YES – See "In Darkness" – Even If You've Seen Other Holocaust Movies!

Wikipedia

So many Holocaust movies: "Schindler's List," "The Reader," "Shoah," "Europa Europa."

I knew "In Darkness" would be frightening, depressing, and disturbing.

So, I didn't want to watch "In Darkness."

Big mistake. "In Darkness" is a masterpiece. It's better than "Schindler's List." Yes, it is disturbing to watch, but it is great art, and great art, even as it moves us to tears, rewards us. You already know about the horrors of the Holocaust. The gift of "In Darkness" is that it transports the viewer to a better realm, where the best of humanity shines in the worst darkness we humans have produced. That best of humanity is not just Socha, the rescuer, but the filmmakers who, through their art, tell the world Socha's story.

"In Darkness" has a verisimilitude, indeed a "darkness," that other Holocaust films do not. No one in this movie would look appropriate placed on a pedestal. Everyone here – Jews and rescuers – is a deeply flawed human being. The Jews hiding in the sewers look and act the way people hiding in sewers would look – filthy, hungry, and bedraggled; they are sometimes petty, jealous, and vengeful. The film is dark and claustrophobic. The Nazis are not sexy and thrilling. They are murderous scum. Not only do characters speak Polish, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and Russian, where appropriate, they also spoke Balak, a dialect typical of Poles living in Lwow. Krystyna Chiger, who survived the sewer, said she found the film so real it was hard to watch.

None of the actors are well known outside of Poland or Germany, so I was able to invest in them as the characters they were playing in a way that I could never invest in "Schindler's List," which, of course, featured big stars I'd seen in other films – Ralph Fiennes, the handsome lover from "The English Patient," was suddenly giving an Oscar-bait performance as a fat Nazi; Ben Kingsley was no longer Gandhi, but a Jew in a concentration camp.

Robert Wieckiewicz as Leopold Socha gives one of the very best, most absorbing, most believable film performances I have ever seen. Wieckiewicz is utterly believable as a petty thief who makes one right choice that leads him onto a path that awakens his soul. He starts out as a rough guy, an opportunist, who isn't ready to be as cruel as life invites him to be. The Nazis are paying bonuses to anyone who turns in Jews. Socha, already a petty criminal, who had initially helped Jews for money, could have made the choice to hand Jews over to the Nazis, for even more money. He didn't. He decided to do the next kind thing. And the next. And the next. And he becomes of the most moving, heroic people you will ever see onscreen. If Socha's entirely believable transformation doesn't make you cry … you are tougher than I am.

Benno Furmann is especially memorable as Mundek Margulies, one of the Jews who escapes to the sewers. Furmann has pale blue eyes that shine out intensely in the dark sewer scenes, communicating outrage, sorrow, panic, and caged macho. The tense dynamic between him and Socha electrifies their scenes. Theirs is a male-male relationship utterly beyond what any current Hollywood "buddy" movie could hope to portray.

Kinga Preis is quietly moving as Wanda Socha, Leopold's plump and freckled, earth-goddess wife. Maria Schrader as one of the Jewish women in hiding adds poignancy without doing anything showy. Michal Zurawski as Bortnik, a Ukrainian who does the dirty work for the Nazis, is very handsome sickening, and terrifying. You can see that Socha could have turned out like his old friend Bortnik. But, somehow, he didn't. Why? Because Bortnik was Ukrainian, not Polish – and thus treated differently by the Nazis? Because Bortnik was more handsome? We don't know. We just get the sense that before he made the one choice that set him on a path that would turn him into a beast, Bortnik was probably much like his old pal, Socha.

"In Darkness" is a feature film, not history lesson or a documentary, but for this viewer it dramatized aspects of the Holocaust, and of humanity, that other Holocaust films have failed to adequately address, or to address at all.

I've never seen a film that brought home to me so vividly the mass killings of Poles that Nazis carried out. Of course I know about these killings, but, as Joseph Stalin allegedly said, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." "In Darkness" depicts a mass hanging of randomly selected Polish civilians, killed in retaliation for the death of a German. This scene was orchestrated in such a way that it grabbed me as dry statistics on the page never have.

