The Children Take Their Revenge

Already in one of the first scenes of the film Unzere Kinder (which follows the newsreel prologue that depicts the harsh reality of Jews being mass-deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and what happened to them and their belongings there), the children from the orphanage who belong to the very small number of surviving Polish-Jewish children protest and confront the two Kleinkünstler returning from exile in the Soviet Union, who are essentially playing themselves and in a sketch perform a sentimentalized version of the wartime events (“because that is not how it was”). This opens up the divide (in the context of the film) between the children who were forced to become survival artists (compare the quote from one of the boys, “It was my job to trick the German gendarmes”) and the returning artists who survived the war exiled deep into Soviet Russia.

But in a broader context, it opens the divide between those who survived the war and the Holocaust in exile and those who survived and resisted (or, for that matter, much more likely perished in the ghettos and concentration camps). A divide between, on the one hand, those who were either victims of the Holocaust or resistance fighters against it – and the fact is that given the horrific circumstances for Jews during the Nazi era and the war, the mere act of survival might, and rightly so, be viewed as an act of resistance (against the efforts to exterminate the Jewish people and their culture, religion, and language(s)), and hence these two categories start to blend into one, even if the latter ones were the ones idealized, venerated and idolized in Israel, perhaps as a foundation for nation building amid hostile states – and on the other hand, those who survived in the relatively safe haven of exile on foreign soil.

This divide would, by the way, continue to echo during the first postwar decades: in Israel (where the surviving and non-surviving European Jews alike sometimes were accused of cowardice or not “putting up enough of a fight”) but also in the German Democratic Republic and other Eastern Bloc countries where initially the only Jews who got compensation and recognition for their sufferings and losses during the war were the ones that could prove that they had fought actively, preferably with a weapon in hand, against the Nazi regime in, or Nazi occupation of, their countries and territories; the latter because there the war was primarily viewed as a (communist) fight against fascism, a mindset that in a way presaged the view of the Cold War as a “struggle” between two competing (and opposite) ideologies or thought systems. This sentiment also shines through in one of the scenes of the film when one of the young kitchen helpers (or something similar) laments the plight of mothers who were deprived of their children and accuses them of not doing enough to protect and shield their offspring, saying, in effect, that if it had been her child, she would have put up a fight and done everything to stop the seemingly inevitable. This scene of the film is also one of the few instances where the atrocities committed outside the ghettos and the concentration camps are highlighted, here with references to the “Holocaust by Bullets,” the mass shootings of Polish and Ukrainian Jews out in the forests, sometimes after their Christian neighbors had betrayed them. Thus, the scene also provides the film’s only glimpse of the possibility that the Poles were not only victims but also collaborators and potential perpetrators of the Nazi persecution of Jews.

This initial scene not only serves to illuminate this divide but also, unintentionally or perhaps intentionally, tells the story of the storytelling or, maybe, the framing of the film. It opens up a crack that sheds light on the conditions under the newly established Soviet-backed communist regime in Poland—conditions that shaped, informed, and limited what the filmmakers were able and allowed to tell, regardless of their own presumed agenda to provide hope and comfort to the few surviving Polish Jews and especially the even fewer children among them. The children protest and accuse the two returning Kleinkünstler of idealizing, idolizing, and sentimentalizing the wartime events. Still, the film itself does, in many ways, precisely the same thing, i.e., it idealizes, idolizes, and sentimentalizes.

Firstly, the film portrays both wartime and postwar Poland in a very positive, in hindsight almost parodic, light. This might again be due to the political conditions and what the filmmakers believed they had to do to be allowed to shoot and produce the movie—an assumption underscored by the fact that it was only screened once on Polish soil, for an audience consisting of pre-vetted and trusted members. In street scenes from a country that has been torn apart and moved many miles westwards by, and been the battleground of, a world war, and that Hitler’s Germany has occupied and that now is occupied by Stalin’s Soviet Union, that has seen millions of its inhabitants killed or forced to relocate and the core of its cities reduced to ashes and rubble and ruins, the people look well-dressed and well-fed, the trams are in good condition and running, the buildings look intact, and apparently there is, even though even England was subject to food rationing well into the fifties, such an abundance of food that in the final scene, where the Kleinkünstler bid farewell to the children and leave the orphanage, the former are gifted with baskets of fresh eggs and cans of fresh milk. On that note, the orphanage also appears to be very well-furnished, well-staffed, and in want of nothing – be it food, musical instruments, bedlinen, toys, sporting equipment, and so on. Another instance of this idealizing and idolizing of immediate postwar Poland is the Jewish (sic!) farmer that the two artists encounter on their way to the orphanage who obviously has been granted farmland and livestock and farming utensils by one of the newly founded collective farms and appears to be thriving and happily on his way to a meeting with the comrades in the collective.

