By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — If you missed Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness when it was in the theatres, rent a copy now that it is available on DVD or watch it on your On-Demand cable service. In my opinion it the best Holocaust film since The Pianist. My appreciation of it stems from three things: 1) its cinematography which replicates the claustrophobic, dank, dark, and vermin infested sewers of Lvov where eleven Jews hid for fourteen months in 1943 and 1944, 2) its resistance to reducing the Jewish characters to amiable, grateful, or subservient beneficiaries of the help they receive from the Polish sewer worker Leopold Socha, 3) its ambiguous characterization of Socha who extorts an exorbitant fee for concealing and feeding these Jews and whose moral metamorphosis into a committed rescuer is as tortuous as the labyrinth of sewer pipes which keep the Germans from finding his wards.
Based on Robert Marshall’s In the Sewers of Lvov (Scribner: 1991), the film effectively weaves these factors together to convey the nadir of human evil and the fragility of human decency during World War Two.
Jolanta Dylewsko, whose accomplishment in this film received Europe’s most prestigious cinematography award, dimly lights the interior of the sewer system with the flashlights and lanterns Socha, his friend Szczepek, and the Jews carry to illuminate their way. The spectrum of coloration varies little from blackish greens, pale yellows, dark browns, and shadowy grays. Dylewsko used a Red Digital Camera to delineate the motion and figures more sharply against the blackness that otherwise would eclipse them.
The ubiquitous presence of rats not only evoke the invidious comparison of Jews to rats in the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940), but also the analogy of Jews to mice preyed upon by cats in Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) and Don Bluth’s An American Tail (1986). Indeed, the movie intimates that an alliance of the hunted is forged when the two hidden Jewish children feed the rats and treat them like pets.
Although the scenes above ground are more brightly lit, they draw primarily from the same subdued hues. Here the darkness of human evil casts a pall over what the audience sees: naked Jewish women being herded into a forest and shot, an elderly Jew forced to dance for the entertainment of a German soldier, Polish men limply hanging like rags on a gallows, and the Janowska concentration camp where inmates are tormented and worked to death.
That Socha and Szczepek greedily scavenge through the belongings left behind by the Jews to sell them on the black market and demand a high payment for preventing a fortunate few from being captured assures that neither man facilely functions as the ethical foil to the German perpetrators and their Ukrainian accomplices. Yet Dylewsko also brightens the shots of Socha to communicate that “the light was always with him.”
Holland deliberately avoids romanticizing her Jewish or Polish characters. Born into a mixed marriage between a Jewish father, whose parents perished in the Holocaust, and a Polish mother who participated in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Holland possesses a critical but sympathetic perspective on the plight and prejudices of both Jews and Poles. Her father subsequently died during a police interrogation by Polish authorities in 1961, and Holland herself was imprisoned for six weeks in 1968 in Czechoslovakia for supporting the Prague Spring when she studied film there to evade anti-Semitic and sexist discrimination within Polish film schools.
Her unflattering, albeit understanding, portraits of both Jewish and Polish characters were evident in her previous Holocaust films, Angry Harvest (1985) and Europa Europa (1990). In the former a Polish peasant sexually exploits the Viennese Jewish woman who has sought refuge on his farm. In the latter, an amoral Jewish adolescent survives by parroting his oppressors. When falling under Soviet control, he becomes a loyal comrade of the Komsomol. When captured by the Germans, he becomes an ardent member of the Hitler Youth.
Holland frankly admits, “The Jewish characters aren’t one-dimensional angelic, they are full bodied human beings with anger, sex, weakness and selfishness and love as well. That was another thing that irritates me in English-language Holocaust movies: that in most of them the Jews are turned into some kind of non-living, positive stereotypes.”
Screenwriter David Shamoon, the son of Iraqi Jews who fled the Farhud first for India, then Iran, and finally Canada, concurred with Holland’s refusal to “sugarcoat any of the Jewish characters.” Holland and Shamoon depict the class resentments among the Jews, the power struggles between those who don’t trust “Polaks” and conspire to kill Socha before he betrays them, an adulterous affair conducted by Yanek while his wife sleeps a few feet away from him, and the smothering of the baby born from this illicit union by its mother.
