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."
