Survivors ReliveHistory’s Horrors

“Fighter” might be called “Two Tough Jews” or “My Squabble With Arnost,” but under any name it’s a revealing and provocative documentary. Director Amir Bar-Lev finds a way to mix the personal, the philosophical and the historical into a complex human document, something that’s funny, moving and sad.

The fighter of the title is clearly 77-year-old Jan Weiner, a professor and wilderness guide introduced smartly hitting the heavy bag despite his advanced years. A figure of great dignity and presence, with snow-white hair and a carefully clipped mustache, Weiner is a classic man of action with a story to match his bearing.

Weiner was only 19 when he got himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague, first to Slovenia and then to Italy. There he escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp and managed to get to Britain and join the Royal Air Force. He returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, only to find himself imprisoned by the Communist regime for five years because of his British connections.

Eventually emigrating to the United States, Weiner became friends with another Czech refugee, writer and filmmaker Arnost Lustig, whose experience was different but equally compelling: He spent the war years in a variety of Nazi death camps, from Theresienstadt to Buchenwald.

It was the idea of filmmakers Bar-Lev, Alex Mamlet and Jonathan Crosby to have these two men go back to the scenes of their wartime experiences together. It was a natural suggestion, especially given that both are articulate, powerful storytellers with crystalline recollections of indelible stories, but what happened on the trip no one could have anticipated.

As Weiner and Lustig relived what they went through, the weight of reexperiencing their pasts made both men more intransigent, more themselves. And since each represented a very distinct psychological type, a different way of interacting with the world, a compelling, disturbing dynamic was the result.

“Fighter” goes first to Prague, where Weiner’s war experiences began. He revisits the building where his reaction to being humiliated by a Czech collaborator was so intense that he claims his hate kept him alive until the war ended and he could reconfront the man with the frank intention of killing him. Weiner and Lustig have their first major verbal confrontation in that same office, arguing passionately over Lustig’s postwar membership in the same Communist Party that unjustly imprisoned Weiner for all those years.

The next stop is Theresienstadt, the fake showcase of concentration camps, presented to the world in a staged and contrived newsreel called “The Fhrer Gives a City to the Jews” as the happiest place on Earth. It’s where Lustig and his family were first imprisoned and where Weiner’s mother was beaten to death.

Next comes a visit to Slovenia, where Weiner had witnessed his father and his stepmother take poison and commit suicide because they believed “that is the only freedom that is left to us.” Finally, there is Italy, the last stop before liberation.

As the trip progresses, both men emerge in stronger, more uncompromising outline. Weiner is the consummate doer, the man who is increasingly resistant to speculation and analysis and prone to fearing that Lustig, who’s wanted to write about him, will inevitably do violence to his story.

The writer, for his part, is an even more complicated character. He understands Weiner and his motivations, but his temperament forces him to tease the man in an unpromising fashion, and his experiences during the war have made him more of a cynical relativist than his traveling companion.

Lustig, for example, tells of stealing two cabbages as a boy and getting slapped for it by his father, who then gave the vegetables to his mother to cook for dinner. “That was my first lesson about morality,” he says. “It’s a child of necessity. If you’re hungry, you change it.”

A clash between an observer who believes in the value of the imagination and a doer who views speculation with suspicion would be likely under any circumstances, but the conflict both men lived through made it inevitable and sad. “No one who survived the war is normal,” Lustig confirms near the close. “It’s impossible.”

*

No MPAA rating. Times guidelines: mature subject matter.

‘Fighter’

A Next Wave Films presentation, released by First Run Features. Director Amir Bar-Lev. Producers Amir Bar-Lev, Jonathan Crosby, Alex Mamlet. Executive producer Peter Broderick. Cinematographers David Collier, Gary Griffin, Jay Danner McDonald, Justin Schein. Editor Amir Bar-Lev. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

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