The Most Precious Of Cargoes

Bluesky

The horrors of the Holocaust find a graphic and only occasionally mawkish rendering in this animation from Michel Hazanavicius who has adapted a book by a family friend Jean-Claude Grumberg, an eminent French dramatist and writer.

Conceived as a fairy tale about a lost baby girl who is thrown from a train bound for Auschwitz and then found by a childless woodcutter’s wife (the couple are voiced by Dominique Blanc and Gregory Gadebois), Hazanavicius avoids in the main the obvious pitfalls of over-egging the sorrows and the suffering and keeps dialogue to a minimum.

The couple warm to the infant who, given the circumstances, is sweet-natured and well-behaved, and decide to guard her from the authorities and intrusive neighbours. They had been trying for years to conceive and the discovery of the child seems like a gift from Heaven although the woodcutter takes time to be convinced.

One of the most painful sequences is watching the infant being pushed through a hole in the carriage by her father who is en route to Auschwitz. His act is witnessed by the other deportees, whose faces are etched in sharp detail – unable to make good their own chance of escape. The father, his wife, and another child continue the journey to the death camp where his forced labour involves piling up the emaciated bodies. His wife and child are never glimpsed again.

Hazanavicius who draws on his own family history (he is descended from Ashkenazi Jews), did not want to deal directly with the horrors of the camps but rather “to show that beautiful things could exist in the midst of ugliness.”

The choice of hand-drawn animation and its ability to demonstrate a magical realism allows the film to find the right distance from what is being depicted. The drawing with watercolour-style backdrops of dark trees and snowscapes is striking and apposite – describing a harsh and haunting beauty.

There is no denying the contemporary relevance of the themes of man’s inhumanity given our present-day litany of atrocities, conflict and refugee crises as well as the dehumanisation of many societies.