THE SEARCH

While I was channel surfing yesterday, headed to the usual reruns of, or, gasp, an episode of Law and Order I hadn't seen ( although I don't think that's possible ), I cruised by the TCM channel and there was this movie in progress. An old post WWII movie involving a mother and son seperated by the holocaust and after the liberation of the camps continually miss finding each other by a series of events. Enter an american army engineer ( Montgomery Clift ) who finds the lad wandering around in rags, barefoot, sporting the number of the beast ( an Auschwitz tattoo ). He takes him in and cares for him. Finally in the end Mother and son are reunited at a camp for child survivors of the holocaust enroute to "Palestine". I was intrigued by this film, and coming into it in progress had no idea what it was called, but thanks to BartCop Entertainment listing movies on all the cable networks daily I was able to learn the title and the date of production (1948) . It's called The Search and it was a fun view. All black and white, not only in film, but in dialog. People said what was on their minds and that was it, a bit simple really but refreshingly so.
But there was more. I have a history with this history. My mom was a nurse during the "big one" and her brothers served as well, my uncle Frank was seriously wounded at Dunkirk, and apparently lanquished on the beach there for a couple of days. My uncle Tommy served as well, but managed to have" pretty boys luck"* and emerged unscathed.
*Pretty boy was a character in a really fucking awesome Viet Nam era movie called "84 Charlie Mopic"...back to topic.
My mom regaled me with stories of this war, she was there when the germans tried to bomb england back to the pre stone age, she was decorated for her service. She had seen the horrors of war and was determined to instill in me the right frame of mind to avoid it again at all costs, while it worked for me, it didn't work for the world and we have made the same mistakes over and over again. Korea. Viet Nam, and now for the second time, the middle east. And interestingly enough, a little spit of a country- Palestine- is at the center of it all.
And in my fractured mind I think about this movie and the settling of orphans in Palestine in 1948, a new start-a new home-a new beginning and for a moment I wonder what the fuck went wrong, I mean in the movie, these kids were marching off to the trucks with their rucksacks singing the praises of the promise of a new life in a new country free from harm and full of hope. And then I remembered it was just a movie. Make believe. Or maybe not.
My Mom loved these old movies and I used to wonder why. I don't wonder anymore.