–“[The Holocaust] happened and it was bad. Get over it. This sob story needs to end. There is a problem in the Jewish community with those who continually decide to play the ‘woe is me’ card.”—Zamir Thind, UC Davis student, Letter to the Editor, California Aggies, February 18^th, 2010

–“Human it is to have compassion on the unhappy.”—Giovanni Boccacio, Italian poet and scholar, 14^th century

Looks like Boccaccio was wrong.

Sadly, this is a sentiment I’ve often encountered in my life, whether in political debate or otherwise, and especially among my own generation. It has come to the point where if you mention the Holocaust, you are using your old Jewish powers of the “guilt-trip.” Oh, it’s just one of those “Jewish things.”

To me, it seems like an utter lack of human compassion.

Surely, the UC Davis student with such strong opinions does not consider himself uncompassionate, and yet when discussing an atrocious act of genocide that happened little over sixty years ago, and within living memory, he wishes we would forget this irrelevant drop of human history and “get over it.”

Which is why I was so happily surprised to meet Germano Maccioni, an Italian filmmaker, just over thirty years old, who sees things the same way I do, “… most people, I believe, don’t understand the true meaning of the word ‘compassion’.”

Clearly, he has a point.

Mr. Maccioni knows a thing or two about compassion. He is the director of a documentary about the Monte Sole massacre, in which entire Italian farming communities, over 700 people, among whom were women, children, and the elderly, were slaughtered during World War II for allegedly conspiring with the partisans. Sixty-two years after the fact, the documentation of these events, previously hidden, was discovered and led to the creation of a trial against the men responsible. The months spent in the editing room alone watching the same heartrending scenes over and over were a lesson in compassion that allowed him to create a truly masterful film, “I had to re-listen to [to the footage] so many times in order to understand how to put this story together that it was truly painful…. It was a constructive pain.”

As a result, Mr. Maccioni created a haunting and subtle documentary film of this trial, titled “The State of Exception,” allowing the world to witness the survivors’ retelling their experiences and showing, even sixty-two years later, that crimes of this nature remain very much an immediate part of people’s lives.

In fact, the scope of these events reaches farther than just the lives of the victims. There is still a lot of controversy regarding the events at Monte Sole because they were supposed to be swept under the rug and unacknowledged by the government. The files about the events were kept hidden in a basement for decades. “In Italy, Monte Sole is always a thorny subject. Someone else tried to make a documentary and there was a lot of debate, because there is always the political issue. The right used the massacre to lay the fault on the partisans. Then there is the left that says otherwise. I tried to keep politics out of it.”

The politicians themselves seemed eager to stay out of the controversy as well, and came to show support only when there would be journalists present in order to further their own images,  “to show off,” adds Mr. Maccioni.
There was such controversy, in fact, that when the victims first tried to speak out, they were disparaged, “all the women, once they arrived in the city, having experienced this shocking trauma, weren’t even believed. When they retold what had happened, the people didn’t believe them. The biggest newspaper in Bologna wrote an article saying that these were all stories and lies that came from Monte Sole.”

For this reason, among many others, “The State of Exception” plays an important role. “While I was there making the film, I understood by their testimonies that the fact that we were there to listen and not just to listen but to film created the cinematic illusion of stopping time. It rendered their stories accessible to everyone, to whoever wanted to listen. At the end we had a screening just for the witnesses and when it was over they all got in line to shake my hand, to hug me, to thank me.”

And, it seems, this isn’t the only community touched by the movie. “One thing that really pleased me was that just as in Portland, as in Santa Cruz, as in San Francisco, as in Berkeley, the Jewish community felt a connection with this story. And now I understand that even though there are different religions and cultural differences and so on, we are all part of the same thing.”

This is a lesson that unfortunately many people seem to not understand. That even though we all come from different places and hold different views, we are part of the same history and to some degree, it affects us all.

Germano Maccioni learned this from his first-hand experiences.

“Watching the sentencing was the moment in which I realized that my legs were trembling. I felt different in that moment. I began to feel that in some way this sentence concerned me too, because I now felt like a part of this community…. I think, thanks to this film, I was able to experience that thing that is normally called ‘compassion’.