Korczak

Andrzej Wajda's dark-hued film evokes at once the nostalgia of a large pre-World War II Jewish Polish community, bittersweet memories of orphanage life, and the dread of imminent destruction of life. Indeed, Wajda has been called to task by moviemakers and critics alike for a sentimentalist, unrealistic, even venal portryal of wartime Poland and of Polish-Jewish relations. I find this unfair. For at least the present writer (a “second generation” survivor of the Holocaust whose father was an escapee), the film resonated aesthetically, politically, and psychologically. The trajectory and project of the film may be analyzed from several perspectives to understand the controversy it has provoked and its artistic contributions.

Authorship and audienceship are the privileged perspectives from a psychological standpoint. For the director Wajda, a filmmaker of social democratic vision who inspired Solidarity and in 1989 gained a senate seat in Poland, the film provided a vehicle to valorize a Jewish Polish hero and redeem a usable history from the hell of the Holocaust. The problems arise from the gloss given to this historical artifact. Dr. Janusz Korczak, né Goldszmit, was reported to have run a Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and to have shielded his charges from death until a fateful deportation to Treblinka, which Wajda derails into a penultimate triumphal escape into a misty, celestial field (disclaimed, however, by an on-screen paragraph detailing the children's and Korczak's deaths at Treblinka in August 1942). Is this simply a case of denial of history? Jewish audiences, especially intellectually inclined French and American ones already subject to certain “revisions” of World War II history, are prone to balk at such a distortion.

There are other oddities of story presentation. About one-quarter of the way through the film Korczak is incarcerated by the Gestapo for refusing to wear a Jewish armband, and commiserates with gentile Polish compatriots, looking fo