Marek Haltof's latest book illuminates the cinematic origins of concentration camp iconography. Screening Auschwitz continues his incisive scholarship from previous books, including Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (2012). Its chapter on The Last Stage (1948, also known under the title Ostatni etap [The Last Stop]) is expanded here into a succinct monograph.
Based on true stories, the film recreates how a group of female prisoners working in the Auschwitz hospital resisted the Nazis. Despite language barriers—the Russian doctor speaks Russian; the French nurse, French; the Polish assistant, Polish—they banded together to disseminate information to other inmates about Nazi military losses.
Haltof places The Last Stage—which was co-written by Gerda Schneider, a German communist—in a number of fruitful contexts. In addition to being the first dramatization of both horror and transcendence in Auschwitz, it inaugurated post-1945 Polish cinema. For example, Aleksandra Slaska (who plays the blond Oberaufseherin) would go on to star in films by Andrzej Munk (The Passenger, which Haltof discusses in detail) and Wojciech Has (The Noose). Assistant Director Jerzy Kawalerowicz became a seminal director of such classics as Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels.
The book focuses not only on Jakubowska's groundbreaking drama, but its influence on subsequent Holocaust films. From Night and Fog and The Diary of Anne Frank, to Kapo, Sophie's Choice, and Schindler's List, one can find images from The Last Stage. Jakubowska, a Polish (non-Jewish) survivor of Auschwitz, was the first to film inside the concentration camp; in the process, she codified a cinematic language that remains both formally rich and politically provocative.
As Haltof elaborates, “these images include … morning and evening roll calls on the Appelplatz; the arrival of a transport train at Auschwitz II (Vernichtungslager Birkenau)—a steam locomotive slowly moving, in a thick fog, through the “death gate” toward the armed SS guards with dogs; the separation of families upon their arrival at the Birkenau unloading ramp; the tracking shot over the belongings left by the gassed camp victims; shots of crowded prisoners’ barracks; and the juxtaposition of the camp orchestra playing classical music with the selection process for the gas chambers” (3–4). His scholarship overlaps with Sylvie Lindeperg's fine book, Night and Fog: A Film in History.
Haltof does not shy away from questioning the tropes that valorize political solidarity (inspired by Iosif Stalin) over Jewish victimization. One problem with The Last Stage is that—like Aleksander Ford's Border Street in 1949—Jewish identity is subsumed to communist affiliation. Jakubowska was far more committed to political goals: “With its stress on the victims’ country of origin, rather than on their respective ethnicity, The Last Stage mirrors the status of postwar debates about Auschwitz-Birkenau,” (10) Haltof adds. “The Soviet method of classifying those killed in Auschwitz according to their state affiliations led to the absence of the category ‘Jew,’ and this had an impact on subsequent Polish documentations of Auschwitz” (10–11).
Moreover, the female prisoners of the film work primarily in a hospital or a garden—a far cry from the majority of Jews who were not even aware of a resistance network in Auschwitz. The hierarchy of concentration camps was designed with political prisoners on a higher rung than those of the Hebrew religion who constituted the abject object of Nazi hatred.
Admirable attention is paid to the international reception of the film, as well as its role in post-war Poland. On the one hand, The Last Stage won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best foreign film, and was favorably compared with Italian Neorealist classics like Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City and Paisan. On the other hand, some Holocaust survivors (and Haltof includes the numbers that were tattooed on their arms) questioned the film for its sanitized version of Auschwitz, given the focus on privileged political prisoners.
The release of The Last Stage in Poland dovetailed with conflicting views about the future of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Both emphasized the “heroic” aspect of Auschwitz. The film epitomizes the efforts by the communist regime to internationalize Auschwitz—“to make it a symbol of Polish martyrdom as well as a symbol of victory over fascism” (10).
Haltof perceives how Jakubowska not only placed her film in the service of communist ideology, but fulfilled “the traditional, martyrological version of Polish history that emphasized heroic struggle and self-sacrifice at the altar of high, often unattainable, national needs” (101). Impeccably documented, Screening Auschwitz also boasts stills from The Last Stage that are crisp and evocative.
