Title: The mother of all holocaust films?: Wanda Jakubowska's Auschwitz trilogy
Abstract: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Béla Balázs, Ostatni Etap (translated into English by Stuart Liebman), Slavic and East European Performance. Drama, Theatre, Film, 16:3 (1996), p. 66. Typoscript in the Hungarian Academy of Science, manuscript collection (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára), MS 5014/198. Ibid. Ibid. Members of START had been, among others, Stanisław Wohl (1912–?), Jerzy Bossak (1910–1989), Jerzy Toeplitz (1909–1995), Jerzy Zarzycki (1911–1971), Eugeniusz Ce¸kalski (1905–1952) and Aleksander Ford (1908–1980). They all met again when Film Polski and the Film School in Łódź were founded after the war. See Frank Bren, World Cinema. I: Poland (London, 1986), p. 22. Her letter from 5 January 1946 is quoted in Alina Madej's interview with Jakubowska from 1994, published in 1998. (Alina Madej, Jak powstawał Ostatni etap, Kino, 5/98, p. 14.) She tells Ford about her collaboration with Schneider and asks for permission to travel to Berlin, Czechoslowakia, Paris, Kraków, Tarnów, Nowy Targ and Oświe¸cim. Ibid. ‘Opinion’ of Adam Ważik about the screenplay ‘Oświe¸cim‐Birkenau’, 15 May 1946 (in: Filmoteka Narodowa, files of ‘Ostatni etap’, S 364, 144/78). Tadeusz Hołuj in his respective expert opinion made similar points again, arguing for a clear distinction between this film and any documentarism. ‘Opinion’ of Adam Ważik about the screenplay ‘Oświe¸cim’, 20 June 1946 (in: Filmoteka Narodowa, files of ‘Ostatni etap’, S 364, 144/78). Monastyrski had been the cameramen in Gustav von Wangenheim's anti‐nazi film Borzi (Fighters) in 1936. The first version of the screenplay put Helena even more in the centre of the narrative by presenting her and her husband in a more elaborated exposition before she enters the camp. In the discussions of the artistic board of Film Polski this was reduced to a short introductory sequence followed by the titles of the film. See the protocols of the board meetings of 2 February 1947 and 24 April 1947. (Both at Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw, files of ‘Ostatni etap’, S 364, 144/78.) Adam Ważik, in a memorandum of 21 January 1947 had already consulted her, to have Helena being reunited with Andrzej in the end, by letting the liberated women meet polish soldiers, who come with the Russians, as the closure of the film. (Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw, files of ‘Ostatni etap’, S 364, 144/78.) An early version of the screenplay identifies her as a Slowakian Jew. Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz–Birkenau 1939–1945 (Reinbek, 1989), p. 879. In her interview by Madej she told that, together with Schneider in Berlin, she had spoken to several SS men in summer 1945 in order to learn about their motivations and inner conflicts. Even with ‘Lagerführerin Mandel’ they would have tried to make an ‘interview’, but she refused. In the film, Mandel is played by Aleksandra Śla̧ska who got her chance to elaborate a much more differentiated character of a female SS guard only 15 years later, in Andrzej Munk's film Pasażerka, a casting clearly motivated by her emblematic figure in Ostatni etap. The board included Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Bossak, Stanisław Wohl and Eugeniusz Ce¸kalski. They had asked Tadeusz Hołuj, a communist writer and survivor of Auschwitz and an important figure in the process that led to the founding of the museum, Zofia Nałkowska, who helped to built up the ‘Główna Komisja’, the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes after the war, and for the questions of ideology and politics in particular a certain comrad Żółkiewski. Gerda Schneider, who—when the film was released—got the credit for consulting on the screenplay only, is not mentioned anymore throughout these protocols. In her interview by Madej, Jakubowska remembered with disgust that Ford in particular was trying to force Klaren (‘a hitlerite screenwriter’) on her (Alina Madej, Jak powstawał Ostatni etap, Kino, 5/98, p. 16). Klaren (1900–1962) had worked for the film industry throughout the Third Reich and, after writing and directing a few films for DEFA (among that an adaption of Wozzeck), left East Berlin in 1950 for Vienna, the town where he was born. This was obviously a delicate subject. In her interview by Madej she recounts criticism by her fellow prisoners, that the main heroine had been a Jew and not a ‘Polish woman’ (Alina Madej, Jak powstawal Ostatni etap, Kino, 5/98, p. 17). Here she explained the change in the emphasis with her mistake of casting a weak actress (Wanda Bartówna) for the role of Helena that had forced her to put Martha in the centre. And she told about more problems with the casting. For the role of the French heroine Daniele/Michele (who sings the Marseillaise on her way into the gas chamber with her fellows) she had already engaged Juliette Greco. But her ‘beloved French communists’ did not allow that and forced