ADAM: Hi, I’m Adam.
NITZAN: and I’m Nitzan. This is Stories From The Eastern West, a show telling you little-known stories that changed our world.
ADAM: Today’s show starts with an unlikely meeting in Paris. It left a former concentration camp prisoner wondering what goes through a mind taken over by Nazi ideology. Her fantasy later became the basis of one of the most thrilling Holocaust movies in cinema history.
NITZAN: Coming up on Stories From The Eastern West!
(THEME TUNE)
PART I
ADAM: It’s the late 1950s. Thirteen years have passed since the end of the second world war. Several nazi war criminals have been put on trial, evoking a lot of emotions and public attention. More are yet to come. One of the many people following them was Zofia Posmysz, a former Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner and a reporter for Polish Radio:
ZOFIA POSMYSZ: I followed very carefully the trials against camp supervisors that took place in Poland and abroad. Not just the ones that concerned Auschwitz. Though I did look out for the ones I might know. I saw some of them in the reports. I read that people I knew from Auschwitz became witnesses. I thought I might see my unit’s overseer. It crossed my mind many times that she might ask me to become her defense witness.
NITZAN: After a new plane route is established between Warsaw and Paris, Zofia Posmysz takes the inaugural flight to the French capital to make a radio piece about it. Upon arrival, she only has a few hours before the return flight. She decides to take a bus from Orly Airport to Place de la Concorde in the heart of the city.
ZOFIA POSMYSZ: I took the bus to Place de la Concorde. It was full of tourists. There was singing, shouting and joking everywhere. And much of it… was in German. It was German that was audible. Suddenly, someone yelled behind me “Erica, komm, wir fahren…”. I froze completely. It was the voice of my overseer. My boss. I thought to myself: “God, well of course I didn’t see her at any trial. All this time she’s been living a peaceful life in Paris.” And I start thinking “My God, what am I supposed to do? If it’s her, what am I supposed to do?”. My first idea was to say: “Guten tag Frau Aufseherin, wie geht's?”. Or maybe I should tell the police that she’s an ex SS member? That’s when I heard someone calling Erika a second time. I decided to turn around. It wasn’t her of course. She was much younger, and didn’t look like her. But that thought, “What would I have done if it was her?”, it just wouldn’t leave me alone.
ADAM: Zofia Posmysz returned home to Warsaw that evening very troubled. She told her husband what had happened.
ZOFIA POSMYSZ: He thought about it for a moment and said, “You know what, you should write about it.”
NITZAN : So she did. She wrote a radio play called “The Passenger from Cabin nr 45”. It takes place on a ship travelling from Europe to Latin America. Liza and Walter, a German couple, are enjoying their time sun bathing and joking.
ADAM: Suddenly, Liza notices a woman whose presence startles her. This mysterious woman wearing sunglasses and long sleeves in summer resembles a prisoner from Auschwitz where Liza was a supervisor. Overwhelmed by memories and emotions, she becomes obsessed with discovering the passenger’s true identity and starts revealing to her husband the circumstances in which she might have met her.
NITZAN: Seeing how appalled her story makes him, she quickly censors herself explaining she was only performing her duties as a good German, and that, truth be told, the woman owes her life to her. In a moment of solidarity, her husband tries to calm her down by saying that the times when SS members were hunted down are long gone. But Liza can’t stop thinking that the woman might finally approach her and publicly reveal her identity by saying:
Excerpt from radio play: “Guten tag, Frau Aufsehrerin”
ZOFIA POSMYSZ: I wanted to give her a voice. I wanted her to talk.
ADAM: Poszmysz often wondered how her supervisor would have defended herself had she been prosecuted. Her radio play captured all their fraught imagined conversations.
NITZAN: Up until this point, both fiction and non-fiction literature about concentration camps had been dominated by martyrological narratives describing the atrocities as seen by the prisoners.
POSMYSZ: I wrote the radio play thinking that it just couldn’t be aired, nobody would ever allow it. Because I had used this different perspective - the point of view of an SS member, not a prisoner. But, this was the time of the Thaw.
ADAM: The Thaw was a period in the late 1950s when the strict censorship that had appeared after the communists came to power in Poland started to loosen up. It began with Stalin’s death in 1953, after which artists in the Soviet Union were given relative freedom. Due to its political dependence on the Soviet Union, this change soon influenced Poland. It was in this new reality that “The Passenger from Cabin Nr 45” was not only aired, but very well received. Shortly after its premiere, Posmysz met film director Andrzej Munk on a bus.
ZOFIA POSMYSZ: “I’ve been wanting to contact you. I’d like to make a film out of it.”
PART II
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: When he decided to adapt Zofia Posmysz’s “The Passenger”, he was one of the most important Polish directors of that time. Definitely the one who felt equipped well enough to tackle the most difficult subject of the 20th century - the Holocasut. A topic that was present in Polish cinema. But it was still considered thorny and difficult to depict.
