Page 78 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

achem in a similar way ‘testify’ and ‘accuse’, although
the difference between the representation orders is in-
tentional.
Seemingly, Daniel Szylit’s Litzmannstadt Getto
(1965) presents the above procedure in an intensified
form, but it becomes comprehensible only after the pri-
mary communication context of the film is recreated. An
emphatic commentary, which ‘speaks for the victims’
steers the narration, but also contributes to the impres-
sion of uniformity of the photographs used in the film.
The historical lecture suggests that someone is speak-
ing on behalf of Polish society about the crime commit-
ted against the Jewish society, and the affective tone
expresses the pathos of the collective ‘us’. The opening
shots proudly show the pre-war achievements of the
Jewish population of Łódź, mentioning Julian Tuwim and
Artur Rubinstein’s contribution to national and interna-
tional culture. Subsequently, they are followed by im-
ages of damage and exhausting work, which contrast
with the opening story of vitality and the achievements
of the Jewish population. The existing version of the film
ends with information on the liquidation of the ghetto in
August 1944, illustrated by Mendel Grosman’s photo-
graphs, and on the resistance movement organized by
a communist group led by Rachela Róża Pacanowska-
Krengel. She is the only individual character in the film;
the decision to highlight only her fate in a story about
the entire population was undoubtedly made for politi-
cal reasons. It is even more obvious as an exception
from the rule; the mention of the social activist deported
to Chełmno nad Nerem in 1942 after the information
about the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944 is the
only thing that disrupts the chronological order. How-
ever, an analysis of the first version of the scenario, pre-
served in the archive of the Educational Film Studio
[Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych], proves that the end-
ing of the film was supposed to be different. Daniel
Szylit proposed to end the film with a contemporary se-
quence of Bałuty and the newly built settlement of
apartment blocks, named after Włada Bytomska. The
sequence would be based on images of daily life of
a society that had survived and its vitality, resigning for
a moment from the division into Poles and Jews. But
such a solution evokes doubts, since only a small part
of the pre-war Jewish population of Łódź survived; there-

76 Tomasz Majewski