Читать книгу The Holocaust in Czechoslovak and Czech Feature Films - Šárka Sladovníková - Страница 6

Alfréd Radok’s (1919–1976) Daleká cesta [Distant Journey, 1949]1 was made just three years after the war. It is based on a semi-autobiographical film treatment titled „Cesta“ [Journey] written by Erik Kolár (1906–1976).2

The film’s story, part of which takes place in the Terezín ghetto, was inspired by the fate of Radok’s father, who was of Jewish extraction and died as a political prisoner at Terezín. Radok himself was interned in 1944 at the Klettendorf concentration camp. In his film, he wanted to give a true portrayal of the recent past and expose the falseness of Nazi propaganda. In one interview, he stated:

Hitler’s name calls a picture to my mind: A little girl, like a baby doll, hands Hitler a bouquet of wild flowers. Hitler bends towards her, smiling with affection. […] This picture of Hitler with the little girl, every overly ostentatious ceremony, it all is somehow related and adds up. When you sum it up, all of a sudden the truth emerges. The whole truth, of course properly organized, with the right editing: ceremonies, parades, little girls, and concentration camps, in that order. […] Whoever sees just Hitler and a girl with flowers doesn’t see anything at all. […] I tried to emphasize the paradox that many people––and this goes for more than just Communist Czechoslovakia––simply don’t see things, don’t want to see them, and just see Hitler with a little girl. (Radok 2001, 80)

Distant Journey did not meet the ideological requirements of the new regime formed after the Communists came to power in February 1948. Therefore, the film was denied a gala premiere and was almost immediately removed from the main cinemas in the centre of Prague and was screened only in outlying districts and in movie theaters outside of the capital.

It was a tragically premature and anachronistic work of art. […] The film was labelled “existential” and “formalistic”. After a very brief run, it was withdrawn from public showing and for almost two decades was locked away in the Barrandov vault. (Škvorecký 1971, 41)

It is paradoxical that this film was stigmatized in Czechoslovakia, while it met with great success abroad. The Communist regime prided itself on Distant Journey at foreign film festivals. Distant Journey was even screened in the USA, where it was compared to Orson Welles’s famous Citizen Kane (1941).

The plot of Distant Journey begins in Prague in March 1939. A doctor’s assistant haughtily suggests to Hana Kaufmannová (played by Blanka Waleská), a young Jewish female doctor, that she should leave the clinic. The film depicts the life of the Kaufmann family and of Toník Bureš, a Czech doctor, who falls in love with Hana and marries her. Hana’s parents and younger brother are deported to Terezín. Toník sets out to clandestinely visit the family, but he does not get to Terezín in time; they have already been deported to the East. Later, Toník, as the husband of a Jewess, is interned in a labor camp. In the end, Hana too is interned in Terezín, where she as a doctor helps out during an outbreak of typhus. From her family, only she and Toník live to see the end of the war; in the final scene, they walk through the Terezín cemetery.

Figure 1: Distant Journey: “Šlojzka”, the space where incoming Jewish prisoners in the Terezín ghetto were placed. Source: National Film Archive Prague

The Holocaust is the central theme of the entire story. The filmmakers were aware of spectators’ ignorance stemming from the short amount of time that had passed. Therefore, they included in the film a great amount of information about the persecution of the Jews, primarily incorporating it into dialogue:

Hana: “I want to look great for the theater.”

Toník: “You really like nice things, don’t you?”

Hana: “I do. I love getting dressed up. You know, Toník, I couldn’t say good-bye to all this. […]”

Father Kaufmann: “But Hana, you know we aren’t allowed to come to the theater since yesterday.”

Kaufmann: “The Jews have also been thrown out of the state office. Jewish lawyers can’t practise. Our Honzík can’t even go to the playground, or to Sokol [a patriotic gymnastic organization]. It seems he might not even be allowed to go to school. […] I am not going to wait here to die.”

Reiter: “And where do you want to go to wait?”

Kaufmann: “Refugees are still being accepted in Brazil. The Pick family has left for Canada. One of our relatives lives in Puerto Rico.”

Other pieces of information are shared visually and require no commentary, for example, in the scene when children from the East arrive in Terezín.3 Hana takes them to the showers. When the small children see the showerheads, they begin to scream; panicking and shouting “gas”, they run away. In the entire film, there is not one mention of the murder of Jews in the gas chambers. The filmmakers, however, assumed that the viewer would already know about the gas chambers, and therefore only hinted at them in the film.

This motion picture depicts a broad range of subthemes related to the Holocaust. It portrays the rise of Nazism and growing anti-Semitism, as evidenced by signs that read “Jews out!”, “A purely Aryan business”, “Jews are not welcome in this shop”, and “No Jews or dogs allowed” and a newspaper headline that reads “No Jews allowed”. It also depicts the greediness of common people waiting for the Jews to be deported so that they could take their apartments, or at the very least, their furniture. (Neighbor: “And the sofa that Honzík used, is it staying here?”) It also deals with emigration to South America, the suicide of distraught Jews in a hopeless situation (Reiter), and the social downfall of mixed married couples (Toník, a former doctor, has to start working in a factory). The character of Hana also displays survivor’s guilt, as she lived, whereas the people closest to her left (and later perished).

