Table of contents: Death was Nonchalant | The Best Time of My Life | New York – the World in Miniature | Midnight Cowboy and The Panic in Needle Park – New York Jungle | Brooklyn Walks with Paul Auster
When the Second World War broke out, he was two and a half years old. He was living with his grandmother in Lviv. Shortly before that, his father, a lawyer, had decided that his wife and son should move. The upcoming war could be felt in the air and Lviv was 300km further from the German border than their native Kraków. It was supposed to be safer there. But on 17th September, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, and it was not long before the Russians appeared in the city. In the winter of 1940 the three-year-old Adam was exiled with his parents to Siberia. They travelled to the camp in a cattle truck for two and a half months. The hunger, cold and dirt present in the carriage, as well as the deaths of his fellow passengers, became part of his childhood memories.
Adam and his parents spent six years in the Sverdlovsk camp near Krasnouralsk. The father, together with the other men, went to cut timber in the taiga every morning.
Many perished due to exhaustion and disease. Death was nonchalant. Soldiers pulled out their guns and shot at people just by the way. Silence fell upon the camps, the prisoners closed their eyes.
– recalls Adam Holender in an interview with Agnieszka Niezgoda.
His father, a provincial court judge, and his mother, who was the daughter of a lawyer from Tarnów, educated in Switzerland and spoke four languages, now had only one goal: to survive. He worked hard in the taiga, while she tried to take care of her husband and son. She cooked soups rich in vitamins using weeds growing in the camp. When one day the gulag shop received cotton wicks for oil lamps, she bought so many of them that she was able to weave felt boots for her son. Adam walked in them for the next three years. When he went to school outside the camp to become a Soviet soldier, he smuggled food in his gloves for his starving parents.
He watched his first film in the camp. One summer, a truck with Soviet soldiers and a projector arrived there. The prisoners sat on wooden benches, and the screen showed a Hollywood film. This is how Adam Holender remembers his first film screening in an interview with Agnieszka Niezgoda:
A beautiful lady in ballroom silk, in an evening dress, enters the living room of a stately mansion amid satin curtains and crystal chandeliers. A table richly laid with porcelain groans under the weight of delicious food. The lady throws a sausage to the dog on the floor with her hand adorned with rings, bracelets and jewels. ‘Mum! Mum!’, I cried hysterically, and my parents took me away as I went into convulsions. We were fed potato soup.
It was provided once a day, in a boiler placed on a sledge. Everyone got one ladle. Like the other prisoners, the Holender family lived in a wooden hut with no electricity, toilets nor water for six years. They shared a house with a family from Estonia and a lawyer from Moscow. ‘This was my daily life, my childhood (...). The square was fenced with barbed wire, with a narrow gate in the middle surrounded by wooden watchtowers, each guarded by Soviet soldiers with rifles.
In 1945 the war ended. Yet the Holender family had to wait before they left the camp. In 1946, they were taken to the nearest town, Krasnouralsk, and then to Odessa, where they spent half a year. They only returned to Kraków in 1947. The father returned to his job as a provincial court judge and the family recovered their apartment on Krasiński avenue. It had been looted and the furniture had been stolen by a neighbour. Every day there were news about family and friends who had died in the Holocaust.
In high school Holender became interested in photography. He received his first camera from his parents – a big, American Kodak. He was hooked. He read books, looking for tips from experts. He earned some money by working at a photo lab at the medical school. Although he began his studies at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Technology in Kraków, his love for photography turned out to be stronger. He sent a portfolio to the Film School in Łódź and became a student of cinematography:
I think this was the best time of my life. My colleagues and I were united by a common passion. This was not a school that we wanted to escape from immediately after lectures. We breathed cinema.
– shared the cinematographer with Barbara Hollender.
He worked on short films by Krzysztof Zanussi and Roman Polański, and after graduating in 1966 he became a member of the United Film Crews / Zjednoczone Zespoły Filmowe located on 61 Puławska street. His last project in Poland was the panning for Four Tank-Men and a Dog, a cult TV series of that era.
Soon after, Adam Holender left Poland. He sailed to Canada on board the transatlantic ship Batory. He keeps the return ticket in his New York apartment to this day, though the Batory was cut for scrap long ago. Eleven days after sailing from the port in Gdynia he arrived in Montreal and took a bus to New York.
In my pocket I had a few hundred dollars and a map of the city, on which a friend from Warsaw had marked the cheapest hotels. The bus was arriving from the side of New Jersey. Behind the escarpment, which we were passing by, an island suddenly emerged through the greenery: skyscrapers soaring skywards. I was overwhelmed by the view of Manhattan. [Holender recreates this scene in Midnight Cowboy – ed. B. S.] (...) A shocking impression of the city. Unusually intense, urban character of the space, with people of all races, bouncing off one another, sometimes kind and sometimes not, with extreme poverty and opulent wealth all around. The centre of humanity! The world in miniature.
In New York, Holender’s cinematographic education did not impress anyone. He got a job as a truck driver. He transported lighting equipment for a small company producing commercials and documentaries. He carried lamps and laid out cables. One day an additional shot had to be filmed, and the cameraman had already gone. Holender stood behind the camera and filmed the missing material. A few days later he got another opportunity. He began to climb the professional hierarchy. He made documentaries for the BBC and CBS, filmed commercials for airlines, cars and drugs. He was constantly on the go.