Huguette Faget on her, obviously backed by the Sowjets who did not always accommodate Jakubowska's favorites with the required passports. Travelling around in postwar Europe was not that easy. Expert opinion of Tadeusz Hołuj. Filmoteka Narodowa, files on ‘Ostatni etap’, S 364, 144/78. The film won the Grand Prize at the International Film Festival in Marianske Lazne 1948 and was shown shortly after in Germany, France, Italy, Norway, and many other countries. Ewa Mazierska, Wanda Jakubowska's cinema of commitment, The European Journal of Women's Studies, 8:2 (2001), p. 221. In 1955, in the course of the reorganization of the Polish filmindustry, she became head of ‘Start’, one of the six film production units, now endowed with an increased artistic autonomy. On Unzere Kinder see Ira Konigsberg, Our children and the limits of cinema, Film Quarterly, Fall 1998. Ford worked in Denmark, Israel and West‐Germany and then lived in the United States, where he committed suicide in 1980. Jerzy Toeplitz lost his position as the rector of the Łódź Film School and went to Australia, where he died in 1995. In order to do so Marek, who is probably returning from Russia like Stanisław Wohl himself, has to say farewell to his hometown, his old love and his own bourgeois past. The somewhat explicit moral vantage point, from where the authors of the film (in addition to Wohl also Józef Wyszomirski got a credit for directing) portrayed post war Poland, was unlikely to attract the audience and the film was not released in 1946. Unfortunately in the Filmoteka I could not find any sources related to this case, besides a short note to the review ‘Film’ from 1946 that Ewa Szelburg‐Zarembina, who wrote the first idea for the film, refrained from any participation in the film and that the title of the film would be changed into ‘Od 9‐ej do 11‐ej’ (from 9 to 11), already indicating a conflict about the film. (Files of ‘Dwie godziny’, S‐113, in Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw.) The existing version of the film (from 1957) has only 1917 meter (about 70 minutes). One might wonder what happened to the other 20 minutes. Stuart Liebman's extensive research in that subject will soon be published in an essay. Majdanek, as the first death camp, liberated by the Allied, in this case the Russian forces, was to be—in the Western hemisphere—overshadowed by Buchenwald, Dachau or Belsen and only later by Auschwitz, as a world wide symbol for the Holocaust. The first broschure about Nazi extermination in the camps distributed worldwide in a mass scale (regarding the number of copies) was Konstantin Simonow's Das Vernichtungslager (Moscow, 1944). And the ‘shoes of Lublin’ (up to this day installed as a huge museum showcase in Majdanek) became the first iconographic emblem of the Holocaust and remained a pertinent one in East Germany, codified by Johannes R. Becher's famous poem ‘Kinderschuhe von Lublin’. Mira Liehm and Antonín J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: Eastern European film after 1945 (Berkeley, 1977), p. 116. An early version of the screenplay with this title exists in the files of ‘Spotkania w mroku’, S 1900, D 1395/63, in Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw. See Kurt Maetzig's letter from 28 May 959 to Wanda Jakubowska in the Archive of Akademie der Künste Berlin, Kurt Maetzig‐Archiv, file 1606. ‘Now films are needed that foster the friendship between our two states and our people, expressing the atmosphere we find for instance during the long distance cycle race for peace (Radfernfahrt für den Frieden).’ Maetzig, who mentioned his own losses of family members in the camps in his letter to Jakubowska, was probably touched by one very personal aspect of the story too. His own Jewish mother committed suicide in Nazi Germany. A fact he had tried to come to terms with in his own film, Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadow, 1947) Mazierska, Wanda Jakubowska's Cinema of Commitment, op. cit., p. 226. This portrayal of American arrogance and ignorance was heavily debated in the ‘kolaudacja’, the artistic board discussion of the film. Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Toeplitz and Stanisław Wohl found the cliché of the American unconvincing and even tasteless. ‘We don't need to make an asshole of him, it's enough to show him as a young, flippant person’, somebody who is moved, by what he sees in Auschwitz, Bossak argued. It was Kawalerowicz who took Jakubowskas side: ‘That's the way these Americans are’, while Aleksander Ford told about discussions he had about Auschwitz with John Steinbeck, who was not taking serious enough what happened there. For him Auschwitz had been an ‘accident’ of history. But the problem, Aleksander Ford wanted to present, nobody in the board was willing to discuss: even a most decent man, a leftist, critical thinker like Steinbeck, had a different view, had still to be ‘convonced’. For Ford this clearly showed, that the film should not be at all the last one on that subject, as