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145 12 Muslims Instead of Musslmans Sons of the Fatherland (1968) Simultaneously with the release of Eastern Corridor, another film was in the works in the distant land of Uzbekistan. This was Sons of the Fatherland (Syny Otechestva, 1968), directed by Latif Faiziev. Although it might not be immediately apparent, this film has much in common with Eastern Corridor. Both deal with the theme of the Holocaust, both are filmed in the tradition of the 1960s poetic cinema, both present suffering and violence graphically, both rely on eclectic religious (though mainly Christian) symbolism, and both are made in republican studios, far away from the metropolis of Moscow. To an uninitiated viewer, Sons of the Fatherland might appear entirely surreal: from the scene of a crucifixion of a Jew in a concentration camp to a scene of inmates in the iconic striped uniforms kneeling in fervent Muslim prayer. But behind this stunning imagery (and the frankly improbable plot) is an intriguing story. The film was loosely based on the real-life history of the Muslim Legions— SS units recruited from among Soviet Muslims at POW camps. One of them, the Turkistan Legion, was composed of Uzbeks and other Central Asians. They were lured to the legion not only by the drive to avoid starvation and sure death in the camps but also by the prospect of liberation from Bolshevism, national independence after the war, and a chance to practice Islam right away, a practice forbidden to them anywhere in the Soviet Union, and certainly in the Red Army. During the war, their national and religious hopes were so high that they established a Turkestan government-in-exile, with an army of over two hundred thousand.1 Their hopes did not materialize, obviously, but the subject of collaboration with the Nazis and aspiration for national independence remained a highly sensitive subject for years to come in Soviet Uzbekistan. Unlike Crimean Tatars, after the war Uzbeks avoided collective punishment, but the stigma of being Nazi collaborators still stuck to them.2 So it is not surprising that an Uzbek director would want to make a film revealing Uzbek heroism in an attempt to repair the compromised image. Here I read this film as an apologia of the Uzbeks’ collaboration with the Nazis. It is to that end that the subject of the Holocaust is brought up. Sons of the Fatherland is set in a Nazi camp, drawing on a story of resistance in Buchenwald, as told by participants in the events—one of them, a survivor of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp (a satellite of Buchenwald), was invited 146 The Phantom Holocaust to serve as a consultant. The film also draws on the biography of Mussa Jalil, a Tatar national poet who was recruited to serve in one of the Muslim legions. Jalil led an underground organization in the legion and was subsequently arrested and executed in a Nazi prison. For a long time he was considered a traitor in the Soviet Union, until the evidence of his resistance was uncovered. Jalil’s story was made into a film, Moabit Notebook (Moabitskaia Tetrad’, dir. Leonid Kvinikhidze), also released in 1968. However, Moabit Notebook was really more of a heroic biopic about Mussa Jalil, and did not feature Jewish characters, or any other Holocaust references (it is also a less interesting film cinematically). Jewish fate during the war is invoked in the very first sequence of Sons of the Fatherland; documentary footage of the Soviet poet, Konstantin Simonov (the author of the cult poem and a film based on it, Wait for Me), speaks about a fellow poet, Ghafur Ghulom, an accomplished Uzbek author, to whom the film is dedicated.3 As Simonov is reciting Ghulom’s poem “I Am a Jew” in voiceover (using his own Russian translation), the camera turns to various Soviet monuments dedicated to the Great Patriotic War—to emphasize the internationalist message of a poem. To offset its subversive title, Simonov recites the poem’s most “Soviet”—and least Jewish—part. This opening marks an ambivalent tension of the film. It attempts to speak to the Jewish question, but cannot. This tension surfaces repeatedly in the fictional part of the film. The action starts in contemporary Uzbekistan, at the opening of an art show on tour from West Germany. The portraits created in Schpilhausen, the German concentration camp, are displayed on the ancient, vaulted walls of a museum. The identity of one of the artists is unknown, but some...

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