In 1948, Polish socialist film-maker Wanda Jakubowska released this gripping and pioneering film about the Auschwitz death camp in which she herself had recently been imprisoned, using actors and nonprofessionals and partly shooting in what remained of the camp itself. Jakubowska’s film influenced every subsequent director of work on the subject, including Resnais, Pontecorvo and Spielberg, and arguably invented the visual and dramatic language with which cinema attempted to make the Holocaust thinkable: the striped uniforms, the blocks, the bunk-beds, the brutal roll-call musters with emaciated prisoners swaying and passing out, the informants, the complicit kapos, the bizarre prisoners’ orchestra...
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