Option for fire – 09/16/2023 – Candido Bracher

Among the unforgettable films of my adolescence, “Grand Prix” stands out. In it, there is a dialogue whose impact only grew the several times I reviewed it. It occurs when pilot Jean-Pierre Sarti, played by actor Yves Montand, tells his companion that when he sees an accident on the track, he accelerates hard, as he knows that all the other pilots are lifting their feet.

More than the competitive spirit, what is impressive in the phrase is the attempt to repress fear and suffering in the face of the tragedy that affects a similar person.

Likewise, when there are accidents on the road, it always catches my attention, the huge traffic jam that persists hours after the fact, when the accident cars no longer block the road. Drivers slow down a lot to observe the accident; not even those who are impatient to continue their journey fail to look closely.

In these situations, I always feel a certain guilt, not because of what could be called “morbid curiosity”, which contrasts with empathy with the victims, but because of the feeling of relief, which seems to say: “It could have been me, but it wasn’t”.

Perhaps to combat the risk of being insensitive to other people’s pain, before going to the cinema to see “Oppenheimer”, I followed critic Amir Labaki’s suggestion and watched the film “Flash/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” via streaming. by Steven Okazaki. The documentary, with period scenes and interviews with Japanese survivors and even American soldiers, exposes in a profound and touching way the pain that the Hollywood film omits.

The excellent book “Oppenheimer: The Triumph and Tragedy of the American Prometheus”, on which the blockbuster film is based, would still teach me something about the limits of my ability to empathize with other people’s suffering, which is painful for me to share. In one passage, after the success of the atomic explosion, Oppenheimer says he only regrets that it was not possible to complete the bomb project in time to drop it on Hitler’s Germany.

Of course I understand the logic of the reasoning, especially considering that Oppenheimer was Jewish, but I confess that I felt a chill down my spine. I have no German nationality or ancestors, but I was born in Germany to Brazilian parents. Before coming definitively to Brazil, I lived the first two years of my life in Friborg and Heidelberg, cities where I have friends that I visited several times.

The idea that the bomb could be dropped on these cities shocked me even more than the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reminding me in a raw way that, when we feel empathy, we establish a hierarchy of proximity between our fellow humans. Some are more similar than others: “Matthew, thine first.”

But the event that gave rise to the trail of thoughts in this text occurred a few days ago in Greece and shocked me to the point of becoming a recurring idea, even in dreams. I realized this the day I woke up thinking about the title of a book I really liked: “Other lives than mine”, by Emmanuel Carrère. In the book, the French author reflects with great sensitivity —based on two real cases involving people close to him— about accidents, illness, death, poverty and especially about the love that can involve these extreme situations.

In the Greek episode, after the serious fires that mainly affected the island of Rhodes in June, the fire again caused great destruction in late August and early September in forests located in the northeast of the country, close to the border with Turkey.

Firefighters found 19 charred bodies in the forest, but in the days that followed there were no reports of missing people in the region. Today there is no longer any doubt that the dead were refugees, arrived in Greece through Turkey, who hid in the forest after crossing the border.

I imagine them, upon realizing the fire, being reluctant to flee to the nearby city of Alexandroupolis, for fear of being returned to Turkey and deported to their home countries in North Africa. These moments of hesitation cost them their lives. Affected by the two contemporary global tragedies — that of refugees and that of global warming — and faced with the option between the risk of fire and the risk of returning to the hardships from which they sought to escape, they chose fire.

Unlike Carrère’s book, where the victims were close, it was precisely the perception of the enormous distance between the conditions and opportunities that I had and that of the refugees in the Evron forest that made me wake up thinking about the phrase “other lives than the my”. In this case, it wasn’t just a bad dream.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.