DailyView: Day 322, Movie 461

The documentaries have been dark recently. While there is no sexual abuse involved here, cannibalism is a different kind of abomination.

This documentary (which apparently was released in Spain in 2011, but Amazon Prime lists the year as 2015) deals with a dark spot in Russian history. In 1933, Joseph Stalin deported 6000 “unwanted” citizens of Moscow and Leningrad to a desolate Siberian island, Nazino Island with little in way of clothing, food or materials needed for survival. After a certain amount of time, the deportees turned to violence, including murder and cannibalism to try and maintain their lives.

The whole time I was watching this documentary, all I kept thinking about was the Holocaust that would begin in Nazi Germany in less than 5-6 years later. Stalin was an ally with the United States and Britain in World War II, but Stalin had committed many atrocities against his own people by the time World War II was underway.

There were people who were removed to the island who had done nothing wrong. People who had gone out from their house without their passports to prove who they were had been grabbed and deported among this group of people. The randomness of the whole situation makes it all the worse.

It makes one wonder at what point do you go from a normal human being to someone who is so desperately hungry that they would kill someone for food. It certainly is not a situation that I ever plan on being stuck within.

Cannibal Island told a story that I had never heard before, but should be something that we never forget.