Page 86 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

A Journey to the Cursed Land.

Western European Jews in documentary films
about the Litzmannstadt Ghetto

Ewa Ciszewska —

The leitmotif of a return to the ghetto marks a very spe-
cial group of documentary films dedicated to the Litz-
mannstadt Ghetto. The returns are either metaphorical
– as a memory travel of the survivors recollecting their
life in the ghetto – or physical, for those who visit the
former Litzmannstadt Ghetto.
The Bałuty district of Łódź is visited not only by sur-
vivors of Polish origin, but also by Jews who were
brought to Łódź from Western Europe, Luxembourg and
Czechoslovakia. I am going to focus on those documen-
taries about their life in the ghetto, which feature their
return to contemporary Łódź. The testimonies of Czech
and Western European Jews reveal the existence of
a separate ‘hell circle’ in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto,
where oppression, suffering and hunger were felt with
different intensity and sensitivity than in its other parts.
That specific ‘writing out of the voices’ on suffering (for
the ghetto experience had different dimensions for chil-
dren, women, Gypsies and others) is not aimed at mak-
ing one of those perspectives more important than the
others. Instead, it is intended to emphasize the
polyphony of the survivors’ testimonies and draw atten-
tion to the intersecting – and often contradictory or mu-
tually exclusive – lines of narratives on the ghetto
experience. I will also discuss the theme of non-Jewish
victims of WWII who were incarcerated in Łódź: children
from the Czech towns of Lidice and Ležáky.
My deliberations on the above problems will be illus-
trated by the following documentaries: Radegast
(directed by Borys Lankosz, screenplay by Andrzej Bart,
2008), A Baluty Ghetto [Bałuckie getto] (written and di-

84 Ewa Ciszewska