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An unusual semidocumentary new film by Polish director Andrzej Wajda turns Janusz Korczak from a Jewish victim into a national martyr.
Why would a Polish director want to make a film about a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, even if his death was an act of heroism? True, it is in the nature of heroes that their stories have a widespread, often universal appeal. Also, that they are commonly fated to transcend the specific historical context from which they arose and enter the domain of individual interpretation. However, there is something about Jewish history in general and the Holocaust in particular that does not lend itself easily to borrowing.
Since Jews have historically suffered as a result of the hostile sentiment held for them by their neighbors, it is at the very least surprising that one of these neighbors should now choose to adopt a Jewish hero as one of its own. Noted Polish director Andrzej Wajda, however, has elected to do just that.
In what he claims will be his final cinematic offering, he has meticulously recreated the story of Janusz Korczak, the Jewish pediatrician who in 1942 declined all offers of false documents which would have made an escape possible, and followed the orphans in his care into the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto and from it to Treblinka where he perished with them.
While to many Jews Korczak is symbolic of one who chose to share in the fate of his people, the Jews, Wajda's Korczak is as much a Polish martyr as he is a Jewish victim. He is first and foremost a Pole and his death a loss to Poland. Korczak, an Academy Award nominee as best foreign film, is being released here.
Though the screenplay for Korczak, written by long-time Wajda collaborator Agnieszka Holland, was completed as far back as 1981, it took Andrzej Wajda, the man who made Man of Iron and Man of Marble, almost a decade to raise the necessary financial backing. Hollywood was interested, but on condition that the final product be lighter, less bleak and funnier than the original concept. Wajda refused. "I cannot make a Dr. Zhivago or a Holocaust," he said. "Hollywood productions of that kind are unnatural fictions. I'm striving...