La dernière étape

The Last Stage (Ostatni Etap) is about the women who were interned at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. Although men were also imprisoned there, this story is mostly about the women. People from all over Europe (including France, Hungry, Poland and Russia) were caged and killed at this camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Some were imprisoned for political reasons and others for simply being a Pole or a Jew. The story is based on the actual experiences of the director (Wanda Jakubowska) and was shot on location just three years after the war, which gives it a feeling of practically being a recreation of the atrocity.

Although we get to know a group of women, one that stands out is Martha Weiss. She is a young Jewish woman that is spared the same fate as her family because she ends up working for the Germans as an interpreter. Those who have a skill useful to the Nazis are spared leaving the camp though the smoke of the chimney. Martha and her friends make the best of their grim situation and are courageous in their acts of defiance.

With their survival threatened, not all of the prisoners are quite so noble. Some of the prisoners work as assistants for the guards to help them do their dirty work. In return, they get a few extra comforts and their own deaths are delayed.

The Last Stage captures the feeling of what it was like at Auschwitz, which is at times surreal with an orchestra of prisoners playing classical music out in the open air while the other prisoners are abused and degraded by their captors.

Ostatni Etap is a classic Polish movie; in Poland, it is in the top 20 of all time box office hits of Polish cinema. The Last Stage depicts a disturbing part of history, but it is better to know what really happened during World War II than it is to pretend it never did, which is why I would recommend everyone to watch this movie.

I guess that there were not that many movies about Auschwitz, so this one is an absolute must see, though this is a rather ankward feature, with a score not at all in the mood of this atmosphere and many other clumsy details that interfere a bit with the purpose of the film. But it is really important to see it. I prefered KAPO however, around the same topic.

In common with Donskoi's 'The Rainbow' and Rossellini's 'Rome, open City', the effectiveness of Wanda Jakubowska's film lies in its sheer immediacy. Its power to shock has been somewhat diluted by later and more graphic depictions of the Holocaust but it nonetheless remains the blueprint.

Some critics have unfairly referred to it as a 'Hollywoodised' version of life in Auschwitz but the director has understandably chosen to sanitise events so as to make her film more palatable to post-war audiences.

Although Jakubowska and her fellow writer Gerda Schneider, a former 'blocksenior', have based the material on the personal stories of prisoners, many of whom appear in the film, the main female protagonists are all professional actresses. Extremely popular and photogenic Barbara Drapinska as the interpreter, Tatyana Guretskaya as the doctor and the nurse of Antonia Górecka are symbols of resistance whilst the banality of evil is portrayed by Aleksandra Slaska as the overseer, which made her inspired casting in Munk's 'Passenger' fifteen years later.

Filmed in the remains of Auschwitz, individual scenes haunt and no more heartrending use has been made in film of La Marseillaise. It is both a grim reminder of the depths of cruelty to which humans can sink and a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. On a purely technical level, the camerawork, editing and score are exemplary.

In contrast to the film's neo-realistic treatment, the overtly propogandist climax has naturally dated the film immeasurably but must be viewed in its historical context.

The film has rightly been called 'a courageous act of remembrance' but as an unreformed Communist, Jakubowska's subsequently blinkered adherence to a brutally oppressive and discredited ideology does her little credit.

When Polish filmmaker Wanda Jakubowska was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau German concentration camp, all she could think of during her darkest days was to make a movie of her experiences-that is if she survived. She miraculously did. In the first film to personally dramatize the life and death inside a Nazi extermination camp during World War Two was March 1948's "The Last Stage." This movie highly influenced directors Steven Spielberg, Alain Resnais and others who made films centered on the Holocaust and what millions of victims went through on their way to labor camps and the gas chambers.

"The decision to make a film about Auschwitz originated as soon as I crossed the camp's gate," reflected Jakubowska, who had been involved in the Polish film industry several years before her arrest by the German Gestapo in 1942. The Polish filmmaker years earlier had been nominated for an Oscar in 1933 for her short documentary 'The Sea,' making her the first female director to be honored by the Academy Awards. When Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939, she joined an underground resistance group before her arrest. Jakubowska was first sent to Auschwitz, then transferred to the all-women Ravensbruck concentration camp. It was there that most of the script for "The Last Stage" was based, although some of the exteriors of the film were shot in Auschwitz two years after its liberation.

Jakubowska's film is largely episodic, involving a number of dramatic threads the director either personally witnessed or seen by her co-writer Gerda Schneider, also a political prisoner who had been assigned by the SS guards to oversee some of the laborers. "The Last Stage's" primary character is Marta Weiss (Barbara Drapinska), a Jewish Polish inmate who is picked by the camp officer to be his interpreter since she knows German. Marta was based on Malka Zimetbaum, who escaped Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, only to be captured and executed.

Since Poland was under Soviet Union rule after the war, Jakubowska's novella, which became the basis of "The Last Stage's" script, went up the chain to Joseph Stalin, who personally green lighted the production. With the Soviets' cooperation, along with a dash of Communist ideologically, Jakubowska was given the use of Red Army soldiers to play both German guards and the local people of Oswiecim, Poland (Auschwitz). She was able to convince a number of female volunteers who were actually inmates at the concentration camp to play themselves. One assistant director filming on the grounds of the real-life Auschwitz camp commented these woman "were wiser than all assistant directors; they knew everything from experience. They saw it. Those former inmates were returning to their places." Once released, "The Last Stage," so named because Auschwitz was the last train station on the rail line transporting the prisoners to the camp, won several honors, including the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. In Poland Jakubowska's film was immensely popular. Film reviewer Saskia Baron wrote, "one of the key reasons to watch 'The Last Stage' is to see how many of the scenes Jakubowska created for the camera went on to become iconic images and source material for so many later films about the Holocaust."

Wanda Jakubowska's brutal look on Auschwitz was very disturbing and Horrific; this movie is one of the Early depictions of the Brutality of the Holocaust; in 1948, this movie was very shocking and realistic, and Many people didn't watch it, but it was great movie watched if you are in film school or not. I know that this movie is one of my favorite films of all time. To this day, this film is one of the finest films about the Holocaust. The Event This movie is still quoted extensively by succeeding directors, including Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List One of Spielberg his famous and one of the greatest film of all time.