The Search (1948)

I just watched this movie and really think it did a great job in showing the plight of the displaced children after World War 2. It is about a young boy from Czechoslovakia (played by Ivan Jandl) who was in a concentration camp and how he searches for his mother (played by Jarmila Novotná) when the war ends - and at the same time how his mother searches for him. The boy doesn't remember anything about the camps and doesn't speak. An American soldier (played by Montgomery Clift) befriends him. The soldier learns from the number tattoo on the boy's arm that he was in Auschwitz and tries to find the boy's mother and nationality by writing the UN Office of Refugees - who write back that his mother was gassed. The soldier then teaches the boy English and wants to take him to the US with him but the boy starts remembering about his mother and the camps and eventually he finds her.

The movie is more about when and where it was filmed then solely about the story lines. It was filmed in Germany (amid the ruins of the bombed cities in the American Zone of Occupation) just 3 years after the war ended. Europe was full of displaced people and there are numerous movies and books dealing with them, but this is one of a few that I have found dealing only with the children who suffered. There is one scene at the beginning of the movie where the children are supposed to get into an ambulance so they can be driven to a better transit camp. The kids try to run away rather than get in and the female American soldier doesn't understand what the problem is until an interpreter tells her that the Germans used ambulances to gas people during the war. She finally convinces the children to get in the ambulance, but during the ride they think they smell gas and escape. The idea that children would have to even worry about being gassed is beyond normal comprehension.

Another fact I learned about the movie is that while it came out in the US in 1948 and in Allied Occupied Austria in 1949 it didn't come out in Germany until 1961. This is one of the movies that every German who was 18 or older in 1945 should have been forced to watch (along with real footage of the death and concentration camps.) It is one thing for a nation to kill men and women during a war and another entirely to target innocent children. This film gives a basic idea of what the children experienced in the war, but more importantly how it still affected their lives once they were free. There is a scene in the movie when an American boy hurts himself when eating soup and runs crying to his mother and she mentions what the little boy from the camps went through. The American boy was a little wimpy while the Czechoslovakian boy survived a death camp. The Germans especially targeted the children because they would grow up and seek revenge for their murdered parents and grandparents and also carry on their race. This movie gave light to a group of innocent people that have mostly been neglected. They lost their childhoods along with their parents, homes, countries and sense of security all because the Germans thought they were the master race and deserved everything. Watching this film, seeing the bombed buildings and then learning about what happened to the children in the camps makes you wish we had punished the Germans more than we did after the war (they got away with so much because the English, French and Americans were more concerned with the growing Soviet threat then the surrendered Germans.) Another scene from the movie has a little girl tell how she worked sorting clothes taken from those that were gassed and how one day she found her mother's blouse and knew she had been gassed. For a movie made in 1948 it is very detailed about the German war crimes and doesn't make excuses or show them (the Germans) as victims as many try to twist history nowadays.