"In Darkness" defies revisionist histories of World War Two that insist that Poles did nothing to help Jews and that Poles were enjoying the high life during the Nazi occupation. "In Darkness" makes clear – Nazis treated Poles with special brutality. Dramatic tension is never lost, even as the viewer learns something he would never learn from something like "Schindler's List."

"In Darkness" focuses on a Pole who rescued Jews. This defies popular uses of the Brute Polak stereotype to rewrite World War Two history.

Never for one minute, though, does "In Darkness" stop being a big, involving, tense, movie-movie. You care about the characters. You are swept along by the action. You hold your breath during scenes of suspense. You root for success. You tear up when things go wrong. After all that has gone before, the final scene, as humble as it is, is overwhelming. This is just a great film. See it.

Don't Walk on Fish! Soviet Safety Posters

"I was drunk at work."
From the looks of it, not just him, but the whole frat house! 

A little known method, pioneered by Soviet physicians, for treating bloody noses. 

"Don't walk on fish!"
I can't add anything to that. 

The somewhat harsh, Soviet version of "stripper working the pole." 

This worker is testing which has greater force: freight train cars, or his skull. 

Poster for the latest Soviet superhero film.
This one features Shadow man, who haunts steel mills and uses a cross of karate and disco moves
to neutralize his enemies. 

I thought Comrade Roskolnikov was trying to kill me. 

Poster for a lost Alfred Hitchcock classic in which the MacGuffin is a vengeful wrench.
Hitch's first draft actually used the word "wench" --
but a secretary added an "r" and the Master of Suspense just went with it. 

Doesn't he look like he should be singing a Cole Porter song? 

Is it my imagination or does this worker falling to his death bear some resemblance to Comrade Lenin? 

The End. 

See all the posters here.

Thanks to Mary Skinner for sharing these.

The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War by Halik Kochanski

The Economist
The Vivisection of Poland
Poland's wartime suffering was extraordinary. It has been greatly neglected by the rest of the world
Sep 29, 2012
The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War.
By Halik Kochanski.
Harvard University Press

Excerpts from the article:

The biggest gap in most histories of the second world war is what happened to Poland. By the war's end it had lost not only a fifth of its population but also its freedom—despite having fought from the first day to the last against the Germans.

Many histories deal with the greatest crime of the war years: the annihilation of Europe's Jews. That chiefly took place in occupied Poland, and the largest number of its victims were citizens of the pre-war republic. But these are books about the Holocaust, not about Poland. Books about Poland abound too. Some deal with the spectacular military events of the war: the Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Others have highlighted the great neglected scandals of the war, such as the Soviet massacre of 20,000 captured Polish officers. A book called "Dark Side of the Moon" tried to alert the West to the Soviet deportation of hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians to privation and death. There are even books about Wojtek, a bear cub adopted by Polish soldiers, who drank beer, ate cigarettes, carried ammunition and died in a zoo in Scotland.

But until Halik Kochanski's "The Eagle Unbowed" nobody had written a comprehensive English-language history of Poland at war. A British-born historian whose own family's experiences dot her pages, she weaves together the political, military, diplomatic and human strands of the story. She ranges from the fatal weaknesses of pre-war Poland (divided, cash-strapped and isolated) to the humiliation of Britain's victory parade in 1946 when the organisers invited Fijians and Mexicans, but not Poles.

Readers reared on Western accounts of a war between good and evil may be shocked to learn that for Poles the war was three-sided. The Western allies were duplicitous and the Soviets for the most part as bad as the Nazis.

Read the full article here.
Purchase "The Eagle Unbowed" here.
Thanks to Sue Knight for alerting me to this story.

"Remembering Europe's Touchy Issue of Expulsion" from Deutsche Welle

A group of Germans is pictured leaving their village in East Prussia in 1946 .Source
The above is the original caption. They aren't just "Germans," though. They are all women. 

"Remembering Europe's touchy issue of expulsion"
From Deutsche Welle
September 27, 2012

Excerpts:

The idea for a documentation center where the fate of displaced people is told first came up 13 years ago. It was the end of the 1990s when Erika Steinbach, a conservative politician and president of the League of Expellees - an advocate group for Germans and their descendents who were expelled from eastern Europe after World War II, proposed her plans for a Center Against Expulsions. And her plan met with firm resistance.

