Come and See

From The Apocalypse of John, chapter 6,

...and I heard one of the four living creatures saying, as with a voice of thunder, "Come and see!"

This video is a montage from the 1985 Russian film "Come and See" directed by Elem Klimov, Элем Германович Климов, and titled after the above quote.

It is the story of the teenage boy Florya in a 1943 German occupied village in Belarus. The German soldiers move in and herd all of the people into their small wooden church until it is filled wall-to-wall with families. Once nearly all of the villagers are locked inside, the church is set ablaze. Florya manages to climb out and his life is spared.



The film clip is set to the haunting elegy of Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych), by Polish composer Henryk Górecki.

Sung by a solo soprano, we hear the slow and deliberate middle theme of the First Movement, Lento Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile, which is based on a late-fifteenth-century 'Lament of Mary' from a monastery in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains.

Górecki said of his Symphony,

"I had a grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You know how it was between Poles and Germans. But Bach was a German too, and Schubert, and Strauss. Everyone has his place on this little earth. That's all behind me. So the Third Symphony is not a Dies Irae, it's a normal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs."

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[Related: Holocaust Survivor Paul Celan (1920 - 1970)]

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