Tonight after work, I walked over to the downtown theater to blocks away to catch an early film. I had heard little about the movie “The Zookeeper’s Wife” before I checked on possibilities earlier in the afternoon. Then I read the blurb on the film, and it was clearly a film I’d need to see.

The Zookeeper’s Wife is about Dr. Jan Zabinski and his wife, Antonina, who in the 1930’s ran the zoo in Warsaw, Poland. As history tells us, in 1939 Germany invaded Poland during its Blitzkreig, and shortly after, Jews were collected and moved into the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. When Germany invaded Poland, Jan and Antonina soon realized what was happening to Jews in the city and the ghetto, and with a large facility and few animals because they were “borrowed” by the zookeeper of Berlin for safekeeping in Germany, the Zabinski made the decision to hide Jews and then help them to escape out of the city,

The movie was decent enough. The story is like most every other of those about brave people who willingly put their lives at risk to save others. It is tense and fraught with opportunities for their efforts to be discovered and betrayed.

I go to see films like this one to be reminded, if in some small way, what horrors happened in the world back in the early 1940’s when Hitler was in power, and a government sanctioned the murder of an entire people. And by reflecting on those events from the past, I am also reminded that good and evil are not bound to certain ages. The atrocities that happened under Hitler and Nazi Germany still happen in similar and other forms today, done by other people, and other governments, under similar irrational pretenses. Evil destroys.

Movies like this also help me to remember of another peculiar truth about humanity, though. How remarkable is it that, in dark and dire times, when governments and men find reasons to kill others for patriotic or neurotic reasons, there are always some people who turn their back on evil and go all in, risking their lives to save and support others who are sentenced to death based on their skin color or their blood type.

That, to me, is the amazing thing. When a flower grows and blossoms out of the rocks.

How odd it is that we, a race of intelligent creatures, have scientifically and philosophically come to the place where Darwinian theory- the fittest survives- guides biological and sociological thinking, and yet the highest behavior that is lauded in human being is self-sacrifice, acting to benefit the other in spite of what it might cost one’s self.

I am grateful for these historical reminders that suggest that whatever evil might do to try and tie up and terminate human lives, there are always a number of people in the crowd who fight it and serve to save lives. In the end, it is they we celebrate and extol as the best of humanity.

And, well, it’s because they are.