Figure 2: Distant Journey: Signs in Prague’s streets announcing “Jews out!”. Source: National Film Archive Prague

The final scene, in which the Terezín ghetto is liberated by the Soviet army, lacks the pathos prominent in contemporary and later conventional films. Instead of a long line of tanks, just a motorcycle with a sidecar shows up in Terezín. Toník’s brother’s participation in the resistance and his hiding of a radio transmitter in his home, as well as Toník’s act of sabotage at a German arms factory, help flesh out the story. (Toník’s friend from the factory: “It was bad in the beginning, but now he’s already making good rejects.”)

The film also depicts traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as the association between Jews and business: “Miss Kaufmannová, you can still practice medicine elsewhere, unless you want to do another job. For example some trading, Miss Kaufmannová.” At the beginning of the film, a religious autostereotype and heterostereotype is depicted. Hana’s mother asks her, “And you don’t mind the doctor is a Christian?” In the following shot, Toník’s father proclaims: “For me she’s a Jewess!”4 Hana herself does not prioritize her Jewishness; she feels like a Czech and has no thoughts of emigrating: “I belong just here, it’s my culture, language, people, everything.”

In Czechoslovak cinema, Jews are often depicted as absolutely positive characters. Radok tried to avoid this black-and-white view. Zdeněk, a family friend of the Kaufmanns and Hana’s admirer, gains a high position at Terezín, treats his fellow inmates harshly and arrogantly, and does not save Hana’s family from being sent to the East. The depiction of Czechs is also multifaceted. Besides the mentioned negative neighbor character (see p. 16), there is the positive character of a Czech gendarme in Terezín, who brings Hana a message from her parents and allows Toník to illegally enter Terezín. Toník’s fellow factory worker is also a positive character who wants to hide Hana so she does not have to go to Terezín.

The film’s esthetics are highly stylized; symbols play an important role. At the beginning of the film, the menorah represents the religious barrier between a Christian and a Jewess, whereas a globe evokes the free world. The bureaucratic and deportation machinery interweave in the striking keys of a typewriter, which, when viewed from the side, resembles a train. The ubiquitous numbers that appear in the storehouse containing confiscated Jewish property and on the rucksacks of deported Jews document anonymization. The piano is a substantial symbol; its tones accompany the film and its ruined frame in Terezín serves as a murder weapon on the one hand and on the other as a gong announcing freedom and the end of the war. The frequently repeated words transport and gas create the impression of a musical canon. The Star of David is a synecdoche of the Jews’ suffering and does not indicate pride in the lot of the Jews portrayed in later cinematic productions (see Romeo, Juliet and the Darkness, p. 25). After being liberated, Hana, in a close shot, demonstratively tears off the star.

The beginning and end of the film are framed by the voice of a subjective narrator (actor Václav Voska). At the beginning of the film, he translates German words praising the Reich in propaganda newsreels from this period. The narrator, with a tone and intensity in his voice, imbues the translation with a subjective viewpoint that sharply contrasts with the accompanying image. The narrator translates the aggressive rhetoric of the newsreel, the exclamations, the emphatic sentences, and the stirring words with sadness in his voice. The concluding “Long live Germany!” is uttered with a sigh. In the last scene, statistics about the Holocaust are summarized in names and numbers ironically: “Mankind has won. Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka…”

The film consists of several layers. Nearly every sequence begins with a stylized documentary clip5, or a clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). Thus, a mosaic structure emerges that depicts both macrohistory (documentary clips) and microhistory (the fate of the Kaufmann and Bureš families). The documentary clips serve as a “narrative shortcut” and embed this fictional story into historical context, while also generalizing it. This type of framing captures anti-Semitism from above (in the newsreels) as well as from below (in the life of common people). It shows two parallel worlds: one in which Jews experienced the reality of the Nuremberg Laws, and who could not from a certain point in time visit cinemas and thus could not see these newsreels, and one in which non-Jews experienced this reality. Theatricality6 is an important layer of the film. It is manifested in the characters’ facial expressions and gestures, as well as in the spatial arrangement of the Terezín ghetto, which in some respects resembles a theatrical scenery. The ghetto is also visualized as a hopeless Kafkaesque7 labyrinth. The film employs a bold expressionist style to engender an emotional atmosphere (the semi-mad dance of the Jewish man in the storehouse among the light fixtures; the band in Terezín, whose music accompanies those being deported to the East; repeated shots of the gates of Terezín, from which people leave in one direction carrying coffins and through which in the other direction masses of new arrivals stream in).8

After Distant Journey, another Czechoslovak Holocaust motion picture would not be made for eleven years. The film “succumbed to an ideological curse and for a long time became a cautionary reminder for those who would have looked to it as an example” (Žalman 1993, 173). Distant Journey was ahead of its time by more than a decade and would become an important source of inspiration for filmmakers in the 1960s.9 One of the motifs in the film, which would be depicted later as well, was the complicity of many ordinary Czechs in the Holocaust.

1 The year and title given for each film have been taken from the Czechoslovak Film Database. See www.csfd.cz. Other information, such as the names of the screenwriters, have been taken from the books Český hraný film III-VI.