The title of Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 film is taken from lines by the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Norwid: “Will there remain among the ashes a star-like diamond, the dawn of eternal victory?” They are words imbued with bleak irony and disillusion; a pair of lovers in this movie discover them written in a ravaged church and have difficulty deciphering them, and also cannot decide where their loyalties and future lie as the second world war comes to its chaotic end. Are the diamonds of future law-abiding peacetime prosperity under communist rule – that is, effective rule by those who started the war invading Poland in league with the Nazis – preferable to the ashes of wartime suffering which at least offered certainty and purpose?
The scene is a provincial Polish town on VE Day, 8 May 1945. Across the continent, there are complex and unresolved feelings under all the celebration, nowhere more so than in Poland, the historic centre of the European war. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and Drewnowski (Bogumił Kobiela) are three fighters in the home army resistance movement, patriotically opposed to communists as much as Nazis. They consider their mission in no way halted by the end of the war, but they have just grotesquely bungled their latest task of assassinating Communist party apparatchik Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński); lounging around and sunbathing before the hit, they accidentally kill two innocent young people.