Voices both in Germany and neighboring countries quickly pointed out that such an institution could present a lopsided view of history. In Poland, Steinbach was accused of labeling Germans as the victims in the aftermath of World War II, without adequately emphasizing that the fate of the ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe after the war was a consequence of the heinous crimes the Nazis had committed in Europe.

For years, Poland has been a major opponent of the plan to build a Center Against Expulsions in Germany and the political elite in Poland has lobbied at the highest political level to prevent Steinbach from implementing her initiative….

The reconciliatory aim of the exhibition was captured in the slogan: "Remember expulsions - Respect expulsions - Deepen reconciliation and understanding."…

Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans is a major issue, according to the proposal. Millions of Muslims were forced from their homes as a result of the Serbian uprising against Ottoman rule in 1804, the Greek independence movement starting in 1821 and the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913. The Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915 and 1916 is also to be touched upon.

The millions of people affected by Stalin's policies in the 1930s are another focus of the exhibition. "Forced labor, deportation, gulags, starvation and mass murder were part of the Stalinist terror," the proposal said…

See the full text of the article here.

Thanks to Otto Gross for alerting me to this article. 

Bieganski and Victoria's Secret Lingerie

Sigh. 

Look, there's one thing we can all agree on. If there's one thing Bieganski the Blog needs more of, it's sexy photos of half nekkid wimmin. No?

Long story short: Victoria's Secret is reportedly self-censoring and banning sales of its own item, the above-pictured Sexy Little Geisha lingerie.

You know what I think when I look at that photo? What most women think, I'll bet: Geez, I wish I looked like her.

But somebody looked at that picture of that very sexy gal and that very cute lingerie and got all affronted. Because the lingerie is racist, doncha know.

!!!!

I'll leave it to blog readers to point out, in the comments section, how asinine Victoria's Secret's self-censorship is. The girl is cute, the outfit is cute – life is short. Have some fun! What's not to like?

So some party pooper who apparently doesn't like pretty half nekkid grlz in cute lingerie posted a blog post protesting this outfit, and the outfit is pulled.

***

Polonia, do you know what I'm about to say?

Let's get serious here. My book, "Bieganski the Brute Polak Stereotype" and this blog, talk about newspaper articles, college courses, big-budget films, museum displays, etc, that rewrite immigration, Holocaust, and World War II history by exploiting a stereotype of Poles and other Bohunks. And Polonia has not been successful in countering that stereotype. The museum displays, university press books, and the authors who produce them are all going strong.

Check out this blog post.

And this one.

And this one.

While a blogger has the clout to ban something as trivial and harmless as pretty lingerie because it is deemed to be anti-Japanese.

On a more serious note, check out this blog post on how America embraced the Axis, including Japan, after World War II, and how a Hollywood movie, "A Majority of One," helped.

Polonia, we need to unite, support each other, organize, and act strategically, in order to exercise any cultural, political, and academic power.

Check out this blog post on that topic.

***

Related note: In the recent past, an American institution of higher learning published racist, anti-Polish material.

Polonia should have had the clout to demand that that institution of higher learning hire a scholar who works on stereotypes of Polaks and other low-status, blue-collar ethnics.

That has happened when other groups have been insulted. Other groups, including African Americans, women, and homosexuals have demanded, and been granted, academic hires. Poles and other Bohunks? We have not done this. When we have been stereotyped, we have griped about it among ourselves, but we have not demanded, nor have we received, academic hires, as other groups have.

I just applied for a job at this institution of higher learning.

Their ad said that they are committed to diversity, multiculturalism, and tolerance, and for that reason they wanted to hire women, members of underrepresented minorities, African Americans, feminists, queer theorists, and human rights and peace and justice scholars.

Will they look at my application, as a real life Bohunk and scholar of Bohunk stereotypes, and grant me credit as belonging to the above groups? No, they will not.

Look, in the eyes of this institution of higher learning, when they want to tell a Polak joke, or disseminate Polak-joke type humor via their publications, Bohunks are OTHER. We are their minority.

When a Bohunk who publishes on that kind of stereotyping applies for a job, we are not welcome.

Only Polonian activism can change that, and can change the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype.

