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.

Jakubowska uses documentary techniques that are quite remarkable - location shots, use of actual participants speaking their own languages to build up the experience of women being sent to Auschwitz, the death camp. A great film for Poland, for the Holocaust, for women, for resistance against fascism - but it is not quite clear where the place of the Jews in this is. There is the slogan "You must not allow Auschwitz to be repeated" and the role of the Russians as liberators is emphasised with shots of their planes overhead. Amusing to compare with Wyler's 1942 "Mrs.Miniver" - but "The Last Stage" alas is unavailable.

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.

Director Wanda Jakubowska was, herself, interred in Auschwitz during the latter stages of WWII, and so is uniquely placed to tell us the story of "Marta" (a stirring effort from Barbara Drapinski). A Jewish woman who is sent for slaughter to this infamous camp, but whom - by a curious twist of fate - is selected to interpret for the Nazis. That may spare her, but she must watch her family and countless others live lives of violence, deprivation and humiliation before the potential relief of death was visited upon them. What we see here illustrates really succinctly the brutality that went on here; and sometimes that appeared all the worst because the criminal frau were just as complicit in these atrocities as the men. Indeed, some seemed to positively relish their newfound power! The use of a gramophone record to cover the sounds of the regular beatings that were administered to those less co-operative, or dissident, or whose face simply didn't fit in, was ingeniously odious. An ensemble cast of powerful character actors and the setting at the camp itself adds a ghastliness to the impact of this film that didn't really need to rely on a script to augment the experience of the viewer. Defeatist these ladies weren't - a stoicism and determination crept in and took hold, and that is epitomised by the brave and increasingly shrewd "Marta" as she - and her thousands of fellow inmates - constantly treads on egg shells to survive. You can almost smell the evil coming from this film, and as an example of the gruesome inhumanity mankind can have for it's own brethren, it is spine-tingling. It's not especially graphic nor detailed in it's menace - but the sum of the parts makes for a compelling film that perhaps the warmongers of 2024 could do with watching.