Everything Must Perish: The Screenplay

By bal kumar

World War 2. Germany. Berlin. 1939.   

The war has begun in Germany, and Jewish civilians are massacred in the blood soaked streets of Berlin in large numbers by ‘Einsatzgruppen’, the Nazi killing squads, who stop at nothing to destroy their enemies.    

Hiding out in an abandoned barn are shop keepers Aaron and older brother Moshe, and their small band of friends, leading a dangerous existence, as they scavenge for food on the outskirts of Berlin in Potsdam, struggling to survive against the brutality of war.  

Within the midst of this chaos is SS officer Lieutenant Jurgen Klauss, head of ‘Einsatzgruppen C’, assigned to rid the Germans of their ‘Jewish problem’.   

As part of their killing campaign the S.S. capture a Jewish shop owner, Gerhard Silverman, who after being tortured, confesses the whereabouts of Aaron and his friends to the Germans. SS officer Jurgen Klauss then marches with his battalion of S.S. ‘Death’s head’ sentries to Potsdam, hunting his prey, like a wolf on a killing spree, finding the terrified civilians and executing them in cold blood.    

All hope seems to have been lost for the Jewish civilians, but by some miracle, one of the victims Aaron miraculously survives the massacre, seriously wounded and bleeding from a shot to the stomach.  

With the assistance of a local German widow Aaron slowly and painfully recovers from his wounds, vowing to avenge the death of his brother and comrades, by assassinating SS officer Jurgen Klauss. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: bal kumar
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536523850

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EVERYTHING MUST PERISH

By BAL KUMAR

EVERYTHING MUST PERISH

Copyright(c)2016

Prophecy Publishing Limited.

The following is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form, digital or printed, without the permission of the author.

This book is dedicated to the millions of Jewish people that suffered and were persecuted by the Nazis during World War 2.

May you find peace in heaven.

AN INTRODUCTION TO EVERYTHING MUST PERISH 18th February 2016.

Written by Bal Kumar.

Before I really begin telling you the story behind the story that is ‘EVERYTHING MUST PERISH’ please let me thank you reader for taking the time out of your busy life, to spend your energy reading my creative work, my screenplay. I’m most grateful for your efforts, and hope that reading this gives you some sense of who I am, and what I’m trying to achieve as an artist, that you connect with it on an emotional level, and that you hopefully will enjoy the story. 

Right now its February 18th 2016, its just gone midnight, and I’m in my Hotel room in Tel Aviv writing this. It’s really the perfect place for me to write this, as of course I’m in Israel writing about Jewish people and Judaism.

It’s also a bridge from my first piece of work which links beautifully to another feature film I will begin writing this week, which is called ‘Crossfire’. This is also a film about Jewish characters and is a contemporary story that reflects certain aspects of Jewish society today. More on that later.

Now if I go back to the beginnings of Everything Must Perish, which is really going back to the start of 2015 in January, when I really first started thinking about writing something new. I had been spending the past few years reading lots of material on world war 2, particularly from a German perspective, out of own passion and interest in the subject area.

I had it in my mind that I’d really wanted to write a film based in that era, but it had to be something very special, a little bit different that any of the films that had come before.  Before January 2015 the seeds of the idea were still growing in my mind.

I had a lot to live up to, I was never going to be able to compete with the best of those kinds of films, but at the same time I really wanted to write something that was in that genre but was still something different, something original.

I spent a lot of time thinking through this carefully, and then like a random shot of lightening it hit me..and wow..what an amazing idea is was.

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I was flicking through a book of world war 2 photographs one day, and one image struck me, it was a photo of a young woman protecting her child from an SS sentry who had his rifle pointed at her.

It had some kind of raw emotion attached to it which I couldn’t explain. The woman showed no fear in shielding her child, and at the same time the soldier was focused, prepared to fire, not afraid of killing the woman and the child.

The image stayed in my head perhaps every day for almost two weeks, before all of a sudden I began thinking about the genesis of an idea that was to become the basic structure for my feature film idea and screenplay.

Before the German’s had perfected the concentration camps towards the middle of world war 2 they had used specialised units, killing squads to round up civilians and shoot them in large groups. People would then be thrown into ditches and buried, hiding any trace of their existence. 

I had spent some time previously reading about the German killing squads, the ‘Einsatzgrupen’ and their cruel and disturbing methods of casually killing large groups of the Jewish community, as they went from town to town. I remember what I had read had haunted me for days. What I had read was truly chilling. I began thinking about how I could structure my project with some of these ideas in place.

I imagined the sheer terror the Jewish population must had felt having to undress in front of the soldiers, standing in a ditch and then having to see tumbling bodies die before they themselves were then shot. How utterly heartbreaking and sad.