NITZAN: This is Michał Oleszczyk, a film historian and critic from the University of Warsaw.
OLESZCZYK: Polish film school as a movement was a group of filmmakers that decided to tackle the subject of the second world war in Polish cinema after 1956.
ADAM: Meaning during the Thaw.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: To understand the Polish Film School, you need to remember it was created by people who had in mind Stalinist terror, the Second World War and strict political censorship that dominated the scene in the late 1940s and 1950s.
NITZAN: Andrzej Munk had also fought during the war.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: So these people, after 1956 after this relaxation, they started to tackle the experience of war. It was only 10 years since the end. They started to talk about the war in a more open, honest and in a politically more unorthodox way. These are films like Andrzej Wajda’s “Canal”, “Ashes and Diamonds”, and crucially films by Andrzej Munk, like “Eroica” which presented the Second World War in an almost comical light, which was shocking at that time, and “Bad Luck” that tackled the topic of political conformism. And after those two, Munk prepares “The Passenger”.
ADAM: Posmysz’s “The Passenger from Cabin Nr 45”, with its unexpected perspective from the other side, fitted Munk’s unorthodox approach to filmmaking.
NITZAN: While he kept this perspective as well as the character of the psychological relationships of the protagonists, Munk altered parts to become more cinematic. He replaced Liza’s monologues with a series of flashbacks, showing the turbulence of memory and Liza’s moral sidestepping when confronted with the possibility of meeting former prisoner Marta.
ADAM: The first flashback appears the very moment Liza notices this passenger resembling Marta. It’s a short and dynamic montage of brutal scenes that are at the core of Holocaust imagery: naked prisoners running between perfectly ordered rows of soldiers, carts of bodies being pushed, a number being tattooed on a hand.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: Very rapid and basically like a sensory assault, isn’t a narrative at all. Just like a slap in the face. //It’s simply a sudden eruption of pure violence and humiliation. And in an essence this is exactly what the camps were. Pure humiliation and death.//
NITZAN: The second retrospective is a story Liza tells her husband. She portrays herself as a strict but fair guard, to whom Marta owes her life.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: In order to live, in order to continue, she needs to believe in a version in which she was not a villain. She doesn't have enough self knowledge and enough courage to face the fact that she was a villain. So she needs to construct a narrative that saves at least a part of her humanity.
ADAM: Back on the ship, Liza is still observing the other passenger, trying to figure out if she really is Marta. The voice over says: “Her tension rises and more authentic memories of the past keep coming to the surface.”
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: The third version strips a little bit of her self-illusion (because it’s the version that she tells herself, as the voiceover says)
Which does not mean that it’s not self-censored, because we keep lying to ourselves. The third flashback is basically the version that Liza wants to believe in her heart. What would be the version in a court of law, in Nuremberg for example, we don’t know. What would be the version of the witnesses - we don’t know.
NITZAN: This last memory undermines everything she’s told her husband up until this point and reveals the complexity of her relationship with Marta. There is no trace of care towards the prisoner. The pity she claimed to have earlier is replaced by fascination, jealousy and most of all a desire to dominate Marta.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: The psychological duel between Liza and Mara; the overseer and the prisoner. This relationship is at the heart of the movie. The control, the mindgame of taking control of another life. (///)
Still this relationship between Marta and Liza is intimate on some levels. The looks they exchange are looks of deep inquisitive knowledge about the other person. Liza tries to see through Marta, and it’s really a duel of two very strong willed women, of which Marta is the one with deeper moral insight, because of course Liza is part of an ideological machine, Marta is a free woman. That’s the great paradox of this story: Marta is imprisoned but she’s free, Liza is supposedly free but she’s really imprisoned by the ideology.
NITZAN:The psychological duel between the two women is intellectual, discreet and almost silent, just like how the film depicts the concentration camp in its flashbacks.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: Andrzej Munk was a very paradoxical filmmaker, I don’t think he would go for the most obvious solutions. This is why he chose the minimal, micro approach. I don’t think he was interested in staging big obvious scenes. If you compare “The Passenger” with “Schindler’s List” you see immediately that these films were made by such different directors. Spilberg is a showman. He likes big emotional scenes, he likes big scale, and his film is also a big production. It’s a 3 hour movie filled with amazingly realised scenes, but he is a showman. Munk is not a showman, he’s an intellectual, who wants you to experience the horrific nature of the Holocaust by experiencing only its paraphenalia, the margins. He draws only the margins, and the centre you need to draw by yourself in your own mind.
