Page 79 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

Photograph of Daniel Szylit fore it would only be justifiable to use ‘I’ instead of ‘us’
(courtesy of Mr Leon Kelcz) in the commentary.
The little known biography of the director may be
helpful in understanding that paradox. Daniel Szylit was
one of the survivors of the Łódź ghetto; he remained
there after the liquidation as a member of the cleaning
7
7 — unit . After the war, he lived in the former ghetto area,
I would like to thank Mr Leon in the aforementioned settlement at Boya-Żeleńskiego
Kelcz, who was so kind as to share
the biographical data of Daniel Street. His wartime experiences must have been known
Szylit with me. at least to some people from the film circles. Andrzej
Wajda, who was a contemporary of his in the Film
School, appointed him as his co-worker while working
on Samson (1961), a famous film based on Kazimierz
Brandys’ prose about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.
Szylit himself directed only two films before he immi-
grated to Israel after the anti-Semitic events in March
1968. One of them is the afore-mentioned documentary
commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the liqui-
dation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, which Szylit was de-
termined to make. Soon after the film had been
8 — completed, it was most probably put on a shelf, judging
The first public show of Szylit's by the lack of any information about it being screened
film took place 40 years later, 8
in April 2004, as a part or distributed .
of a retrospective of documentary Another issue I would like to address is the demar-
films about the Łódź ghetto cation line between the cinematic representations of
(Song of the Murdered Jewish
Nation) organized by the Institute ghettoes in Warsaw and in Łódź. At first that borderline
of Tolerance. seems accidental; there are more existing film records

Litzmannstadt Ghetto – Affective Memory, Photography and Music 77