‘Souvenir Souvenir’ and facing the West’s legacy of colonialism

Souvenir Souvenir is a short documentary animation by 2011 Oscar nominee animation director Bastien Dubois, laying out a story of war trauma, family conflict, creative process and filial love. As the world’s governments continue to refuse to call for a permanent ceasefire for the slaughter taking place in the Gaza Strip, the film makes a vital case for facing the horrors of colonialism head-on.

Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. They wiped out around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population in the process. It remains one of the darkest chapters of 20th century history. It is inaccurate to paint it as a one-off-event, though.

The established Western – or more explicitly, White Western – understanding of the Holocaust frames it as unique. As many of the people who the continent’s political mainstream and media are speaking to have not witnessed another systematic, mechanised slaughter of an ethnic group first-hand, this is often taken at face value. But the unspoken reason why it should be taken as a one-off is always left unsaid.

In the same way that the Ukraine war has been coded as a unique event in modern history, however, this is underwritten by an implicit historic slight of hand. Ukraine is not unique because large countries simply don’t invade small ones for land, resources or a totalitarian political project anymore. It is unique because the victims and perpetrators of the war are European, and predominantly white. They look like the people who are presented as the normative citizen across the continent. Meanwhile, other such acts of imperialist aggression are simply par for the course, as long as they take place in Africa, Central America, or the Middle East.

The Holocaust is a horrific stain on global history, then, but it is not a standalone. Concentration camps had been a fixture of colonial policy for decades before the Second World War. Britain had deployed them in South Africa during the Boer War. At the end of the 19th century, the Belgian occupation of Congo saw a campaign of brutality saw forced labour, starvation and capital punishment rack up a death-toll which historians can still only estimate – depending who you ask, and whether ‘direct or indirect’ deaths count, the number could range from 10 million to 15 million people. And during the Algerian War, the French colonisers destroyed more than 8,000 villages, and relocated over 2 million people to concentration camps. The conflict which left between 400,000 and 1.5 million Algerians dead – with some estimates asserting 300,000 civilians perished from starvation, violence, and disease inside and around the camps.

In this historical context, the Holocaust is not a lone set of atrocities. It is just the one which is most prominent, in part because its victims can be reconciled with Europe’s political norms. Ideas of the progressive Europe that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust – supposedly driven by the mantra Never Again – take a bit of a hit when factoring in its colonial legacy it still refuses to address, or when its current leaders comfortably throw their weight behind a campaign of ethnic cleansing by a military ally on another continent.

Souvenir Souvenir is an important film in this context. Bastien Dubois’ introspective, retrospective animated documentary is born of a determination to say Never Again, and to mean it. The film follows Dubois as he recounts various encounters with his grandfather, during which he attempted – innocuously at first, then more pointedly – to ask him what he did during the Algerian War.

Dubois’ grandfather remains dogged in his insistence that he saw no combat at all. That he sat around sunning himself for a few months, then went home to normality. Dubois finds this difficult to believe, and early work in his career as an animator sees him trying to both imagine the horrors being hidden from him, and to help tell the story of survivors, who his grandfather’s silence glosses over.

As the film builds toward a climax, Dubois’ determination – and perhaps a creeping sense of mortality – sees his grandfather finally cave, for one moment. At a family dinner, he begins to discuss a weapon crafter by someone in his regiment during the war – a steel bar with a leaden ball at the end. In the wake of the picture already painted by Dubois, from historical accounts and interviews of those who saw what terror such weapons were used to inflict, it becomes clear that this is as close to a confession as he needs to get.

Dubois is obviously taken aback by the admission. Discovering your own flesh and blood could be complicit in war crimes will always come with a horrendous emotional sting. But to a degree, he is almost relieved that his grandfather has in some senses come clean about the grisly reality of a trip he previously spoke of as a holiday. It is a warning from the past that ‘people like us’ are capable of unspeakable things, and it is not even particularly exceptional. Living in that legacy, but blind to its effects, has rendered our society prone to repeating those same horrors. If we are going to really move forward, though, this is an essential first recognition.

That is not to say the path before us is clear even when the truth presents itself. Dubois leaves us with a worrying suggestion that we actually stand at a cross-roads; one where people remain determined to gloss over the past, and lay the foundations for a nightmarish future in the process. When Dubois tries to talk to his father about his grandfather’s outburst at the dinner, he finds the same stubborn resistance to discussing it. “What are you talking about?”

There is something haunting about this particular exchange, amid the continued carnage in Gaza. With an Israeli military that is has been presented as an extension of the West in the Middle East for decades – in every media update, every televised debate, every political press conference – a lingering ideological assumption remains that people like us don’t do these things. Allies of Western democracies don’t behave in this way.

In the month since Hamas attacked Israel’s border, killing 1,200 people and taking roughly 240 people taken hostage, the retaliation has seen estimates upwards of 13,000 civilians killed in Gaza by the Israeli bombardment and invasion. Hospitals, schools and refugee camps have not been exempted from the destruction. Entire family lines have been wiped out. It is clear at this stage, that the project the likes of Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak have leant full-throated support to is much more than a retaliation, then.

Even so, amid all of this, mainstream discourse remains is that this is all just normal. It can’t be ethnic cleansing, because as the West and its partners don’t do that – a position which requires increasingly deranged mental-gymnastics to enforce. From the idea that either the numbers of casualties are ‘exaggerated’, to the suggestion that they include civilians wiped out by misfiring Hamas missiles, to the openly ghoulish questioning of ‘who even is a civilian, anyway?’

But like Dubois in Souvenir Souvenir, the wider public is determined to speak about what is going on. Millions of people around the world have marched behind that message, defying government attempts to silence them. It is crucial that they continue to do so, because unless we acknowledge that the horrors of the 20th century Europe were not an exception – but in fact, the rule – we doom ourselves to repeat them. The proof is in the crimes unfolding before our very eyes.