The prologue of Decalogue VIII, in which the camera focuses on the entwined hands of two people – a man and a little girl – entering a grey tenement house courtyard, announces the film’s main theme and, at the same time, differentiates it from the rest of the series. This episode takes place not only the concrete housing estate known from the other episodes but also an old tenement house, which was ‘a witness to human humiliation’ (as one of the characters says) back during World War II. Although Kieślowski, as usual, focuses on the present day, VIII is the only part of The Decalogue referring directly to history, specifically to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust.
The main character, ethics professor Zofia (Maria Kościałkowska), lives in the same block of flats as the doctor from Decalogue II, which is worth mentioning because there is an interesting connection between the two films. The lecturer, who discusses various case studies with her students in class, also comments on the case of the doctor, who – as we know from the second part of the series – betrayed his principles to save the pregnancy of a woman determined to have an abortion. ‘The child lives. And this is perhaps the most important thing in this story’, Zofia summarises the head doctor’s ethical hesitations. However, the professor must quickly move on to real-life practice, because her conclusion provokes Elżbieta Loranz (Teresa Marczewska), who has just arrived from the United States to present another real-life event in which, it turns out, the professor participated.
At first, the story from the past seems to be just another example to serve as a discussion point in ethics classes. In 1943, a young couple was supposed to help a Jewish girl by becoming her fictitious godparents. In the end, however, the Poles refused, arguing that the Catholic faith forbade them to bear false witness, with the result that the six-year-old girl came close to death. As you can guess, the woman who did not help at that time was Zofia, and the Jewish girl was Elżbieta. The problem presented in the ethics lecture – can a Catholic lie if the lie serves to save another human being? – turns out, however, to be purely scholastic and illusory, because the motivations of the main character were in fact completely different.