Having dropped off to sleep with the TV on I woke up suddenly to find the film had changed to "The Reader". 

The film was shot in 2008 with Kate Winslet playing, for me the important lead roll of Hanna a women in  her 40s who helps and then draws a young adolescent boy into a cooperative sexually based relationship with the trade being for him to read to her from a list of classics that the boy is studying.


She disappears and the film moves to the young man now a student of law sitting in on a trial of a number of female concentration camp guards, Hanna being one.



The shock of listening to Hanna demand, with "absolute compulsion" that her position as a "Guard" engrained and  overrode any sense of morality to reject the orders she received, was shocking. Yet, and this is no excuse, people
 can be indoctrinated to such an extent that their self respect or any previous ethical concept are substituted by the overpowering prejudice of those around you. The power of the cult is no different to the harm and the distortion of human values that the pack can bring upon the individual. "What would you have done", she asks the prosecutor, what indeed when threatened with the firing squad. How easy to judge when safe and secure !!


Throughout life we accept the roll presented to us, the roll which is contrived by society to ensure society works. Morality is not the pre-eminent drive, "law" and the way we conform to it is the bed rock on which we build our lives. Who makes the law. 



She compartmentalise the memories of the past, the bits she valued and the rest was binned until asked in the trial "why did you do it"? It was never a question she asked herself at the time, others did the thinking and events were sanitised by a compulsion to fit in to the camp and the horror of the experience.
The need to be read to was because she was illiterate but somewhere deep down in her make up she needed an alternative to this everyday horror.  

  

The pathos was that her last moments were to use the books (the stories she had loves and probably kept her sane) to build a platform from which to hang herself !





This commentary is made without any sort of self reference to the atrocities that went on but I think it too easy to follow today's sense of guilt for everything that went on years ago. Deeply felt prejudice was common and totally distorted the thought process, even the humanity we are supposed to have for each other?