Then I started thinking what if out of blind luck (or perhaps fate?) one of these characters were to survive the massacre, and come back and seek revenge? That really got the ball rolling for me creatively in terms of thinking about how the story might develop as a screenplay.

I travelled to Athens in January 2015 to catch up with one my closest friends and his family from my university days, and when not with him, I began to tentatively write the opening sequences to the story. As soon as I began writing it flowed effortlessly.

I felt suddenly all of the ideas about world war 2 were flying onto the page. It was really exciting seeing that world come to life.

The story would focus on several characters in Berlin Germany, during the beginning of World war 2, both resistance and German soldiers, that were in a fight for survival as the German killing squads roamed Berlin shooting Jewish people without remorse. 

This was a truly amazing moment for me creatively, as really this was the start of the screenplay. Certainly one of the key scenes is the actual shooting itself, in which a large group of innocent civilians, captured by the Germans are slaughtered by our main antagonist Jurgen Klauss and his killing squad unit of SS sentries.

Klauss is perhaps the most conflicted and complex character in the screenplay, with all of my characters I wanted to try really hard to make them familiar and engaging, but still give them an intelligence that was different than the kind of characters I had previously seen in other films about war.

I wanted to go much further with my own protagonists and antagonists, in many of the films I had seen previously featuring German soldiers, to me they seemed very one dimensional, very clearly evil and without remorse but rarely did I see anything more than that, no glimpse of their humanity, which is what I really wanted from behind that uniform.

With my own senior SS officer Jurgen Klauss I wanted to have a man that was certainly patriotic, but was also conflicted and was uneasy with some aspects of his duty as a soldier, and had doubts that haunted him, he was certainly loyal to the cause but there was still some part of him that didn’t want to kill, that wanted to live an ordinary life, like other people and not the life of a warrior in wartime.

The character that really changes him, makes him think about another life he could live is the character of Johanna. She is portrayed as sultry, sophisticated and articulate. We see she is a singer, often singing songs to German officers about love, loss and wartime in smoky bars and cafes, this seems so ironic when you look back at her character and reflect on what she goes through.

All those feelings of longing and sadness that she sings about, she herself experiences in the story. What we don’t know though when we first meet her is that she also supports the Jewish resistance in their struggle to save Jewish people in wartime.

As the story progresses we also see the conflict within her, the fact that she can see Jurgen as a good man, following orders, but wanting a life with him in which he isn’t a soldier in war time, but an ordinary man. A good man, that loves her.  

Another one of the most important character’s, particularly in the second half of the film is Gurion, the leader of the resistance and a member of paramilitary organisation ‘The Haganah’ his role in the story is to help the central character develop as a resistance fighter and to be almost like a father figure to him, he is brave and charismatic and would sacrifice himself in an instant if it meant saving his fellow Jewish comrades.

That leads me to my central protagonist, Arron. Arron is a young man at the beginning of the war, trying hard to cope with the horrors of war, as the people all around him are dying, its heartbreaking for him, particularly when his brother Moshe is killed in the first third of the story, yet he himself, by some miracle manages to survive.

The first half of the film is then very much about him having to face violence all around him, and count each of his days as a blessing. Through the kindness of a German stranger he manages to survive the shooting and slowly recover so that he can bury his brother with some dignity.

At the same time it is here, at this point in the story that he meets resistance fighter Gurion, as the story develops from the midpoint our central character begins to understand what courage is, and what he must do to survive.

The story then builds to a crescendo, in which Aaron fights against Jurgen Klauss the man that almost killed him, but as I don’t want to give it away, I will at least tell you that isn’t the end of the story, but only the beginning of the end.

This is a piece of work I am truly proud of, it has taken more than a year of writing and rewriting scenes to finally get this far to the end, with many ups and downs, and moments where I really struggled with the story, it has really enabled me to develop as a screenwriter.

Following the release of the screenplay in printed form will be the release of the novel, an audio book, and then a graphic novel, as well as a limited edition release of the soundtrack.  Then I will also be working on the feature film, producing and directing the film, once it’s ready.

I have many ideas about the feature film and how it will look visually, along with who I would like to cast in it. All of the elements of the story will really come alive once it becomes a film in the future..

It’s really an exciting time for me right now as a filmmaker and as a writer, as I’m completing this I’m just preparing to write another feature film ‘Crossfire’ while I’m here in Tel Aviv.

This story is also about Jewish people, but this time in a contemporary setting, about a young Haredi, Avi (Haredi are seen as very religious people) a civilian that becomes a soldier, and while on duty at a checkpoint one day he is ambushed by angry Palestinians, who shoot his colleagues and flee the scene.

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