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Auschwitz existed on this earth. This simple statement of fact has placed a specific obligation on all the arts in Poland, on all the thinking people of this country. However, there is one other aspect that is of far greater concern than the simple sense of obligation. The fact that for the long years of war the people of Poland lived constantly beside that terrible place of mass extermination, that today one can take the train from any town in Poland and a few hours later stand before the evil barracks, the execution places and crematories — all this weighs heavily upon the consciousness of the Poles and it does not let them forget the things that happened here. There is no one in Poland who disbelieves in Auschwitz or who feels that the statistics on the number of people from all parts of Europe killed and tortured inside the barbed wire compound are exaggerated. Not one says that the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in Auschwitz can hardly be believed, that they are inconceivable.
That is the reason why the memory of Auschwitz has emerged and reemerged constantly in all the arts and so also in the films produced in Poland in the past twenty years. The concern is not only to preserve the memory of Auschwitz and the grounds of the concentration camp as a museum piece or a macabre historical monument, but to preserve the living memory, to keep constantly reminding the world that this may, or rather must, be the logical end of fascism wherever it may rear its head.
The man in the striped prison uniform, a uniform worn in the concentration camps, the man with a number tattooed on his forearm is our contemporary. He is also frequently a protagonist of Polish films.
Immediately after the war, the second film to be produced in Poland was the great Auschwitz picture, one of the first incriminating documents of Nazi atrocities. “The Last Stage’ was directed by Wanda Jakubowska, a former prisoner of Auschwitz. The film was a factual report. The fictionalized personal stories, the fate that befell the separate individuals were not drawn with firm strokes. After years we do not remember the characters clearly, we may at best remember some of the episodes. Yet, whoever has seen the film will remember the oppressive atmosphere that hovered above that giant death factory, must remember the eerie landscape of Auschwitz and its barracks, the trampled ground of the roll-call quadrangle with the smoking crematory chimneys in the distance — crematories which consumed thousands of bodies each day.
After many years Wanda Jakubowska returned to Auschwitz in her latest film, called “The End of Our World.” In the meantime, however, the man (or woman) in the prison stripes, the Auschwitz prisoner has appeared in a number of Polish films. It may be worth while to recall them. There was “The Three Women,” directed by Stanislaw Rdzewicz. The film tells us the story