others argued. And it was Kawalerowicz who confirmed, how much Jakubowska had to fight already, to be allowed to make this film, even in Poland. Protocols of the ‘kolaudacja’, 6 January 1964, Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw, A‐216, 13. Jan Rybkowski emphasized this difference to Naked among the Wolves explicitly in the ‘kolaudacja’. Protocols of the ‘kolaudacja’, 6 January 1964, Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw, files on ‘Koniec naszego świata’, A‐216, 13, p. 19. Tadeusz Borowski, Die steinerne Welt. Erzaehlungen (München, 1963). Andrzej Wirth, Die unvollständige Rechnung des Tadeusz Borowski. Nachwort, in Tadeusz Borowski, Die steinerne Welt, Erzaehlungen (München, 1963), p. 273. See Antonín J. Liehm, Closely Watched Films: the Czechoslovak experience (White Plains, NY, 1974) and Mira Liehm and Antonín J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: Eastern European film after 1945 (Berkeley, 1977). Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London, 2000), pp. 2–3. Carlo Celli, The representation of evil in Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28:2 (2000), p. 77. Balázs, Ostatni Etap, op. cit., p. 67. Stuart Liebman, Lost and found. Wanda Jakubowska's The last stop, Cineaste, 22:4 (1997), p. 43. Béla Balázs, Letter to Wanda Jakubowska, 9 April 1948. (translated into English by Stuart Liebman), slavic and East European Performance, Drama, Theatre, Film, 16:3 (1996), p. 65. Original: typoscript in the Balázs files, Hungarian Academy of Science, Manuscript collection (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára), Budapest, MS 5021/102. Stuart Liebman, ‘I was always in the epicenter of whatever was going on …’ An interview with Wanda Jakubowska, East European Performance. Drama, Theatre, Film, 17:3 (1997), p. 25. Scenario (not dated) in Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw, files on Ostatni Etap, S 364, 144/78. A Russian tank meets the women, coming out of a barn, and the soldier asks Marusya: ‘From where?’ ‘From Moscow!’ she replies. And turning to Aniella he asks again: ‘And you?’ ‘From Warsaw!’ ‘And you?’ ‘From Berlin!’ ‘And we go to Berlin!’ Other scenarios and dialogue list either include or ommit the last dialogue between the dying Martha and Helena, who consoles her with the oath: ‘there won't be any Auschwitz never again!’ Jerzy Kawalerowicz, the Polish director who functioned as the assistant director in the making of Ostatni Etap, in an interview with the author on 9 December 2003, confirmed that they had discussed several versions with a more optimistic or more ‘tragic’ closure. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: what we see in films (Chicago and London, 2002 [1976]), pp. 55–56. Danuta Karcz, Wanda Jakubowska (Berlin, 1967), p. 15. Liebman, ‘I was always in the epicenter of whatever was going on …’, op. cit., p. 17. In March 1946 Jakubowska still planned to shoot abroad, as the original camp site was obviously not available. See the quotes of her letter to Bossak of 3 March 1946, in Madej, Jak powstawał Ostatni etap, p. 15. Jerzy Kawalerowicz speaks of about 300 camp survivors who had responded to the ads Jakubowska had placed in the newspapers in Kraków. And he also confirms another ‘story’ about realism and authenticity that is told about the making of the film. Lacking enough costumes for well dressed Hungarian Jews arriving in the camp, they had profited from arriving visitors of the camp who had been shocked by what they saw: a functioning camp, as the film set appeared to them. A few spontaneous shots of their reactions were taken to be used for the arrival scene. Interview Kawalerowicz with the author, 9 December 2004. Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films. Band 5. 1945–1954 (Berlin, 1984), p. 298. Berliner Zeitung, 29 August 1949. Liebman, ‘I was always in the epicenter of whatever was going on …’, op. cit., p. 26. Up to this day the puzzle who actually took the photographs could not be solved completely. Most probably the photographs had been taken by a greek member of the jewish Sonderkommando. Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert and Andreas Kilian, following the testimony of the Stanislaw Jankowski, a member of the Sonderkommando, attribute the photographs to Alberto Errera. Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert and Andreas Kilian, Zeugen aus der Todeszone. Das jüdische Sonderkommando in Auschwitz (Lüneburg, 2002), p. 214. See also Clément Chéroux, Photographies de la résistance polonaise á Auschwitz in Mémoire des camps: Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazis (1933–1999) (Paris, 2002), p. 86. See Liebman, ‘I was always in the epicenter of whatever was going on …’, op. cit., p. 17. Mazierska, Wanda Jakubowska's cinema of commitment, op. cit., p. 228. Liebman, ‘I was always in the epicenter of whatever was going on …’, op. cit., pp. 29–30.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 17
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