How did this happen?
A long time
ago I took an oral history of a woman who drove her five children in a hay wagon
from her farm in the Russian Sector of Germany to the safety of Berlin at the
end of World War II. They traveled at night to avoid the Russians who were
pillaging and raping as they moved in as occupiers. "I had to go. I had a
teenage daughter," she told me. With 19 hours of tapes in hand, I expressed
admiration for her courage and she said something very quietly that I've never
forgotten: "Every one of us who survived that time had a story; every single
one."
As these
stories surfaced over the last sixty years, they expanded our understanding of
the chaos that enveloped Europe as the war ended, but few had the power of the
stories told by survivors of the Holocaust. One of these has been made into a
disturbing new film: In Darkness by Agnieszka Holland, the distinguished
Polish born director (Europa, Europa) who had always wanted to make a film that
centered on the Warsaw Ghetto. She fastened on the true story of Leopold Socha
(Robert Wieckiewicz), a petty thief and sewer worker who hides his plunder in
the sewers beneath Warsaw. Socha makes a deal with a group trying to escape the
transfer of Jews from the Ghetto to the certain death of Janowoska. They will
pay him cash in return for his protection of them in the sewers.
This movie is
the harrowing passage of fourteen months spent in the underground dark on
rat-filled ledges next to a fast flowing stream of raw sewage. Stench, sickness,
birth, human frailty, betrayal - all these unfold in the dark; and the dark
fuels suspicion, jealousy, fury, violence, and envy - of a warm coat, of a piece
of bread. These emotions scream out from interior places unvisited in a nicer
world. These people saw not one ray of daylight for fourteen months. Filmed in
six languages, the movie is both unrelenting and wrenching in its realism. You
will barely breathe as you watch.
Socha's
journey from petty thief to reluctant savior becomes our focus. Above ground he
must cope with Bortnik(Michal Zurawski), a Ukrainian officer who suspects Socha
of harboring a secret; below ground he must contend with Mundek (Benno Furmann)
who suspects Socha's loyalty. In the prolonged darkness a beautiful pivot
pierces Socha's character when he sees a child lying still, staring without
emotion or expression and he acts.
Director
Holland has asked "Are these events and actions the exception in human history
or do they reveal an inner, dark truth about our nature?" Her movie explores
this question in a probing, personal kind of depth against the fully realized
darkness of the story. There is no end to the value of forcing us to ask, as
Agnieszka Holland does, "How did this happen? Where was Man in this crisis?
Where was God?"
Copyright (c) Illusion