AND WE WERE LEFT DARKLING
In the aftermath of WW2, in an undefined place, two men, Eichmann and Wallenberg, play chess, using humans as pawns. Each represents the extreme of man’s humanity and inhumanity to man. https://andwewereleft.com/
Handsome, well-educated and heir to a Swedish banking fortune, RAOUL WALLENBERG strides into the squalor of the Jewish ghettos of WW2 Budapest where his beliefs in human decency and dignity confronts ADOLF EICHMANN and the Reich’s new god, one of strength and efficiency.
SYNOPSIS 1. EICHMANN occupies a room, a limbo in the afterlife. He is visited by WALLENBERG. Both play chess together and recall their opposing views on the meaning of life. 2. WALLENBERG invites EICHMANN to recall his capture in Buenos Aires. What in EICHMANN’s inhumane past has led him to be housed in this limbo? 3. As they continue recalling the past, images of that past are presented. 4. We see the everyday, personal dramas of Jews, particularly ANNA SARBO as she questions how she can act morally in such an immoral world. 5. When ANNA meets WALLENBERG, she questions why her God has sent this man to help the Jews. 6. We also meet ARPAD ZADOR, the middle-aged chair of the Jewish Council. He too is attempting to comprehend how, in this incomprehensible situation, to act morally. 7. Then there is a young jewess, KATI LEVAI, who witnesses this new God--power, “macht”--usurping the Jaweh of her ancestors. 8. And there is her former schoolmate, ISVAN ISTOCZY, now a member of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross, which offers him the control and domination never before accorded him. 9. Throughout EICHMANN attempts to understand who or what this WALLENBERG represents. He, WALLENBERG, is the antithesis of what EICHMANN’S Nazi party offers. 10. Alone, slowly losing items that formerly signified his strength and power, EICHMANN, confronts that something beautiful and decent in humankind—WALLENBERG. 11. For most, including EICHMANN himself, that beauty and decency is unattainable. 12. And what happened to WALLENBERG? Taken by the Russians and dying in a Gulag. 13. And what of the rest of us? Power? Decency? Which do we choose? 14. Best ease our conscience and forget the WALLENBERGS of this life. And if we do? “Out went the candle,/ And we were left darkling.”
I love to explore and write, in serious and comic forms, stories of those who, through choice or happenstance, find themselves strangers in a strange land (or even in their own land).
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