List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Postwar Poland: Geopolitics and Cinema
Chapter 2. Wanda Jakubowska's Return to Auschwitz: The Last Stage (1948)
Chapter 3. Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Border Street (1949)
Chapter 4. Images of the Holocaust during the Polish School Period (1955-1965)
Chapter 5. Years of Organized Forgetting (1965-1980)
Chapter 6. Return of the Repressed: "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto" (1981- )
Chapter 7. Andrzej Wajda Responds:Korczak (1990) and Holy Week (1996)
Chapter 8. Documentary Archaeology of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish Past

Afterword

Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Marek Haltof is Professor at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. His recent books include the Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema (2007), Australian Cinema: The Screen Construction of Australia (in Polish, 2005), The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance (2004), and Polish National Cinema (2002).

During World War II Poland lost more than six million people, including about three million Polish Jews who perished in the ghettos and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territories. This book is the first to address the representation of the Holocaust in Polish film and does so through a detailed treatment of several films, which the author frames in relation to the political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the times in which they were created. Following the chronological development of Polish Holocaust films, the book begins with two early classics: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (1948) and Aleksander Ford's Border Street (1949), and next explores the Polish School period, represented by Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) and Andrzej Munk's The Passenger (1963). Between 1965 and 1980 there was an "organized silence" regarding sensitive Polish-Jewish relations resulting in only a few relevant films until the return of democracy in 1989 when an increasing number were made, among them Krzysztof Kie¿lowski's Decalogue 8 (1988), Andrzej Wajda's Korczak (1990), Jan Jakub Kolski's Keep Away from the Window (2000), and Roman Poläski's The Pianist (2002). An important contribution to film studies, this book has wider relevance in addressing the issue of Poland's national memory.