‘In Darkness’ portrays Holocaust victims hiding in Polish sewers

Cynthia Citron

By Cynthia Citron

LOS ANGELES– Many people judge Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List to be the definitive Holocaust movie. Until now.

Giving Spielberg a run for his money is Agnieszka Holland’s latest film, In Darkness. Poland’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film in this year’s Oscar race, In Darkness is exactly what its title proclaims: a dark, intense, blood-curdling true story of 11 Jews—two of them children—who huddled for more than a year in the sewage system under the city of Lvov during the Second World War.

They shared the dank, cold, filthy, sewage-laden tunnels with the city’s rats and the occasional rotting bodies of other fugitives. They shuffled from one watery cavern to ever-smaller cubbyholes as they were sought by bands of marauding soldiers and other thugs who coveted the 500 zlotys they would earn for each captured Jew.

And they depended for their lives on the good will of a small-time hood named Socha, who, for an exorbitant fee, brought them food from time to time.

Outside the tunnels there is more gratuitous horror. A flock of naked women run screaming through a forest, chased by warmly clothed soldiers with guns, followed by a brief glimpse of the women, dead, lying face down in a clearing.

A group of soldiers surround an elderly Jew and taunt him as one of them cuts off his beard. Then, impatient with the sport, the would-be barber grabs the remaining beard in his hand and pulls it off, taking a portion of the man’s flesh with it.

A woman gives birth in the sewers, and the bloody delivery is more gory than anything ever seen on ER.

But the scenes above ground are not much lovelier. Crammed into hovels in a miserable ghetto, the Jewish population, before they are systematically shot or shipped off to “labor camps,” try to maintain a semblance of life in single rooms filled with multiple couples and their children. A couple making love in the middle of all this is meant to make the viewer feel intrusive and uncomfortable, and it does.

Moreover, Holland does not whitewash the basic humanness of this group of Jews. “The fear, the terrible conditions, their own selfishness make them complex and difficult, sometimes unbearable human beings,” she says.

Further, there is nothing intrinsically heroic about Socha. Even though he knows he would be executed if his role in helping this group of Jews were discovered, he is in it for the money and, as he tells his young assistant, “We can always turn them in later.” Presumably when their money runs out. As Director Holland notes, he is “religious and immoral at the same time, perhaps an ordinary man living in terrible times.”

By the time the money does run out, however, Socha has been transformed by the experience. He returns a fistful of money to the man who has been paying him, with the admonition, “Pay me with this next week, and be sure to do it in front of the others. I wouldn’t want them to think I would be fool enough to do this for nothing!” “There is nothing easy or sentimental in (Socha’s) journey,” Holland notes. “This is why it’s fascinating; it’s why we can make this journey with him.”

For his incredible experience Leopold Socha and his wife Wanda were commemorated by Israel among the Polish Righteous of the Nations and in a book In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall, from which screenwriter David Shamoon scripted the film. At the insistence of Holland, Shamoon notes, the film is subtitled in English as the actors speak in Polish, German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Hebrew.

The actors, mostly unknown in this country, are all acclaimed, award-winning and award-nominated stars in Poland and Germany, as is director Holland, whose best-known film Europa, Europa won awards throughout America and Britain in the early 1990s.

This latest film, In Darkness, is a major addition to her oeuvre and may win her an Oscar, but word-of-mouth may keep it from winning the wide audience it deserves. It is two-and-a-half hours of sheer horror, tension, and claustrophobia. And so vivid you can practically smell the sewage.

In Darkness will open Dec. 9th in Los Angeles and New York and run through Dec. 15th in order to qualify for the 2011 Academy Awards competition. It will open throughout the country on January 27th, 2012.

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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World.  She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com