muslim migrants shouting "Allahu akbar." Or the British girls forced into prostitution by Muslim men in Britain's notorious "grooming gangs." Or the thousand-plus women and girls raped by Muslim migrants during New Year's celebrations, 2015-16, Or the Muslim women, who sought safety in Europe, and who were, nevertheless, murdered by their own fathers, brothers, and sons in honor killings. Germany documents at least 26 completed or attempted honor killings just between 2022 and 2023. Or schoolteacher Samuel Paty, or 85-year-old Catholic priest Jacques Hamel, or Orthodox priest Father Nikolai Kotelnikov, or British fusilier Lee Rigby; all of these innocent Europeans, in recent years, were decapitated, or had their throats slit, by followers of the religion of peace.

 

Holland could give a face to the migrants who are not sweet, humble, and eager to contribute. Like these migrants, attacking Poles with rocks. She could give a face to Mateusz Sitek, a Polish border guard stabbed to death by a migrant.

 

Holland's insistence that racism is the only reason Europe is hesitant to take in Third World migrants, especially Muslim migrants, is idiotic. This insistence has opened, for her, the doors to the cool club. When she exposed Stalinist crimes, she was an outlier. Holland has finally made a film that gives world audiences what they want. A film that cooperates with what I have called in my book the "Brute Polak Stereotype." These brutish, foul-mouthed Polaks, these beefy women who arm wrestle and like to perform strip searches, these drunken yokels, are responsible both for the Nazi Holocaust and the current, so-called, Holocaust of Muslims.

 

Holland's going along with Nermeen Shaikh's insistence that the Holocaust is of the past, and doesn't need any more movies, because the real Holocaust victims today are Muslims, is pathetic. "The past is never dead. It's not even past," said the Nobel-Prize-winning, Southern writer William Faulkner. The Holocaust is not past. Belarus' history as a poor, agricultural country is not past. Conflict between Poland and Russia is not past. The best people in Belarus are in jail. It's not easy for a poor country that has never had independence to stand on its own. Belarus' devastation at the hands of German Nazis is very much a feature of current events.

 

Muslims have weaponized understanding of the Holocaust. Muslims insist on equating Jews with Nazis and Gazans with concentration camp victims. October 7 was another chapter of a long story that is ongoing. Ensuing antisemitic riots and protests are another chapter of the same book that includes the Nazis. We need to understand the Holocaust – including through movies about the Holocaust – because the Holocaust is now.

 

Europeans' inviting migrants into their homes and massaging their feet is virtue signaling. It is not altruism. It is also, counter-intuitively, evil. Activists dangle a false promise to desperate people. "Come here," they insist. "Chances are you'll die trying, but take the gamble. You may hit the jackpot." Activists lure more and more gamblers to risk drowning in the Mediterranean or a swamp in a foreign forest. The real answer is for the migrants to remain in their countries and do what people have been doing throughout history to improve their own lot. They fight for a better future. Yes, fighting for, say, women's rights in Afghanistan is dangerous. But nothing will replace fights like that, fights that other nations and other people, including Poles in Poland, including Americans, have undertaken.

 

World Wars I and II had a catastrophic impact on European demographics. Post-war Europe has extinction-level birthrates. Socialist economies promise cradle-to-grave care. Someone has to pay into those systems. Europeans saw migrants as a way to continue the welfare state. Germany saw an embrace of migrants as a way to expunge Holocaust shame. Those foot massages are episodes in the most cynical theater.

 

What would real altruism look like? Those who want to save the world can go to Syria, to Afghanistan, to Congo. Remove Woke blinders and recognize that blaming everything on whitey is a foolish, cheap escape from reality. Witness why countries with abundant resources and rich histories wallow in stasis. Read the Arab Human Development Report from 2000 and recognize how an ideology that valorizes mass death and torture and demeans women retards entire swaths of the world. Imagine the courage it would take to make a  movie about that process.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery