Jawnts: 'Aftermath' presents wider view of Holocaust's origins

It is impossible to write about the 2012 Polish film

Aftermath

without giving away an essential plot point. What begins as a movie about the dangers of rural thuggery - two brothers in an isolated farmhouse are anonymously attacked with rocks, fists, and fire - is actually about the legacy of World War II, and the howling moral void that accompanied Nazi occupation.

Franek Kalina returns to his backwater village after 20 years in Chicago to visit his younger brother, Jozek, whose wife and children recently arrived in America with no explanation for their flight. Reasons are soon offered in abundance: The family reunion is marred by a stone thrown through the kitchen window. His old neighbors look at Franek with suspicion. And the creepy new parish priest seems to specialize in veiled threats.

The explanation for all this soon becomes clear: Jozek has been prying up and restoring Jewish tombstones that were used to pave streets and prop up barns after the wartime mass murders. That's only the beginning: As the extent of the town's complicity in the Holocaust becomes clear, the violence against the brothers intensifies.

The real power of Aftermath lies in its subversion of the notion that the Shoah was the sole handiwork of black-clad SS officers. It forces the brothers, and the audience, to look at the atrocities of WWII as not just a case of ideological insanity, but years when grudges, avarice, and prejudice were encouraged to flower among everyone.

Aftermath isn't a love note to its homeland, but it serves a higher purpose by subverting an easy narrative of universal resistance to Nazism. That wasn't true in Poland. Or Lithuania or Denmark or France. People benefited from, and participated in, evil. The moral aftermath of the most awful span of human history is largely a German burden. But not solely.

Aftermath plays at the International House, 3701 Chestnut St., at 7 p.m. Monday, followed by a panel discussion. The event is free for students, $11 for seniors, and $12 for the rest of us.