Again, read the series of blog posts on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, organization, and vision.

Polish Prisoners Tend Jewish Graves; How Even Something Beautiful Can Serve the Bieganski Stereotype

Photo: Służba Więzienna – Polish Prison Service

On September 18, 2012, The Krakow Post ran an article, "Reconstructing Attitudes to Judaism in Poland" by Nissan Tzur. The article describes a program that trains Polish prisoners to tend Jewish graves in Poland.

The project is entitled "The Tikkun Project." According to the article, it was proposed by Jewish leaders in Poland. Excerpts:

"Thousands of prisoners from all over Poland participate in the project…In Krakow alone there are over 1,500 prisoners taking part …The prisoners clean Jewish cemeteries and repair broken headstones. They also visit museums featuring Jewish exhibits, tour extermination camps and sites of Jewish heritage and eagerly watch plays and films about Jewish life in Poland. One prisoner, who helps at a museum in Chrzanów, has even compiled a list of the names of the 1,500 of the city’s Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

Wacławek is proud of his role in helping to organise the Tikkun Project together with the Jewish community. He argues that the programme has introduced inmates to a whole new world of tolerance and shown them how prejudice can lead to tragedy…

Krzysztof is aware that Poland has a reputation for anti-Semitism in some quarters, and believes that this is because Poles do not know enough about Jewish culture. For this reason he encourages fellow prisoners to take part in the Tikkun Project."

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Holocaust happened because Poles are in the past, and of the past; they are ignorant, they "do not know enough about Jewish culture." Poles need to be introduced, as the article states, to a whole new world of tolerance. They need to have their attitudes "reconstructed," as the headline states.

There is a book that analyzes this constant, ubiquitous, thoroughgoing rewriting of Holocaust history. It's called "Bieganski." It will be a good thing when Polonia wakes up and discovers that book and acts on the issues outlined in the series of blog posts on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization and Vision, accessible here.

Until that day comes, it will continue to be common knowledge that Polish identity, not Nazism, is responsible for the Holocaust. It will continue to be the case that even the most positive stories about Poles and Jews will be told in a way that communicates the Bieganski stereotype.

I thank Otto Gross for bringing this article to my attention. Otto's previous blog entry on Enigma can be found here.

The full text of the article cited above, about prisoners tending Jewish graves, can be read here.

Vandalism of Christian Sites in Israel

Source

A blog reader sent in an article, excerpted below.

"Catholics call for Israeli hate-crime crackdown" Published September 20, 2012, at the RT website, link below.

According to the article, recently Christian sites have been vandalized in Israel. The vandals may be Jews; hateful graffiti was written in Hebrew. As comments below the article point out, a provocateur could have used Hebrew but not necessarily been Jewish.

Anti-Semitic websites love material like this. They will disseminate it emphatically and insist that it reveals the essential character of Jews. It does not. Vandalism is a cross-cultural phenomenon.

I wanted to post it here, though, as just another reminder that hostility between Christians and Jews is not exclusively the product of Christian anti-Semitism. 

Of course Christians and other non-Jews must take responsibility for the anti-Semitism expressed by members of their groups.

At the same time revisionist histories that depict Christianity as essentially anti-Semitic and the source of all intergroup hostility do more harm than good.

Full text of article here.

***

Last summer in Poland I encountered well-meaning individuals, educational materials, and institutions that were sending just that message, often quite overtly so, in so many words: Christians and Christianity were the sole source of hostility between Christians and Jews.

It was as if these modern, Westernizing Poles and their institutions were trying to replace the image of the Brute Polak as the hyper-Catholic, world's worst anti-Semite with the image of a New Age, Politically Correct Poland that threw Catholicism under the bus, gaining PC points thereby.

Just one example. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is set to become an authoritative voice in Polish-Jewish relations. It features on its homepage an essay by Rabbi Joseph Polak that deploys the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype. I respond to Polak's essay in the blog post entitled "Polish Scum Responds." You can read that response here.

This scapegoating of Christianity and Christians as the sole source of hostility between Christians and Jews backpeddles from previous scholarship, some of it by Jews, that sees sources of hostility on both sides. Just one example among many, Eva Hoffman's popular book "Shtetl."