Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

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Dan W.
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Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

#1

Post by Dan W. » 05 Apr 2013, 23:47

Marzynski is a Holocaust survivor who, as a child, posed as a Catholic. This film is about a town in Poland forever changed. You can watch the full version online:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... aignId=575

He is also debuting a new film about his experience on April 30th, titled "Never Forget To Lie"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... et-to-lie/

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Re: Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

#2

Post by wm » 06 Apr 2013, 19:10

Well the film certainly isn't WW2 history related fiction, what is shown there really happened. But still it's an ahistorical film and failure, maybe because the subject is not suitable for this medium.
Below is the letter sent after watching his film by that young Polish historian to Marzynski:
1. In the first part there is too much about the Polish murderers. There should be at least one person who was rescuing the Jews there. It would be easy to include Gołębiecki or the pharmacist Woińska material sacrificing a part of the lengthy Yaffa Eliah sequence.

2. The old woman (the booze-peddler) - without any credibility, a total falsehood. In 1945 her son murdered a priest for money in Briańsk. Later she was helping him by transporting his gun during his out of town robberies [...]

3. Later, you are peddling the idea of "5 Germans versus 6,000 Poles" - it is undeserved. Your thinking seems to be that the only problem was those five Germans. So why the Jews didn't kill them? Would it solve the problem?
I think you understand well the logic of that system and the idea of collective responsibility.
118 people were executed because the German Commandant of the Briańsk labor camp was killed in 1943. In 1942 in Briańsk a man was killed for a possession of a radio. [...] A priest (and a Home Army chaplain) - Henryk Opiatowski was executed in Briańsk in July 1943 for helping Jews and escaped Soviet war prisoners.
I mentioned five military policemen [...] but in total there were dozen or so Germans in Briańsk.

4. the film is missing a factual element from the years 1939-1941. At that time the Jews assumed an anti-Polish attitude and collaborated with the Soviets. Polish officials were removed from their posts and replaced with Belarusians and Jews. A Polish-own pharmacy was given to a Jew. A half of the police was Jewish. Many Poles were sent to Siberia in revenge for the events of 1936-1938. One of my cousins was sent there for "super-patriotism".
All those facts would influence enormously the attitudes of some Poles later.

5. Briańsk is not a good example of the debatable Polish indifference and cruelty. 300 Jews had run away from the Ghetto and 76 would survive. With the exception of the city of Białystok, more Jews survived here than in all the other towns of the province combined.
Rescuing the Briańsk Jews three Poles lost their lives, 2 were sent to concentration camps, 2 farms were burned to the ground.[...]
You reduce the problem of the Polish help to "good will". It's an extremely simplistic interpretation, not taking into account the war and occupation realities.
[...]

7. My statement at the monument - "Catholic and Polish," had nothing to do with the Jews, I was talking about unrelated events.

8. Certainly there is not enough about heroic rescuing and too much about murdering. [...] You are showing the scum and you are silent about the heroes.

9. Why no one in the film asks those Jews - in a similar situation would they help Poles? I was asking this question and nobody answered with conviction "yes." Some said: "probably not."


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Dan W.
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Re: Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

#3

Post by Dan W. » 07 Apr 2013, 17:11

Yes, of course the film is not fiction, but this is the section for movies, documentaries, and other works of film. As to the letter, I can only say the views expressed are as subjective as those of Mr. Marzynski. (I'm not defending the filmmaker here, either, as I don't know if he took literary license or not)

On a related note, I would recommend you read the following sometime, if you feel the Polish people have been slighted by historians:

The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

By the superb author and highly regarded historian Sir Martin Gilbert

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Re: Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

#4

Post by wm » 08 Apr 2013, 19:40

Well, as an abstract entity the Polish people can't be slighted, and additionally he has no means to slight as a historian because he's not a historian. :)
That film is terrible because its totally lacks informational content, it is a meaningless string of stories and feelings - certainly very modern in this way, but even most of the contemporary Poles wouldn't be able to understand what it all about, foreigners? - forget it.

They say it's a film is about a town in Poland forever changed. I see no change, the young historian was a civil servant and still is - currently the second in command there.

BTW it is hard not to notice, that for more than a half-century those rich New York Jews - children of holocaust survivals - have never cared to visit the place where their families died, take care of the remains of the Jewish cemetery, build a monument commemorating the killings there. It's not how it should be.

The point of the film seems to be that antisemitism is bad but the murders shown there were obviously criminal in nature. Those criminals didn't care who their victims were, they cared about loot, nothing more.

Or maybe that during a genocidal occupation it's nice to give shelter to strangers? It's nice but inadvisable, the risks to you and your family was too great. Those people had no legal and even moral duty to do that. Till the liberation, there would be six hundred days of mortar fear, and clear and present danger even from those Jews in hiding - only their family and friends had the right to demand such sacrifice.

The last part of the film shows an episode from the civil war that was raging there after the WW2, an attack on the town by one of the many anticommunist units operating in the Eastern Poland.
It's unfortunate that a Jewish woman was caught in crossfire - but in the end there was over 50 thousand victims among the natives, are their lives not worth anything? Even a few words in that film? Shouldn't the reasons, an explanation be given?

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Re: Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

#5

Post by wm » 09 Apr 2013, 21:07

I think maybe it should be illustrated how deceptive and historically inaccurate are the the stories told in that film - mainly because of their black-and-whiteness.
The most dramatic story is told by Yaffa Eliach. Her family was saved by Polish peasants, her brother by a Polish priest, her father was fighting in a Soviet partisan unit.
According to her testimony, her mother and brother were murdered by Poles because of a property dispute.

Although it is possible, the fact is that it happened during an attack of about hundred and fifty strong unit of the Home Army on the village of Ejszyszki. The targets were the Regional Executive Committee of VKPB, Selsoviet, and an officer of the dreaded SMERSH - the counter-intelligence agency in the Red Army.

At that time SMERSH (or rather the Soviet Union) was fighting (more properly exterminating) the Polish independence movements in its efforts to reduce Poland to a Soviet-ruled puppet state.

That officer of SMERSH was staying in her family house because her father was working for SMERSH by then - the Soviets loved to employ local people because of their useful knowledge.
Later her father (and in fact his entire SMERSH team) was convicted for life on criminal charges by the Soviets - of course it is unrelated but it shows how non-black-and-white the real history is.

The Jews weren't targeted, a hundred and fifty armed people could have combed the village quickly and efficiently and killed everyone they wanted and they didn't. And a property dispute is not antisemitism, it is simply a property dispute...

Later the Soviets judicially murdered scores of the people who took part (or not) in the attack and hundreds were imprisoned or deported to Siberia.

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Re: Shtetl - A Film by Marian Marzynski

#6

Post by wm » 15 Feb 2014, 02:07

Birthplace - Shtetl done right. I suppose this is the film Shtetl tried to emulate and failed.
In my opinion the best film ever made in Poland on this subject, and simultaneously the most brutal.
Director and writer: Paweł Łoziński.
Cast: Henryk Grynberg as himself.
Release date: 1992.

Poland 22 years ago, the village of Radoszyna, and the man who was born there.

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