The audacity and the brilliance of Munk’s methods are signalled in an explanatory voice-over: the story that Liza tells Walter is only one version of the story, and it’s a gappy and intentionally vague one, which breaks off, and, after some action aboard the ship-which Munk never lived to film-Liza then summons her own memories of Auschwitz, ones that she doesn’t dare relate to Walter or anyone else. When Marta gets sick, Liza saves her life with medicine from the S.S.-yet that assistance comes with a perverse twist that the wardeness signals in her account to Walter: “I didn’t expect gratitude. Liza treats Marta benevolently-when she learns that Marta’s fiancé, Tadeusz (Marek Walczewski), an artist, is also an inmate, she calls him to the warehouse on an ostensible mission so that the couple can meet. Ordered to select a clerk from among the camp’s inmates, Liza chooses Marta (Anna Ciepielewska), a Polish political prisoner, who, she says, aroused her compassion. Along with piles of shoes and hats, baby carriages and toiletries, the gathered loot included jewelry, furs, silverware, glassware, and other luxurious furnishings. In the summer of 1943, Liza was conscripted to work as a wardeness in Auschwitz, where she was given the relatively easy job of supervising the warehouses next to the camp where the possessions of arriving prisoners were stored for use by the Third Reich. As Liza launches into the tale that she tells Walter, it’s dramatized onscreen, with her voice-over narration endowing it with her own perspective. As the ship docks at a British port, Liza surveys the shore and, on the gangway, notices another woman whom she thinks she recognizes and whose presence sparks Liza’s need to confess to her husband that, during the war, she hadn’t been a concentration-camp prisoner, as she’d claimed, but, rather, a guard-albeit, she says, a benevolent one, who saved the life of the woman she glimpsed. Liza (Aleksandra Śląska) is a German woman who has been living as an émigré for many years after the end of the Second World War and hasn’t returned to Europe since she’s travelling by ship with her husband, Walter (Jan Kreczmar), a German man who had left the country before the war started. The film’s self-questioning of its dramatic form both conveys and respects the experience of its victims, and it does so in a bold, risky way: “Passenger” depicts Auschwitz from the point of view of a Nazi official. The result is a movie that dramatizes the very difficulty of filming the Holocaust. His associates (principally Witold Lesiewicz) completed the film, or, rather, finished it in a way that reflects its fragmentary state while calling attention to Munk’s plans and ideas, and emphasizing the effort to realize them. Munk (who was born in 1920 or 1921) didn’t live to complete the film he died in a car crash in 1961, with much of the movie already in the can. The crucial film in the retrospective of the Polish director Andrzej Munk that opens online today at Film at Lincoln Center is “Passenger,” one of the very few fiction films about Nazi death camps that neither vulgarizes the subject nor presumes easy dramatic access to it.
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