INTRODUCTION

THERE are several obvious points at which one might begin to consider the treatment of Polish–Jewish relations in the films of People's Poland and in the Polish Republic, still in its infancy. One might ‘begin at the beginning’ with The Last Stop (1948), Wanda Jakubowska's sobering portrait of concentration camp life; with the first film to touch on the subject by Poland's leading post-war director, Andrzej Wajda, Samson (1961); or with Wojciech Has's neglected The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1972), a reverie on the work of Bruno Schulz. Another potential starting-point might be Wajda's The Wedding (1972), his film of Stanisław Wyspiański's play in which spirits are summoned by a Jewish woman to invade a fin-de-siècle Galician feast. If I start from a different beginning, it is for various reasons.

Jakubowska's film is concerned less with Polish–Jewish relations than with the solidarity forged between women of various nations through their encounter with the camps’ brutality; its subject is not what has become known as the Shoah itself. In Wajda's Samson, the Jew who wanders beyond the walls of the Warsaw ghetto, finally coming under the wing of a People's Army unit, is less distinctively a Jew than a cipher of alienation: Jewish homelessness dissolves into existential isolation. Jakub Gold's step outside the ghetto is an abstraction from the specificity of Jewishness that transforms him into the archetypal victim—and the abstraction is surely symptomatic of the element of unreality in a work that permits tendentious aggrandizement of the role of the People's Army in the Resistance and ignores the Home Army. (Although accused of falsifying history in other respects, it is only here that Wajda truly distorts it.) The film's prime concern is to exploit the Polish antisemitism of the 1930s to validate the Communist cause. Jakub Gold is no ghetto fighter, but battles, when he does so, only under Communist auspices; and even that effort is a desperate existential plunge into suicidally redemptive action.