Agnieszka Holland's "In Darkness'

Of all subjects, the Holocaust is the most recalcitrant to artistic treatment. The Nazis themselves "sponsored" an arts community of sorts in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which was of course always slated for destruction. Some of the work created there has survived; the wonder is that any of it could be produced at all, and of course one cannot apply ordinary "standards" to it, let alone expect that it express the nightmare of which it was part.

Subsequent attempts to depict the Holocaust have, with few exceptions— the poetry of Paul Celan, the stories of Tadeusz Borowski— been embarrassing, not so say repellent failures. The price of success was high; both Celan and Borowski committed suicide, leaving a sense that only death could validate their efforts.

Claude Lanzmann made the point in his documentary, Shoah, that no representation of the Holocaust was possible, and that the only people who could speak of it were those who had experienced it. That hasn't deterred filmmakers in particular, from the gross exploitation of Liliana Cavani's Night Porter to the solemn kitsch of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. I still think the camps are unrepresentable.

But Roman Polanski, himself a Holocaust survivor, showed in The Pianist (2002) that it was possible to depict Jewish survival outside the camps, and Agnieszka Holland, the daughter of a Jewish father whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, has made two similarly "tangential" films— Angry Harvest, about a Jewish woman on the run during World War II, and Europa Europa, the story of a Jewish youth who successfully impersonated a German. And with her latest film, In Darkness, Holland comes as close as it may be possible to get to relating a collective experience in the Holocaust without crossing the barriers of taste or decency.

In fact, it is a work of great power and, I may say, moral accomplishment.

Survival in the sewers

Like Europa Europa, In Darkness is based on a true story: that of the dozen Jews who survived the extermination of the Lvov ghetto by hiding in the city's sewers until the Soviet liberation. They were able to do so because of a Polish sanitation worker, Leopold Socha, who hid and fed them and managed against the odds to conceal their presence from German authorities who, with Teutonic thoroughness, were determined that not a single one of the city's Jews escape.

(Those authorities were very successful: Of the 800,000 Jews who entered the Treblinka death camp, for example, only 14 survived the war.)

Beyond sheer luck, the sewer fugitives owed their survival to two factors: the personal wealth of one of their number, Ignacy Chiger, who was able to provide a meager diet for some months with cash and valuables; and the fact that the Lvov ghetto, the second largest in Poland, wasn't razed until relatively late in the war.

It was no less a miracle for this. But, of course, nothing would have been possible without Socha, and when Chiger's money inevitably ran out, the game was up.

It was at this point that the true miracle occurred. Socha, having undertaken his protective role as a lucrative business deal (and also a very risky one; the penalty for hiding Jews was, of course, death), had bonded with his charges— "my Jews," he called them— and found himself unable to abandon them.

Moment of truth

The film's central moment comes when Chiger (Herbert Knaup), privately confesses to Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz) that he's out of money. He expects no credit extension; this is the end. Socha bows under the weight of this news— under the weight, perhaps equally, not only of his lost business but his discovered humanity— and says that he will continue to supply the fugitives, presumably from his accumulated profit. He then pulls out a wad of cash and gives it to Chiger, telling him to make his "payment" to him as usual lest the others suspect anything is wrong.

One realizes there are two heroes here, for Chiger has obviously been concealing the truth about his dwindling resources, lest he alarm his fellow fugitives. The scene could easily go wrong, but Holland and her actors handle it so deftly that it passes almost as a mere episode of the narrative instead of the film's moral crisis.

Socha realizes in an instant that he is now in it for more than the money; he is also backed into a corner, because in the cramped space of the sewer, any negative reaction will immediately be sensed by the others, with the likelihood of a panicked reaction that could easily betray everyone.

Socha might also consider that if he abandons his charges, they could turn him in. But if this fear factors into his decision— he must, after all, have anticipated the moment at which "his" Jews go broke— he has no time for calculation. He can only choose to be human.

Live birth

In Darkness contains harrowing scenes in the sewer, most notably a live birth (the child must of course be strangled, the fugitives not knowing that Socha's barren wife has agreed to take it). The lighting and editing are a tour de force, the sudden flashes of illumination in the surrounding darkness like a Baroque tableau vivant. (One wonders how the film would have appeared in black and white.)

But the surrounding horror of the Holocaust is only obliquely hinted at: In a blurred scene of naked women being chased through a forest and then gunned down; in the silence and emptiness of the city streets. Only once does one see a work camp.

Mundek (Benno Furmann), a petty thief who is the only non-bourgeois member of the dozen, is also the only one able to risk going above ground occasionally. In search of his daughter, he infiltrates the camp, where he is about to be summarily executed for not having his prison cap.

The gun is pointed to his head; his face contracts with anticipation of the bullet. At the last second, the camp commandant countermands his lieutenant and shoots a man behind Mundek instead, who, he explains briefly, is more expendable because Mundek is still in shape for labor.

Like the scene between Socha and Chiger, the action here is swift. But this scene reveals not sudden humanity but stark depravity.

One could pile horror upon horror, but this small episode says it all. Anything larger, in fact, would fail.

No Hollywood hero

The resemblance of the plot to that of Schindler's List is obvious, but in contrast to Spielberg's film In Darkness provides no tragic coronation of the human spirit. Liam Neeson's Schindler laments that he was unable to save more than a tiny fraction of the Jews who perished, but Robert Wieckiewicz's Socha is almost childishly proud of his feat in rescuing his dozen when the liberation arrives— no Hollywood hero, but a simple man raised above himself by circumstance.

The real Socha, as the film tells us, was killed himself a year later when he was struck by a Soviet army vehicle. At his funeral, one of the onlookers remarked that he had been justly punished for helping Jews.

In Darkness is a film that perhaps could only have been made by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a Catholic resistance fighter. That era of testimony won't be with us for long.