Characters / Come and See

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Characters featured from Come and See and the book it is based on, Khatyn.

The Gaishun Family

Flyora blossomed

Flyora wilted

Our Kid Hero, who lives with his mother and sisters in the little village of Beliye Peski. He wants adventure in his life and decides to join the partisans…but life has a funny way of not meeting his expectations.

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• Break the Cutie: What was once an eager 14-year-old is now a broken shell of his former self.
• Byronic Hero: He was once a happy little boy whose experiences burdened him with a shipload of trauma and emotional issues.
• Cathartic Crying: Tears trickle down his eyes when he stops shooting the Hitler painting.
• Character Development: One of the darkest ever put to page and screen. At the beginning, he's an innocent adolescent who lives for the thrill of fighting for his rights. By the end, he has seen Hell and death everywhere reducing him to an old and crooked shell of his former self.
• Character Narrator: The novel Khatyn is told from his perspective.
• Child Soldier: One of the most iconic examples in all of Russian literature and cinema, next to Ivan Bondarev from Ivan's Childhood.
• Coming of Age Story: Flyora's story is a darker version of this than usual. All he wants to do is fight to protect his home country, but he never fires a single shot until the end and he has to suffer several layers of Hell on Earth before turning his fury at the very man responsible for destroying his childhood.
• Cool Big Bro: He was a very loving brother to his little sisters.
• Cute but Troubled: Even in the beginning, he showed signs of being a creepy child, and his personality was weighed down by the traumas of war.
• Death of Personality: By the time the story has reached its end, poor little Flyora assumes an almost catatonic state. Witnessing the horrors of war, the tyrannic nature of the Nazis, losing his family and seeing hundreds of people killed pretty much sends him over the deep end. Not to mention his good looks have slowly mutated him into a 90 year old man.
• Despair Event Horizon: After learning that his family has died via Yustin the village elder, Flyora goes to pieces. This marks the beginning of his premature aging.
• Did Not Get the Girl: He falls in love with Glasha, but he never returns to her.
• Disappeared Dad: Nothing much is known about his father aside from the fact that he too went off to fight and has died. According to the novel, he worked as manager of a tractor pool and went off to fight in Finland, presumably in the Continuation War.
• Floral Theme Naming: Flyora is an alternate spelling of Flora, a name for flowers and plants. He wears a scarf with white roses on it and he "wilts" from trauma over the course of the film.
• Growing Up Sucks: Thanks to the war and his family being taken away from him, Flyora is coldly shoved into adulthood, filled with the dangers and terrors of bullets, carnage and death at almost every corner. The fact that the experience has changed him into an old man also puts things into a more literal perspective.
• Helpless Observer Protagonist: Until the famous scene where he shoots the Hitler portrait, he doesn't do much but try to survive.
• I Miss Mom: It can be assumed that seeing baby Hitler with his mother caused him to miss his own mother.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Yustin blames Flyora and his discovery of the gun to let the Nazis into their village.
• Innocence Lost: Poor Flyora, learning the hard way that war is not fun caused him to grow up too early…literally. The experience also caused his sanity to shatter.
• Kid Hero: He's 14, but he's anything but a hero given all that he goes through.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: To his family.
• Pinball Protagonist: He doesn't contribute much to the plot.
• Prematurely Grey-Haired: Flyora's hair shifts from strawberry blonde to white due to a combination of fear and stress.
• Sanity Slippage: Flyora more or less goes off his crumpet during the middle and final acts of the story, which could explain the film's surrealistic nature. It's sad to say that losing his family and witnessing the brutality of the Nazis slowly broke his spirit.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: By the time the story has reached its end, Flyora is now a cold, lonely, miserable and woebegone version of his former self. You can bet at this point that he wishes now he hadn’t left his home.
• Shirtless Scene: He is shown bare chested thrice in the earlier parts of the film.
• Sole Survivor: Call it good or bad luck, but Flyora seems to have the fortune (or misfortune) of surviving almost everything in the film.
• Tagalong Kid: The youngest member of the partisans.
• The Team Wannabe: He wants to join in on the fun, but is deliberately left behind while the partisans go off to war.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Flyora lapses into this upon learning his family was murdered and seeing just about everything the Nazis have done.
• The Tragic Rose: Flyora is a variation of "Flora", and upon joining the partisans, his life meets one tragedy after another.
• Trauma Conga Line: Everything that happens to Flyora from the moment he is recruited is something that no 14-year-old should ever have to go through: The other partisans treat him like the new kid at school, his idyllic romance with Glasha turns into a nightmare that ends with his family dead, bears witness to a village being burned and death and destruction are everywhere.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: One of his reasons for joining the partisans is supposedly to honor his late father and possibly even hoping to make his mother proud despite her objections.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Flyora maintains his courage and humanity by stopping at Hitler's infancy during the "Nazi history" montage.
• You Can't Go Home Again: His family and fellow neighbors have died and much of his village has been destroyed, so even if he survived the war, he has nowhere else to go.
• Young Face, Old Eyes: Flyora is perhaps the poster boy of this trope. As a result of his experiences, the pressure and trauma have transformed him into a hideous old dedushka. His hair turns grey, his brow becomes furrowed, wrinkles form around his face, gains wrinkly bags under his eyes and his own tears melt into his face.
• Younger Than They Look: Slowly, but surely, as every day passes, Flyora gradually becomes an old man who has seen death and destruction around every corner.

The Partisans

The leader of the partisans.

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• Big Good: The most moral and righteous character in the story.
• Colonel Badass: Qualifies, though the partisans address him as "commander".
• Death Glare: His signature expression.
• The Leader: He leads the partisans.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: A tough, but fair one to Flyora, especially on his first day in camp.

The Nazis

• Ax-Crazy: They go around shooting and burning people with no mercy intended.
• Hate Sink: What did you expect from Nazis, a friendly welcoming committee? One of them even has the gall to say that Belarus does not deserve to exist.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Partisans get their revenge on the Nazis by gunning them to death. Too bad it's only shown from the Nazis point of view.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The Nazis are excruciatingly narrow-minded to the point where they believe that Belarus and its people have no right to exist.
• Would Hurt a Child: They hold poor Flyora at gunpoint and burn women and children to death.