V for Vendetta: based on true events?

Last night, on the 5th of November, I watched V for Vendetta for the first time.

And the last.

Don’t get me wrong: I thought the movie was an amazing work of art. The cinematography was beautiful, the script was powerful and the acting top notch. The story was engaging and incredibly important, especially now.

But I will never watch it again.

Why?

Because it felt too much like a memory.

Now that’s absurd, isn’t it? I’ve lived an incredibly privileged life in Canada, in one of the freest countries in the world. So how can I possibly have a personal, visceral reaction to the civil unrest in V for Vendetta. The dystopian society depicted in the film is a polar opposite to the society in which I live, and have always lived.

From the time that I was a child, I was immersed in Holocaust education. I went to a Jewish day school, and at no point did they deem us too young to learn about the history of our people. This, of course, went beyond just World War II, but when something as monumental and horrific as a genocide mars the history of your people, it’s not something you can ignore. The only thing can be done is to accept it and to teach it at every opportunity so we might not repeat history.

Never Forget.

When I was 16 years old, I travelled to Poland with my peers to witness some of the places where the Holocaust occurred. We travelled with two holocaust survivors: Alex Buckman and David Shentow. Alex was a child survivor, and David was a survivor of Dachau, Auschwitz, and Birkenau. In Auschwitz, David pointed out his barrack. In Auschwitz, his wife consoled me as I cried in the gas chambers. She gently led me away from the building, and stayed with me until I regained control of myself.

The truth of the matter is that Holocaust survivors are few and far between. This is not just a product of the genocide, but of time. With old age our greatest link to the past is being severed, and the only way for us to keep that memory alive is to become witnesses ourselves.

So that’s what I did.

Death Marches were commonplace during the war. German soldiers would corral masses of prisoners from one camp to another. With few breaks, little to shield the prisoners from the elements and existing fatigue from time spent in concentration camps, most people would not make it to the other side. Many were shot if they were straggling behind. Some were shot at random. Left on the side of the road.

The March of the Living brings together Jews from all over the world. Draped in Israeli flags and wearing matching blue jackets we walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau together in a show of respect and survival. It is our way of remembering. It is our way of proudly stating that we were not wiped out. We are still here. We are still proud.

It’s been 10 years since I marched in The March of the Living. That trip wasn’t my only exposure to Holocaust history. I spent so much of my youth immersed in the histories of my people, and learning about the horrors that that history includes. At one point, it became too much. I was a witness. I would never forget. I put it out of my mind.

Watching V for Vendetta last night was astonishing. It’s very relevant to see today, but I could not disassociate it from the Holocaust. It’s just a movie. So far removed from any society in which I have ever lived. I have never been concerned with speaking out or speaking true. The consequences of my actions are not so dire.

But as I watched, I remembered.

In a facility where they run experiments to create viruses and cures, I remembered a photo of a line of children who were used for human testing in a concentration camp. It was not uncommon, during the Holocaust, for prisoners to be used in human experiments. They underwent testing to see how much cold a person could withstand before they succumbed to death. Or how much heat. Experiments were conducted to test the limits of the human body before it broke. Other people watch the scene and see the actors stand in line for injections. I saw those children. I saw one of the labs where the experiments were held.

Natalie Portman is taken prisoner, and her head is shaved. She shakes and cries throughout the experience, and later berates her captor for cutting her hair.

This may seem vain.

But I saw huge cases and displays full of the hair of the prisoners of Holocaust. In museums, and in Auschwitz. I saw their shoes, luggage, prosthetics, all taken away and piled up. I understood the loss of dignity that comes with having your hair forcibly taken from you. I stood in Auschwitz, with layers upon layers of material keeping me warm, and was still cold. I knew that I wore infinitely more clothing than the prisoners who stood there before me. I had eaten enough that day. I had my hair. And still I shivered.

In that room in Auschwitz, with the cases of hair and shoes all around me, I cried. And Alex Buckman consoled me. I will never understand how they went through what they did and somehow had the courage to go back. To place their arms around teenagers experiencing a second hand sorrow like they didn’t go through it first hand.

That I will never understand.

In the film, the thing I hated the most was the imagery of the mass grave. I remembered being in Poland, and standing next to two mass graves, sectioned off with fencing. A tree grew from the corner of one of the graves, as though reassuring us that life can still thrive in places of pain.

It was there that we were told a story or a girl. She was taken with her mother to the forest where there had been dug a large hole in the ground. She stood along the edge of the hole, lined up with the other Jews by the German soldiers. One by one, they were shot and left to fall back into the hole. As her turn came closer, she fainted in fear, falling back onto the pile of bodies. Her mother fell dead on top of her. When she awoke, it was night. She lay under the pile, and eventually found the strength and courage to dig herself out and run to the woods. She survived.

As bodies were thrown onto the pile in the film, I thought of her. I thought of images I had seen of naked prisoners left in piles. I thought of that tree. I thought of the tea light candle that I lit for the poor, nameless souls beneath the soil. They were simply gone. Missing. Presumed dead. If their families survived, they never knew what happened to them. We stood in a group around the spot, and chanted the Mourners Kaddish in their honour.

Watching V for Vendetta was much more difficult than I expected it to be. The chancellor, so much like Hitler. Crying in fear at the end of his life and Hitler was so afraid of facing the consequences of his actions that he took his own life.

Minorities, LBGTQ community members and diverse religions prosecuted, and some blamed for the spread of a virus. And the Jews were used as scapegoats. And the Holocaust was not only the end of 6 million Jewish lives, but an additional 4 million others, killed for their political and religious views, or for loving someone that was considered indecent.

The curfews, the civil unrest, the fear. It’s all real to me because it is real. It happened, and it continues to happen.

V for Vendetta is a representation, not of a far fetched dystopia, but of a very close reality. What would have happened if America had fought amongst themselves instead of stepping up and joining the allied forces to put and end to World War II? Would the people have risen up to put a stop to it?

And the Holocaust is full of stories of people who risked their own lives to save the lives of their neighbours and friends and strangers who were being unfairly targeted. And many of them died for their efforts. And many of them survived, with lives in their debt.

V for Vendetta is modelled after this very real scar on our collective human history. It’s a warning. It tells us that people have power. There is power in numbers. This was not only relevant in World War II, but today as we fight the Coronavirus, demand equality and platforms for marginalized groups of people, and, in many places around the world, fight real and ongoing genocides.

So I’m grateful to films like V for Vendetta. It’s difficult to watch, especially if you are like me and have real life associations to the presumed fiction on screen. I hope that it’s just another way to never forget.

Remember, remember the 5th of November.