The 5 of July will be released, to date on no more than three screens in France, a infinitely valuable, and in many ways necessary documentary, directed by two young and talented Polish filmmakers, Anna Kokoszka-Romer and Mateusz Kudla. Walk in Krakow follows with delicacy the footsteps of two friends in the footsteps of their childhood and early youth in Krakow during and just after the Second World War. Very old men today whom History – and their respective temperaments – have inextricably linked. Roman Polanski and Ryszard Horowitz met as children in the Krakow ghetto more than eighty years ago. Roman Polanski was then nine years old, Ryszard Horowitz was three.
Polanski’s family was deported, his mother perished in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. The child Roman escaped deportation, and spent the end of the war in a poor family of Polish peasants, the Buchalas, who took him in. In 2020, The Righteous Medal of Yad Vashem was awarded, posthumously, to the Buchala couple. Ryszard Horowitz meanwhile was snatched from Auschwitz by Oskar Schindler, he is to this day the last survivor of the list of Jews who owe their lives to the German industrialist. Both have become renowned artists: one a great filmmaker; the other a great photographer. Seeing and giving to be seen, bringing the world to life in and through the singularity of a gaze, this has animated them both throughout their lives. What more tenacious resistance to programmed disappearance?
Only here: obviously, in France, as soon as the name of Polanski arises, as definitively unpronounceable since the Cesar 2020 ceremony, it is imperative not to see. Not to hear. Michèle Halberstadt who decided, against (bad) winds and (stinky) tides, to distribute the film, invited on June 22 on the set of it’s up to you, explains this as clearly as possible. It is, moreover, all to the honor of the program to have invited it, in the poisoned climate, mixed hatred and spinelessness, which since the release of I accuse, surrounds everything directly or indirectly related to Roman Polanski. Roman Polansky? The absolute pariah. To clear. SO Walk in Krakow ! Move along, there’s nothing to see. Being a film which relates to the crossing of the Holocaust by two Jewish children, the obscenity is maximum.
Awards in Poland and Italy
On the side of cinema operators, Michèle Halberstadt came up against a general refusal to consider the film. “But not at all!”, protest some blandly: “the documentary is not good” – this asserted without the red rising to their forehead; besides, it seems, “the spectators do not want to hear about Polanski”. Oh yes ? In Poland and in Italy, the public went, numerous, to see the Polish documentary which rewarded several prices, with due respect to our pathetic arbiters of elegance. The spectators were able to exercise their judgment freely, they were allowed, something it seems unimaginable for our censors – sorry for the bad word – in France, to trust their own eyes, their own hearts. The film received audience awards in Poland and Italy. Poles and Italians are badly re-educated…
It is true that feminist collectives could come and tag the rooms, hold up signs. It happened. Very dangerous, that! So, we prefer to stay on the sidelines. Besides, the activists would be right, wouldn’t they? Save them that trouble.
On the side of the press, it is hardly more brilliant. In the cursed name of Polanski, all (or almost) to the shelters. Silence. Or else, following the instructions of the furious militias of Dare feminism, not a line without the warning which associates the word “rape” with the person of Polanski. Compulsory indication. The accusation being authentic, Polanski is a “rapist”. It is now an article of faith. Blasphemy intolerable to the all-powerful mullahs of “feminism” to question it.
This is where we are, in France.
A lesson in truth
This situation is all the more serious since, for several reasons, Walk in Krakow, essential work of transmission conceived by young authors, is a film that everyone should be able to see, and in particular the younger generations.
Firstly because it gives us access, through its two protagonists so intensely present, bodies conducting historical truth, to a still vivid memory of those dark times, whose embodied reality moves away and fades away every day. any further.
“The disappearance of the survivors inevitably implies a weakened memory, therefore a certain forgetfulness. I am only an indirect witness, and yet I remember the number tattooed on Primo Levi’s arm, or even this number inscribed on the arm of Primo Levi. “a stranger seated at the table of a café in the Place Royale in Brussels. The possibility of these encounters will disappear, the memory of the events to which these individuals bore witness in their bodies will be gradually diminished.” Let these words of the great historian Carlo Ginzburg resonate. At one point in the film, Roman asks his friend Ryszard to show him the number that was tattooed on the forearm of his then five-year-old child. He wants to see this, today, with his own eyes, in order to be able to truly imagine the reality of yesterday. We understand in this moment, in what the material truth counts, in a vital way. For Ryszard Horowitz, it matters in an even more disturbing way: because this indelible trace allows him to realize that what happened to him really happened. A lesson in truth, and in life, which goes far beyond what is being played out between the two men.
In the era of post-truth – the “narrative” as an all-powerful matrix of alternative facts, the dogma of “We believe you!” –, nothing more fundamental than to meditate on it.
Then, miles away from both denial and lamentation, Anna Kokoszka-Romer and Mateusz Kudla’s film shows, with a rare accuracy that owes as much to the filmmakers as to the filmed, how a memory lives. He also makes it clear, without sentences and with simplicity – cinematographically – how the worst does not necessarily manage to forge a “victim identity” – its most definitive triumph. For all this, which concerns any life, and applies to everyone, how can we admit that so many of us find ourselves, in fact, deprived of the possibility of seeing it?
Finally, Walk in Krakow clearly conveys, without demonstration of any kind, through the beautiful, the moving dialogue of friendship between the two former children destined for extermination, but only luck, and “the simple kindness” of a few human beings preserved from this disastrous fate, which is really Roman Polanski.
Wouldn’t it finally be time to accept to know it?
* Sabine Prokhoris is a philosopher and psychoanalyst. Latest book published: “The mirage #MeToo. Reflections from the French case” (Le Cherche midi)