ADAM: Munks’ cinematographer Krzysztof Winiewicz said in an interview: “We treated this nightmarish scenery as distant background, in a discrete and blurred way”. (“Całą koszmarną scenerię potraktowaliśmy drugo i trzecioplanowo, w miarę dyskretnie, w nieostrości”.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: And in this I think he is deeply modernist. Because I think it’s a deeply modernist strategy.
NITZAN: Oleszczyk recalls a scene where a Nazi preprares a can of Cyclon B, a lethally poisonous gas, that is going to be used in the gas chambers, while the background is covered in smoke coming from the crematorium’s chimney.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: And in a supreme Munk touch - he loses some crystals. It’s shocking because of what he's not showing. In this you can see Munk - the documentarian. Suitcases, menorah at the edge of the screen, we need to be careful viewers. It’s shown in a peripheral way. At the edge of the frame. Hand hanging out of the cart. We can only imagine how many more bodies are piled up. That was the ultimate holocasut image.
When you think about the truly great Holocaust films, like “Shoah” by Claude Lanzmann, they always have an omission. In that 9 hour film, there is not one archival piece of footage.
This is the strategy of approaching the horror with awe and respect, and not as something that you as an artist are so powerful that you could depict in its entirety. In Spielberg's picture, and he was criticised for that, there is this illusion of totality: I will show you the entire nightmare. Xxx There is this humility towards the subject: I will only show you those micro fragments, the rest of the horror you need to discover yourself, and I think it works brilliantly in “The Passenger”.
PART III
ADAM: Before becoming a feature filmmaker, Andrzej Munk was a documentarian. It’s unsurprising that he filmed on true-to-life locations. For example, the contemporary scenes taking place on the ship were filmed on the MS Batory, a Polish transatlantic liner.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: It’s a legendary ship. For many people Batory meant freedom, because it was the gateway to the US, or to the West in general.
NITZAN: Surprisingly, the shooting didn’t go well. Mostly because of the heavy rocking of the ship that the director hadn’t anticipated, and influenced the camera work.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: What we know is that generally he wasn’t happy with the modern part of the story.
ADAM: He then filmed the flashbacks in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which had been turned into a museum after the war. The material evolved on set and turned out much longer than expected. Munk was very satisfied with the effect, but he felt the two parts were incompatible. He decided that the scenes on the ship should be rewritten and entirely reshot in a studio. But he never got to see this plan through.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: On the 20th of September 1961, under the town of Łowicz he crashed his car, and that was it. He died tragically.
NITZAN: Munk left behind the film reels with more questions than answers. Nobody knew what his exact plans for rewriting and finishing the film had been. Some thought the material should just be left in an archive, while others thought it should be released with the material Munk was unhappy with, while others believed a new director should try to remake the film. His co-workers from the film searched for a solution for two years.
ZOFIA POSMYSZ: Of course, they asked me to write something that would tie together what hadn’t been filmed with the material from Auschwitz. But I said: you have the original script. You should follow it. I don’t feel I can do it.
ADAM: Finally, the film crew decided that they wouldn’t cover up the incompleteness but actually incorporate it into the film. The material filmed on the ship was used in the form of still frames with a voice over commentary explaining the circumstances in which the film was finished. It transformed it into a hybrid film essay made of still and moving pictures.
MICHAŁ OLESZCZYK: There is this eerie quality, the present is frozen and the past is alive…
We are watching something, that’s almost like a fossil, it’s like something excavated from an archive. Something that wasn’t finished, that was put together. It’s almost like watching in a museum, something that was reconstructed and you can imagine the full form, and you will never see it, and yet what was made retains power.
Many commentators [...] said that the very incompleteness of the passenger is something that elevates it to a new level of greatness. And these are extremely cruel words of course in terms of dealing with a personal death of Andrej Munk. Because we all would love to have the filmin the form he would have finished it. But on the other hand it’s undeniable that the film draws its strength from that. Because it approaches a subject that cannot be fully depicted. Essay upon essay in the 20th century were devoted to the idea that the Holocaust cannot be fully depicted, that it can only be depicted in parts. And here is this film, that by the very fact of its incompleteness, and tragic history parttakes in something that will forever be incomplete, which is the memory and understanding of the Holocaust. So it’s a cruel irony of fate.
ADAM: This episode of Stories From The Eastern West was written and produced by Monika Proba for Culture.pl, the flagship brand of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. It was hosted by Nitzan Reisner and me, Adam Zulawski.
NITZAN: It was edited by Wojciech Oleksiak and Adam. Wojciech also did the music and sound design.
ADAM: A huge thank you to both Zofia Posmysz and Michał Oleszczyk for talking to us. For more interesting links about The Passenger, be sure to check the shownotes in your podcast app or on our website SFTEW.com.
NITZAN: Make sure to subscribe or check our feed next month. We’ll be bringing you a love letter. A very peculiar love letter to a tiny country and a defining moment in its history. See you then!
ADAM: Bye!
END
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