Intro: Stories never stop being created, even in the most unlikely of places. Drawing on oral history testimonies from Auschwitz prisoners, filmmaker Michal Bukojemski, creator of The Auschwitz Chronicles, uncovers a most unlikely love story.
Auschwitz. Merely the mention of the name immediately summons horror, sadness and anger in my being. I think of distant family connections I never met now three generations back who suffered and died there. I never thought past the images long cemented in my mind: images of tattooed prisoner numbers, daily dreaded roll calls taking hours and hours. The on-going humiliation and much worse inflicted by the SS guards. Images of sunken faces in striped garb, despair, starvation, fear and often the case ending in death.
That is the story I have always carried with me, what I heard in large measure in history class, saw in movies. I never distinguished individuals from one another – even my own family. Yes - different names and from different places, but in my mind – faceless people – all the same. Life was death in the camps.
Filmmaker Michal Bukojemski cuts at this very notion with his gripping documentary effort, “From the Auschwitz Chronicles” comprised of oral testimonies from prisoners and SS guards. Bukojemski created a storyline broken into five chapters each of which can stand alone about various aspects of life at Auschwitz. Life,not just death. As Bukojemski notes in a 2007 article in the Jewish News of Northern California, there is “not one monolithic experience of the horror of Auschwitz.”
The chapter “Love” centers on the intense love story of Mally, a Belgian Jew fortunate to hold a job as a camp messenger and escort the infirm from the camp hospital back to the barracks and Edik, a non-Jew from Poland recalled by fellow male prisoner, W. Kietar (Prisoner # 290) as “unusually handsome, courageous, and a risk-taker.”
At the outset of the episode recollections of Mally are stitched together from the testimonies of several other female prisoners and narrated by a single female actor. The women recalled Mally’s unique positive disposition and how she used her role to perform kind acts. Prisoner H. Birenbaum (Prisoner # 48693) recalled how, “everyone idolized her, the beauty in her.” And Z. Stepien-Bator (Prisoner #37255) remembered, “I am not at all surprised that Edik fell in love with her.”
A. Palarczyk (Prisoner # 17524) recounted Mally’s “glowing radiant glow” in describing her feelings about Edik, “it’s love. I’m in love and I am loved.”
Even in this crematorium, recalled Kielar (# 290), “It seemed impossible. Some thought it was kind of in poor taste, but life is life. They wanted each other.”
So unfolds this most unlikely and ultimately tragic love story. How is this possible? How does this happen in a prison so heavily guarded?
Throughout the Love episode the testimonies across the prisoners interviewed were clear in their recollections of Mally and Edik.
After the viewer has an initial sense of Mally and Edik, as individuals, the prisoners’ testimonies continue. The lovers’ meet ups in the x-ray room in the hospital, Barrack 30, the least visible from the watch tower; Mally’s desire for a portrait sketched by Stepien-Bator (# 37255) to give to Edik; Edik including Mally in his long thought about escape plan with his co-conspirator Kielar (# 290).
The episode goes on to reveal what happened after the two lovers escaped. “One day passed, another day, they didn’t find them,” per H. Birenbaum’s (#48693) oral testimony, “so perhaps we thought the Germans could be outwitted. It was possible to get out of there.” “We didn’t hear anything for sometime until the news came that Edik and Mally had been arrested,” from the testimony of A. Roth-Jakubovic (#1287).
Fragment by fragment the testimonies are glued together to tell the full story of the tragic lovers. Eventually, W. Marossanyi (# 7524) recounts, they escaped June 24th, caught July 6th and the sentence was carried out on September 15th.
I confess: the images in my head of life to death at Auschwitz didn’t change at all. Those are seared in my mind. But these testimonies added a layer of humanity I didn’t appreciate fully before. The memories recounted by prisoners in this episode of Mally, Edik - their love, feelings and emotions as re-constructed are real and remain with us.
As noted by Marek Miller in his article, The Polyphonic Documentary Novel, the project began in part “as a collection of statements, a quantitative creation instead of a qualitative one” – the first step was to read the 3,000 first-person testimonies housed at Auschwitz and search for themes and stories.
Miller further describes how the range of possibilities for retelling a particular interpretation also always depends on three things: the contents of sentences that the author has at their disposal, the ability to combine “unfinished” statements so that they create a whole when joined by other,” and the commitment “in being treating each voice with the same rights as the other voices.”
Stories never stop being created. This is who we are as people. As Bukojemski explained in the Auschwitz workshop, oral history testimony is merely the raw materials; memories are not assembled, but the truth in the story is the path we seek, find in fragments and ultimately construct.
“Love” is ultimately a full narrative with tension, drama all derived from turning testimony to documentary. This particular intersection of history crafted into storytelling moves us in an emotional way. It deepens our understanding of individual experience set against a larger tapestry of the full social experience.
Oral historians can take note of the cohesiveness achieved by Bukojemski’s polyphonic composition method, including the transparency of the film itself—the process of interpreting, reconstructing, and arranging the materials is partly evident in the public work product. Exposing such self-reflexiveness only nuances the audience’s understanding and appreciation of the story.
Steve Fuchs is a part time student at OHMA and is also C.E.O. of True North, Inc., a digital advertising agency in NYC and San Francisco. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1979 and serves on the Board of Advisors to the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications.
This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.