By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Irena Sendler, a Catholic Polish social worker, was send to the Warsaw ghetto to help prevent spread of typhus, a disease her father, a doctor, died of.
Among the poverty and dangers of the ghetto, Irena realized that what will happen to these imprisoned there after they are deported, will be immeasurably worse. From that suspicion, even before the suspicion became certainty, came the idea of saving at least the children. Or rather, some of the children.
According to the film, at least 80,000 children were living in Warsaw ghetto. Irena Sendler managed to save 2,500. More than anyone else.
The physical walls circling the ghetto were not the only obstacle; it was also language and culture. Jewish children of the 40s spoke, read and wrote Yiddish, dressed and behaved differently from Catholic Poles and often could not “pass” as Christians. It was deadly dangerous to harbor a Jew, or smuggle one out. Helping Jews carried dead sentence.
Although the film shows Poles as compassionate and helpful, the truth is not as nice, and often neighbors denounced Jews as well those who helped them.
Irena, her mother and her co-workers must have lived with constant fear.
The film does good job of presenting the Jewish families trapped in the ghetto: their doubts and fears about future, the inability to understand that concentration camps are really death camps, family ties that tied together even in death, people who left but could not convince others to do the same, fear of losing the kids as well as their heritage should the children convert. We must remember that before German death camps there was nothing comparable ever used in any genocide. People could not comprehend that thousands could be killed in minutes, nor why would peaceful people be subjected to such torture. We have now lost that innocence but back in the 40s it played into German hands.
Hunger, cold, dirt, disease and constant fear was part of everyday's life in the ghetto. Yet, people put on brave faces hoping to survive. When I watched Irena bringing goods to her Jewish friends, I though of an authentic letter from Brno ghetto written by Greta, a woman who perished in Auschwitz. She wrote to my great aunt whom she was ‘related” by marriage: my grand aunt married and divorced Jewish man long before the war and he later married Greta, a Jewish woman with whom he was send to Brno ghetto and later to death. My great aunt kept sending them clothing and food, and Greta was thanking her. Greta was, before the deportation, a wealthy woman, married to successful professional man,now she could not believe how warm and soft was the comforter that may great aunt sent. She described her circumstances, terrible as they were, but did not speak of fear or possible death. The Jews in this film don’t either.
Smuggling is accurately portrayed, it was major occupation for kids and necessary means of survival. The entire orphanage was deported, and Dr. Korczak died in Treblinka in 1942. Warsaw ghetto revolted in 1943, after between 254,000 to 300,000 people were sent to death camps. Over 55,000 Jews died in the uprising or were deported to death camp Treblinka; 7,000 were killed on arrival there. The Warsaw ghetto uprising inspired uprisings in Minsk and Bialystok ghettos and in the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka.
I think, that it is always a mistake to hire American and English actors instead of actors native to the land in the story. Anna Paquin does decent jobs as a Polish woman facing death, but the underlying experience of doom is lacking. It's not part of her or most of her co-players. It does not help that the photographs of young Irena show a woman in the type of Marcia Gay Harden, she plays Irena’s Mother, rather than Anna Paquin. The difference stands out with the acting of Iddo Goldberg, in the part of Jacob, utterly convincing as a man who left the ghetto and comes to visit his family.
The film was shot in Latvia, again, why not shoot it in Poland, say Lodz that had its own ghetto, it would have been more authentic.
Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans in 1944. When the city was rebuild, the Jewish part of the town was omitted from its plans. Little of the ghetto remains; one of the synagogues and the court house are still there. Jewish population was annihilated. Few of the saved children found any members of their family after the war.
Irena Krzyzanowska, born Sendlerowa, was part of Zegota, an organization trying to help the Jews while co-operating with the partisans of Polish Home Army. She had been, like all members of Home Army, persecuted for years after the communist take over. She left Poland for the first time in 1965 when she was honored by the Israelis as one of the Righteous among Nations at Yad Vashem. In 2003 she received the Order of White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration, and the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington DC. In 2007 she was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize that went to Al Gore.
When I watch films like Paranormal Activity, that are supposed to play at our underlying fears of the unknown, I wonder: have we really become this stupid? Have we, in the world full of genocide, forgotten that the greatest danger is among the known and accepted, often next door? It’s not monsters from another world that crowd my nightmares but people looking like me only with different beliefs who would kill me in the name of their “truth”.
