In 1948, Polish socialist film-maker Wanda Jakubowska released this gripping and pioneering film about the Auschwitz death camp in which she herself had recently been imprisoned, using actors and nonprofessionals and partly shooting in what remained of the camp itself.
Jakubowska’s film influenced every subsequent director of work on the subject, including Resnais, Pontecorvo and Spielberg, and arguably invented the visual and dramatic language with which cinema attempted to make the Holocaust thinkable: the striped uniforms, the blocks, the bunk-beds, the brutal roll-call musters with emaciated prisoners swaying and passing out, the informants, the complicit kapos, the bizarre prisoners’ orchestra which doggedly played as the everyday brutalities were carried out. There were also the different types of Nazi: the icy functionary, the shrill ideologue, the bleary incompetent and, most sickeningly, the Nazi doctor with a negligent, distrait, quasi-civilian detachment. In this film, one takes a newborn baby boy out of the women’s block and executes him with a poison injection (off camera) because he supposes the child is likely to be a criminal or a mental defective.
