Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Prologue: Space, Time and the Holocaust
- 1 Countryside, Shtetl, City: The Murders of Mazovia, Jedwabne and Kielce
- 2 Conflicting Memories in the Shtetlekh Gąbin, Suchowola, Brańsk and Luboml
- 3 The Marketplaces of Postmemory in the Shtetlekh Eishyshok, Delatyn, Opatów, Zdunska Wola, Urzejowice and Pińczów
- 4 A Tale of Two Cities: Warsaw and Kraków
- 5 Another Tale of Two Cities: Lviv and Łódź
- 6 A Tale of Two Cities of Death: Treblinka and Oświęcim
- Epilogue: New Routes
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
5 - Another Tale of Two Cities: Lviv and Łódź
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Prologue: Space, Time and the Holocaust
- 1 Countryside, Shtetl, City: The Murders of Mazovia, Jedwabne and Kielce
- 2 Conflicting Memories in the Shtetlekh Gąbin, Suchowola, Brańsk and Luboml
- 3 The Marketplaces of Postmemory in the Shtetlekh Eishyshok, Delatyn, Opatów, Zdunska Wola, Urzejowice and Pińczów
- 4 A Tale of Two Cities: Warsaw and Kraków
- 5 Another Tale of Two Cities: Lviv and Łódź
- 6 A Tale of Two Cities of Death: Treblinka and Oświęcim
- Epilogue: New Routes
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
‘The return to my native city is painful.’
— Mira Hamermesh, Loving the DeadThe cinematic topography of the Holocaust, as discussed in the previous chapter, saw certain neighbourhoods playing the role of other districts of the same city. Holocaust cinema has also seen particular cities being used as sets for events that happened elsewhere, and often in places with their own specific war narratives. Agnieszka Holland's Holocaust drama W ciemności (In Darkness, 2011) is based on the true story of Leopold Socha, a sewer worker in the then Polish city of Lwów (now the Ukrainian city of Lviv) who used his knowledge of the urban sewer system to shelter a group of Jews who escaped from the local ghetto. In Darkness is entirely set in Lviv and filmed in Warsaw, Berlin, Leipzig and, in particular, in and around the city of Łódź. By setting the film in Lviv and filming in Łódź and other places, Holland adopted an approach to location shooting that has been described by François Penz and Andong Lu in terms of ‘creative geography’ – a distinct way of reading cinematic urban geographies in films that ‘reorganize the city spaces into narrative geographies where urban fragments are collaged into spatial episodes’ (2011: 14). Documentaries, on the other hand, are traditionally characterised by a topographically coherent approach to their locations, and as such they can be seen as privileged tools in the process of anchoring the memories of the extermination to the landscapes where it occurred. This chapter investigates the ways in which cinematic images of the city where In Darkness is set, Lviv, and that of one of the actual locations of Holland's film, Łódź, have been articulated in documentary films about the destruction of their Jewish communities. Before the war, both Lviv and Łódź were important cultural, religious and political centres of European Jewry. During the occupation, both cities saw the establishment of ghettos and the deportation of their Jewish populations to the death camps, with primarily Bełżec as a final destination for the Jews of Lviv and Chełmno and Auschwitz II-Birkenau for the Jews of Łódź.
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- Information
- Journey to PolandDocumentary Landscapes of the Holocaust, pp. 114 - 145Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018