WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY

Poland, 2018, 95 minutes, Colour.

Jowita Budnik.

Piotr Glowacki

Piotr Jankowski

Wojciech Zielinski

Karolina Gruszka

Bartlomiej Kotschedoff

Gera Sandler


Directed by Roberta Grossman.

This is a docudrama focusing on the Warsaw ghetto. It dramatises the story of the rounding up of the Jews, their being enclosed behind the wall of the Warsaw ghetto, the hardships of life, the organisers of resistance, the organisers for management and support of those in the ghetto. These scenes are dramatised and are moving.

However, there is a particular focus on the diaries and documents which were written by a number of the organisers but were hidden for safe keeping and some of them lost. The film highlights the recovery of the documents, the studies made of them, transcriptions, the impact. What is revealed is a great amount of detail of life in the war.

The film is also a tribute to the writers, the leaders during the years of the ghetto, the dangers, arrests, imprisonment, interrogations, executions.

Not all the documents were found but those that were our sufficiently substantial to give a powerful picture of the ghetto experience.

There have been many fiction films and stories based on actual events, including Polanski’s The Pianist. This film provides a moving background for these stories.