In Persona Liv Ullmann holds a photo of a boy, frozen hands held level with capped head, soldier leveling rifle at back. The same photo found in Night and Fog precedes piled corpses bulldozed to burial pits.
This boy, now behind barbed wire, Shmuel--Prophet, Judge, Son of God--meets Bruno--son of SS soldier--in a light-hearted tale of mistaken identity at a death camp.
An allegory for our own mistaken identity, fictional self-representation: as Milton Mayer says of his Nazi friends, kleine Leute, ordinary Germans, "they thought they were free," and Mayer asks, "isn't this true of us all?"
It feels good feeding delectably soft pastries to comic strip Pig-Pen neighbors, dirt covered with rotting teeth, imagining our joys untraceable to their pains, sweets untinged by Zyklon B pellets.
And after we absorb the chill, the bite of our crime, our betrayal, what will we sacrifice to give a clasping hand in love, friendship?
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