My father was a Holocaust survivor. He was 3 years old when his apartment building in Warsaw was bombed at the beginning of the war. He lost everyone but his mom, who did anything and everything to ensure his survival. I grew up with the gruesome stories, huge books with hundreds of heartrending pictures that bore witness to all the evil that took place. The inhumanity of it all.
I know war. I live in Israel. What happened in Europe in those dark years was no war.
I knew going in that this new Spielberg movie would be an all-expenses-paid feels trip. I was in uni at Montreal at the time and went with a friend. A few minutes in, tears start rolling down my face. I haven't been able to watch it again since, so I don't recall many specific scenes, but I recall knowing in the first second that that snow wasn't snow at all...
Suffice it to say that by the end of the movie I am an ugly mess, gasping for breath between uncontrollable sobs. I remember going to the bathroom after the movie to wash my face and pull myself together. Poor girl that came with me didn't know how to comfort me (impossible for the following few hours) or what to say. I felt so bad for her. I apologized to her on a daily basis for weeks following that debacle of a moviegoing experience.
Anyway, I went straight home, called my dad crying, and made him promise me not to go see the movie. He wouldn't have made it out of the theatre alive. Entirely too fucking close to home. He caught bits of the movie on TV eventually, watched in small increments. It destroyed him each time.
My father passed away two years ago. At the service, the rabbi explained that in the Jewish faith, the soul basically goes on trial before god for a period of time, where the sins and good deeds of the deceased are weighed against each other. A kind of purgatory, I suppose, deciding whether the soul goes to heaven or... whatever the Jewish equivalent of hell is (reincarnation? Gehenna? No clue. Help me out, fellow Jewdditors).
Holocaust survivors, he said, get to skip that step and go straight to heaven, as they had already been to Hell while alive. I was touched.