albawhall — 12 years ago(March 31, 2014 11:39 PM)

How did the Ukrainian youth, Florya, survive his initial arrest. He had dug up a buried rifle and was arrested in the bosom of his family for possession of a weapon by the Wehrmacht (who must have been omniscient) in front of his mother and twin sisters and then was brutally taken away in a wagon. He next inexplicably surfaces in a group photo session with the partisansall smiles and optimism? There is no transition showing him being carted away with facial blood smears and his evolution into a kind of mascot for the partisans who deem him too young to join in their foray against the invaders.
There is no transition scene explaining his being a captive who is presumably "rescued" nor of the fate of his German captors. Were they ambushed and killed by the partisans?
Whoever wrote the script ignored the blatant gaps in the storyline so much so that I skimmed the chapters of the film to see if I had missed a vital sequence between the cabin scene of his home and the woodland abode of the Russian partisans. But there was not a clue or a mise en scene to dispel my curiosity about missing or cut scenes and the interviewed filmist on the DVD said nothing about the lacunae either. What gives?