A Quote by Edward Zwick
In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.
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With the children of Holocaust survivors, there is always a very close relationship. You grow with the sense that you are parenting your parents and - with this kind of responsibility to protect them. That's what makes the children of Holocaust survivors strange.
People that spend time in a foxhole - they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again... Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets - more than even the Vietnam vets - there's a brotherhood.
More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
World War II is smothered in sentimentality and nostalgia. What's interesting about Vietnam is that sentimentality is just not there, so you're given kind of a clean access to it in one way. It's also a war that represents a failure for the United States. Many people came back feeling like they never wanted to talk about it again. And so we developed a national amnesia.
Why is it, that there's no movies, very little very little attention about the greatest Holocaust in the history of the world which was the Holocaust against Christians by the Soviet communism.And that's my point. We have a controlled media today that talks about the Holocaust, but they don't talk about the death and destruction of tens of millions of Christians...Which was a bigger Holocaust.
The unraveling that I experienced much earlier in the Vietnam war than many people think, was due to the immediate foxhole experiences. But once I got back home and began to follow the war on TV and in the press I began to see this enormous con game - I can't think of any other word for it - that government and the military was foisting on the American people, especially on the young men of my generation, and even worse, the young men of my generation who weren't particularly economically or intellectually privileged.
In my experience of the men of action I have met - whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam - they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.
I don't think my generation carries the weight of World War II anymore. But I've got to tell you, even if we don't really talk about it, we get reminded constantly by other people or other countries. I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.
World War II vets in general didn't talk about their experiences. They believed there was something better and that they were going to prove to America what they could be and show America what it could be by being the change that they wanted. Like that Ghandi phrase "be the change that you want to see" but I think that it was also just a different culture. People didn't want to complain, whereas today if you go to the Starbucks and they mess up your order you might tweet about it. You know it's a different kind of culture.
Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.
You read in any war stories - World War II, whatever - that there are many, many heroes. There are the main stories you always hear about, but there are all these other little people that did things that were very important that we don't always know about.
Heterosexual women ask questions that are a lot to do with what I did to my body and what that was like to lose all that weight and so on. To me it just reveals that that's a preoccupation of theirs. Or gay women have been really keen on knowing how I felt about playing a gay character and have often wanted to talk about their own experiences with children. Straight men have often shown some sense of relief, that they get to experience the philanderer as a woman and not have to judge her in the same way. That's fascinating to me.
The truth is that people - many people are concerned about this, but this is not the first time in America this has happened. There were a significant number of people who didn`t want Jewish refugees before World War II, or even during World War II.
In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like 'Sands of Iwo Jima' and there was this, you know - after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.
It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.
Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.
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