IDA or La jeune fille et la mort
This text has been written as an answer to various posts about the film IDA on a Facebook discussion group: Polish-Jewish matters and the Holocaust.
The two main characters are two Polish women. They are Jewish survivors who live in the 60’s, one as a retired, drunk and depressed ex prosecutor, with an unsettled life, the other as a novice who grew up in a convent. They have been deprived of (in random order) their parents, their children, their identity, the truth about their history, their Jewishness, and the possibility of building a life in the reality of a world. For what reason should a Pole born in the 60’s be unhappy under the communist regime? Most of Poles who have known this place and time would swear they have been happy children or teenagers.
The story of the film is about the first character unveiling the truth about her own history to the second one, the young Anna/Ida. Unfortunately the case of Jews trying to escape the killings and deportation slaughtered by Polish countrymen was very common. I am right now translating into French the diary of the Yiddish novelist Leyb Rochman: Un in dayn blut zolstu lebn. His description concerns the Minsk-Masowiecki region, not very far from Warsaw. But the ethnic cleansing and hunting and looting of the persecuted Jews by local population happened in almost every town and village of Poland during all the time of the war, with high points when the Nazis organized the hunting down and deportation of the Jews. The most painful cases concern people who have been hiding Jews (one hour, one day, one week, or more) and then murdered them. There should be a study per se about these aspects. Those of us who have read a lot of witness narratives know what I am referring to.
It is highly interesting that Pawel Pawlikowski (who is British but decided to return to his native Poland) faces all these questions in his film, including the participation of the Jewish survivors to the Polish communist regime. Is it somehow an answer to the identity problem of these young Poles discovering today their Jewish origins? Not speaking of its formal beauty, the grandeur of the film comes from the genius of the artist who has sketched the psychology of the two female characters with such a sensitive personal stroke that they cannot be forgotten. To approach the question of Polish-Jewish relationships in the context of WWII somehow cruelly evoked in the film, I am relying on the numerous testimonies that I have read in Yiddish or heard and not on historical reconstructions. The phenomenon described in the paroxysmal scene of the countryman's confession was certainly not marginal. It was massive; the people who fled Nazi terror were confronted to an ocean of hostility. The survivors have of course met charitable Christians but they were themselves obviously in such a dreadful danger from their neighbors (and not only from the Nazis occupation authority) that it has sometime led to the murder of their protected Jews as in the story of Ida's parents, in the film. Pawel Pawlikowski is facing this fact as a Pole, and as a child of the 60's. Sorry that I am not translating Leyb Rochman's book into English but in French. His war testimony corresponds almost exactly to the story told in the film. The hunting, looting and killing were massive. If it was from a minority or a majority of Polish countrymen, I don't know. But it has been terribly efficient and cruel. In my parents' hometown Telsiai, the home of the renown Yeshivah of Telz, in Lithuania, the Lithuanians were instrumental in the mass killings (no Einzatzgruppen in this zone), and witnesses and historians have described looting the goods of the Jews as a powerful incentive. My position is not ideological about Poles or Lithuanians. I am just a child of survivors, and we all know to appreciate a righteous mentsh and what righteous people went through to save a handful of lives at the risk of their lives and of the lives of their family.