Not only are the living conditions and supply situation of communist postwar Poland idealized, idolized, and sentimentalized, but so are the Poles themselves. Although individual acts of bravery and resistance and non-cooperation and hiding and protecting Jews while risking their own lives were performed by Polish men and women, collaboration with the Nazis and flagrant antisemitism were widespread (and in the latter case also existed before the war and persisted after the war and sparked postwar pogroms and expulsions of Jews at least into the late sixties or early seventies; also in the Soviet Union the once-supported Yiddish culture and its cultural and linguistic institutions and infrastructures were torn down after the end of the war and the establishment of Israel), all antisemitism is attributed to the Germans (in the form of an almost parodically cruel SS officer who contrasts starkly with the jovial Polish peasants he encounters; thus creating yet another divide between the former evil occupiers and the new kind(er) anti-fascist ones that are backing the current Polish government, a narrative that is echoed in almost all Eastern Bloc countries during the immediate postwar period) and all Poles that appear in the film are depicted as being kind, friendly, child-loving and well-meaning, their only apparent fault being that they sometimes become a little paralyzed and lost and powerless (this too is a recurring theme in Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries; the domestic postwar regimes may be heavy-handed, but that is just a temporary measure to protect their noble but vulnerable inhabitants from proto-fascist Western capitalism, compare the “antifaschistischer Schutzwall”), regarding how to implement their good intentions to help the persecuted Jews; the overarching narrative of course being that they too were victims of, not perpetrators of, the Nazi atrocities.

All the above is in stark contrast to some films produced before the 1947 elections, for example, the Czech-Polish co-production that dealt frankly with both Polish antisemitism and the Nazi extermination of Jews and even expressed sympathy for the non-communist Home Army (Hoberman, The Brigade of Light, p. 334).

Secondly, the portrayed surviving Jewish children – and in a broader sense, all surviving Jewish children – are idealized and idolized throughout the film through being depicted as partisans and resistance fighters as well as the hope and future of (at least) Polish Jewry. This theme becomes obvious already at the beginning of the film when the children from the orphanage are depicted as the “light that awaits at the end of the tunnel” that the tram travels through. This theme is also mirrored in the way the surviving children’s semi-authentic stories are reframed and retold in unrehearsed adult lines to fit inside the overall narrative about them as brave and active partisans, not passive victims, something that can be read as a way to equip the children who survived with an “ersatz-agency” to make up for not only Jewish but above all Polish indifference and passivity when faced with the Nazi occupation and the ensuing Holocaust. A passivity or inability to resist is hinted at in the performance of the sketch about the fire in the shtetl where the barrels with water turn out to be empty. The firefighter, supposed to extinguish the fire, returns home with the words, ‘Two fires in one night, that is too much to ask of a man; let’s go home!’ That point is further driven home when the headmistress of the orphanage in one scene says, in effect, that the children often held up better than the adults, made deals, smuggled, supported entire families, smuggled weapons, etcetera. This sentiment is also mirrored in the embroidered and self-heroizing stories, especially the boys’, about how they managed not only to survive but also to resist the Nazis and rescue their fellow Jews from them.

In this respect, the film is complex and self-contradictory. On the one hand, it is based on the collected memories of the authentic survivors, recorded in the almost extinguished Yiddish language, aimed at resuscitating and rebirthing the Jewish culture and traditions and instilling hope in both the surviving Polish-Jewish children and all other surviving Jews, by insisting that, despite the horrors of the war and the Holocaust and the grim past, there is still hope for Jewry. On the other hand, they are in one way victimized again as victims of communist propaganda and through being deprived first of everything during the war and then again of their authentic stories and experiences that are reframed and reformulated to fit in the overall narrative and in one way reduced by both the actors in the film and the makers of the film to “authentic material” for others to build on.

That said, the central theme and the overall message of the film are that the surviving Jewish children embody the promise of a resurrection of Polish Jewry and, in the words of historian Joanna Beata Michalis, were perceived by the ‘Jewish political and cultural elites of the entire ideological spectrum’ ‘as the “physical and spiritual body,” thanks to which the Jewish community might be “reborn” after the devastating destruction’ (Gaby, Unzere Kinder, p. 222). And consequently, the film ends on an upbeat note with the children playing and reenacting last night’s performance by the visiting artists; an ending that also hints at “playing” as a way to cope with and overcome trauma.

Some other final reflections are that the film says something, sometimes rather profound, about trauma and how to deal with it and work through it; something that is illuminated and exemplified by, among many others, the following scenes and instances, for example, when one of the orphan boys can still hear his mother’s cry for him “ringing in his ears, day and night” (thereby the film also touches on the subject of survivors’ guilt and how to cope with the fact that one survived while most of one’s near and dear perished (and more often than not also with what one did or did not do in order to survive)). The headmistress of the orphanage also touches on how to handle past traumas when she says, “Silence will not bring us joy either,” an observation that both contradicts and presages the silence lasting three generations that in many cases placed itself as a veil over the survivors’ experiences of the war and the Holocaust.

But here too, the film is complex and self-contradictory: while it touches on trauma and its consequences, as well as on different, more or less valid strategies to cope with it and allows the headmistress and some other staff members to lament and miss and mourn their losses and their murdered children, it also, and partly through the choice of upbeat musical tunes, depicts the surviving orphaned children as, despite the tormenting memories, well-adjusted and happily playing outside. One can, of course, read this as a way to say that “All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false,” meaning the children take their (and in addition to that, all Jews’) revenge through resisting succumbing to despair and through insisting on continuing to live and play and create and (hopefully, one day) procreate; thus turning the tide and enacting the future of Jewish life they are depicted as embodying.

A final note is that the film mirrors the gender norms and expectations of the time when portraying the three children – two boys and one girl – in a way that frames the boys as active participants and, for that matter, partisans with clear agency who through inventive and ingenious actions and clever thinking as they go, manage to rescue and save not only themselves but also some of their comrades as well as bravely aim and fire back at the Nazis. In contrast, as she hugs a teddy bear for comfort, the lone girl recalls being rescued and saved by others or, instead, almost by chance.

Öyvind Vågen

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