The family, except for the grandmother, travels west via train. However, they are in a box car of a freight train! The war is over and they are not being transported to a camp.
Was it common for travelers to board box cars of freight trains?
I realize that hobos did this during the depression in the U.S., but I was surprised to see this in the movie, since this is the method the Nazis used in transporting Jews to the camps.
A lot of the ethnic Germans in eastern Europe were deported after the war because they had been tainted as collaborators. Most of them WERE collaborators, like the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia or the Germans of Danzig in this film. In the novel, there is a scene where a German man who had been a Social Democrat before the Nazi takeover tries to insist on getting better treatment because he had been in opposition to the Nazis. The understandably vengeful Polish partisans -- most of them teenagers -- don't grasp the distinction, and treat him as poorly as the Germans who had been pro-Nazi.
share"Most of them WERE collaborators" - This is an absurd lie. Anyhow, people are not "collaborators" when they respect their own government.
The ethnic cleansing of 15 million Germans, of whom more than 2 million were murdered by the Stalinists, was probably the biggest crime against humanity in European history.
Collaborators??!! Suppose that as a punishment for getting involved in Vietnam the United Nations awarded Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to Mexico.. would you be a "collaborator" if you lived in one of those states and fought to regain your reunion with the United States? What an idiot..
shareIt's war, do you have any idea what war means ? Germany was destroyed you take whatever is still working if you need to travel, and I also think it's irony from tha authors to make them travel like the jews did.
shareIt's not irony, it's the way many of those refugees travelled in reality. Using train was the most obvious option.
shareThe polish population from the soviet occupied western territory of Poland was probably transported the same way after the war.
shareYou mean "eastern" Poland, don't you? Poland and the Poles were shifted westward after the war, with the Soviet Union annexing the eastern part of pre-war Poland that it had occupied in 1939 (now in the Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania). The German provinces of Silesia and Pomerania, and the western part of East Prussia, were incorporated into the new Polish state (the rest of East Prussia becoming part of the USSR, now a Russian "island" west of the Baltic States.)
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