More positive Jewish characters offset the negative ones. Ignacy and Pauline Chiger remain nurturing parents who encourage their daughter to sing and read. Holland alludes to the iconic scene of the girl in the red coast from Schindler’s List by having her counterpart Krystyna Chiger wear red boots and a red hair ribbon to symbolize the imperiled innocence of the youngsters. Mundek, a tough black marketer nicknamed “the Pirate,” musters the courage to leave the relative security of the tunnels to rescue his girlfriend Klara’s sister from the Janowska concentration camp, a gesture which wins the respect of Socha.
When Mundek happens upon Klara showering, they embrace with a genuine passion that makes the coupling of Yanek and his mistress seem more sordid in retrospect. Klara insists that the group assume responsibility for caring for the newborn before his mother takes his life. They debate whether the baby should be circumcised recalling the many episodes in Europa Europa where Solly worries that his real identity will be discovered if someone notices his penis. Throughout the group’s confinement, the pious Jacob continues to daven, kindle Shabbat candles, and even chants the Kaddish when Socha buries the infant. Some of Jacob’s compatriots wonder why it hasn’t dawned on him that God is not listening. During one religious ceremony, members of the group break into laughter at the absurdity of praying in a sewer.
Socha, convincingly performed by Robert Wieckiewicz, repeatedly vacillates between sheltering the Jews for the money he charges them or turning them over to the Germans for the bounty they offer on Jews. When he was incarcerated for robbery, Socha befriended a Ukrainian prisoner named Bortnik who now collaborates with the Germans in ferreting out Jews. Parenthetically, one of the gaps in the movie’s narrative is the failure to clarify why in Lvov, a city annexed by the Soviets between 1939 and 1941, Ukrainians like Bortnik were so eager to cooperate with their German “liberators.”
If Bortnik functions as the devil advising Socha to reveal the whereabouts of any Jews in the sewers, Socha’s wife Wanda originally appears to be the angel asserting that “Jews are just the same as us.” Nevertheless, when she learns that her husband is shielding Jews from harm, she counsels him to abandon the Jews for the sake of his own family. Socha’s qualms about aiding Jews arise from several sources, ―Catholic teaching about Jewish guilt for killing Christ, stereotypes about Jewish venality, concern that he is jeopardizing his family, and the distrust of him overtly expressed by Mundek and others. It is not until late into the film that Socha fully commits himself to the rescue operation. Light mirrors this moral transformation when Socha lifts the catatonic Krystyna above a manhole to buoy her hopes and then at the end of the film when he pulls the Jews from the sewer and proudly proclaims:”These are my Jews. They’re my work.”
In the film’s prologue, Holland reports that at the funeral of Socha, who was hit and killed by a truck in 1945, someone muttered, “It’s God’s punishment for helping the Jews.” Holland follows this remark with a retort, “As if we need God to punish each other.” Holland dedicates In Darkness to Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and to the over six thousand Poles who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Gentiles.” As she intended, the visual darkness of the film and the prevarications of Socha prevent viewers from sanguinely concluding that good will always triumph in the end.
Socha is clearly the most conflicted of recent anti-heroes in Holocaust films. Oskar Schindler’s evolution from war profiteer to rescuer comes immediately to mind. The enigmatic Captain Hosenfeld from The Pianist is another example. Does he spare Szpilman because he admires his musical talent, pities him, or wants him appeal to the Soviets to grant the captain clemency? Both Polanski and Holland downplay the virtues of these characters to accentuate the horrors inflicted on the beneficiaries of their atypical acts.
The most recent edition of The Pianist (Picador: 2000) contains excerpts from Hosenfeld’s diary which reveal he was repulsed by the mass murder of the Jews long before he encountered Szpilman. Similarly, Krystyna Chiger’s account of her ordeal, The Girl in the Green Sweater (St. Martins: 2008), portrays Socha as a man who early on decided to shield his Jews from harm to redeem himself from his past transgressions. That the overwhelming majority of the Jews residing in Lvov in particular or Poland in general perished under the Germans attests to the rarity of compassionate Poles like Socha who risked their own lives and those of their families so that Jews would outlive the Nazi assault. May their memory be a blessing!
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com