In Darkness – Holocaust Film

In Darkness is a Polish film, directed by Agnieszka Holland,  which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 2011. The dialogue is a mixture of Polish, Yiddish, German and Ukrainian. The English subtitles were clear, helped by the background generally being very dark.

The film is set during the Holocaust in World War II. A number of Jews attempt to escape into the sewers of Lvov in Poland (now L’viv in Ukraine) when the Germans liquidate the Ghetto. Some of them are helped by Leopold Socha, a sewer inspector and former petty criminal.  He is excellently played by Robert Wieckiewicz.

In Darkness is very atmospheric, re-creating both the cramped, dark and unhealthy conditions in which the Jews have to live and the initial level of distrust between Socha and the Jews; at first he appears to aid them only because they pay him to do so, whilst some of them distrust Poles and/or look down on him because he is uneducated.  It shows that Socha risked the lives of himself, his wife Wanda and their daughter by helping the Jews, but that Poles were also executed in reprisal for acts of resistance that they had nothing to do with.

The film is based on a book by Robert Marshall called In the Sewers of Lvov: A Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust. One of the Jews, Krystyna Chiger, then a small child, wrote a memoir called The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow.

SPOILER ALERT! The links in the next two paragraphs reveal more about the story than some may wish to know before seeing the film.

Socha was helped by Stefan Wroblewski, another sewer worker. Both men and their wives were later recognised by Yad Vashem as being amongst the Righteous of the Nations for their roles in saving Jews during the Holocaust. As with most films about true events, it claims to be ‘based on true events’ and has a degree of fictionalisation and character amalgamation.

This article from the Los Angeles Times is by David Lee Preston; his mother, Halina Wind, was saved by Socha but does not appear in the film. It mentions that Stefan Wroblewski’s fate was not as shown in the film, and that a third sewer worker, Jerzy Kowalow, also helped. There is a character in the film called Kovalov who helps Jews, but he was a factory owner/manager rather than a sewer worker.

A very good film, but one that has a limited release in the UK and, I suspect, the rest of the English-speaking world. There is some sex, nudity and violence, but none of it is gratuitous.