Media Review: The Great Escape

The Movie

The Great Escape movie is perhaps my favorite movie of all time. Perhaps it is because Steve McQueen's American Airman character is as sarcastic to the German Kommandant as I have sometimes wanted to be to a few tyrannical authorities. Or, it could be that I appreciate watching a bunch of supposedly powerless men snubbing their noses at their captors. Or, it could be that
I have just watched it so many times I have been brainwashed. Who knows. I just like the movie.

The Book

Cindi brought home a book from the library entitled "The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World" by Kati Marton. It chronicles the lives of nine secular Jewish Hungarians who lived in Budapest in a golden age of tolerance and education before World War I. These nine men included the following:

1. Two photographers who first developed photography as an art form rather than as potraiture. One became the greatest war photographer yet known, and the other became an icon of texture, motion, and form.
   
2. Two director/producers who created some of the most beloved films of all time and transformed the British and American movie industries
3. Three physicists who worked under Oppenheimer to create the atomic bomb in the Manhattan project. Two of these understood that the combination of Einstein's E=mc² and Niels Bohr's atomic model implied that a nuclear chain reaction could be achieved, creating a superweapon. They recognized these implications of seemingly innocuous German experiments, alerted Albert Einstein and U.S. policymakers, resulting in the Manhattan project.
4. A famous mathematician/lobbyist who developed the ENIAC (the first electronic computer) that made possible the calculations needed to design the atomic bombs created by the Manhattan Project in the race with Germany to develop superweapons
5. One of the world's most influential political novelists.

This is really an exceptional book. It chronicles an incredibly productive time in history when a small area produced remarkable genius of many types which influenced the world in many ways, not all of them good.

One of the things that I got from this book is the drive that was instilled by (1) education, and (2) crisis. All nine of these men lived through a golden age of Budapest in which education, discovery, and creativity were seen as the point of life; but then saw a rapid descent into blaming the Jews for Hungary's problems. I saw how most of these men changed their names to erase their Jewishness, at least politically. The ethnic ties still remained strong, but the conflict that being Jewish in a time of severe repression is very clear in this book. Each of these men was tortured and driven by the experience.

Though I admire the ingenuity and tenacity of these men who survived setbacks most men would find completely disabling, I also took from this book a lesson on spirituality. These men were raised in the golden age to rely on their own intelligence, discovery, and creativity to solve any problem as clearly secular persons. The problems they faced could not be resolved simply through personal strengths. The torture could not be reasoned away, or channeled away into discovery or creativity. There is a certain powerlessness in the stricture that solutions to life's problems must come through human ingenuity. I lived this life for many years, not reasonably understanding the futility of trying to overcome intractable problems through personal exertion. As I read this book, and now as I write about it, it is so clear to me that the torture described is because of the powerlessness of man to control so many interconnected actors.

It makes me grateful to have learned (albeit the hard way) that God wants me to understand that I need Him to make life work--that intractable problems are indeed intractable to all but God who desires that I acknowledge my inability to solve my problems alone. It is good to have a Savior.

Marx indicated that religion is the opiate of the masses. I feel sorry for persons who believe that because it places an impossibly large burden on people, no matter how brilliant, courageous, or creative.