The ending wasn't very conclusive for me. Were we to assume that Micol, her family, and Giorgio's father were killed in a concentration camp? Does the book make that clear or not?
shareYeah, according to Wikipedia every one who goes to the camps dies.
shareI don't understand Italian, but in the very end scenes, which are going in slow motion as they are playing tennis (in flashback) I caught the word "Auschwitz" in the lyrics of the song that is being sung in Italian. So I assume they all die.
shareThe book starts with a description of the Finzi Contini's monumental family tomb and the author says that, among the memebers he once knew, only Alberto is buried there because the other members died at a concentration camp in Germany.
jpb58: the song we hear at the end of the movie is not sung in Italian, I think it's yiddish.
Greetings to you all from Ferrara :-)
Hi.
Whatever it is sung in I still heard the word Auschwitz in the lyrics. It stood out because I didn't recognize a single other word that was being sung.
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I thought the end showing some of the young playing tennis was referring to the ones that died.
Since Giorgio didn't appear.
the song we hear at the end of the movie is not sung in Italian, I think it's yiddish.
It was the "El Moleh Rahamim" (God full of Mercy) poem, which is in Hebrew, not Yiddish (except for the names of the camps), and it is a traditional Jewish prayer for mournful occasions which was especially adapted after the Holocaust to commemorate the Nazis' victims. It was however sung in an Ashkenazic cantorial style, which may lead one to think it was Yiddish rather than Hebrew.
A clip of it can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78uXhSugkrs
with lyrics here:
http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/data.show.php?di=record&da=recordings&ke=18
The ending was a bittersweet reflection of their lives before they were sent to their deaths. The youthfulness and care-free attitudes will perish forever.
"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".
The song is in jewish, not in Italian .....
shareThey were definitely sent to concentration camps. That's why all those people were in that place at the end. However, many people didn't die at those camps, so maybe these characters survived too.
share