The accountant, the doctor, the king, who are you? In 1987, in Austria, in one of the antique shops were put up for sale - 400 color negatives of photos of stunning preservation, which were captured everyday life of the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. Experts first assumed that it was a fake, and subjected them to examination. The slides were real. It turned out that the negatives were put up for sale by the relatives of a certain Walter Genevin, a respected citizen of Austria. After his death, they sold some slides to an art dealer. He, appreciating them, appealed to Jewish organizations in order to sell more expensive goods.
This is how the collection developed.
And it is this man, Walter Genevin, that Dariusz Yablonsky makes the central figure of his film. He is the chief accountant of the Lodz ghetto, keeping strict records of everything from the production of shirts by Jews in the ghetto, uniforms for the German army, repairing watches, bras for the ladies of the Reich, to the procedure for the slow extermination of the Jews themselves. The voiceover, coupled with the archival documents under which Genevine's signature stands, tells us how many "transports" went and how many Jews were taken away. In his spare time from his main job, he passionately indulged in a hobby: he filmed the doomed - 300,000 people. And apparently, he did the pictures not in order to perpetuate them for History, but exclusively for the “soul”, simultaneously checking the light sensitivity of the new color film. So there is nothing tendentious in his cadres, and we will not see scenes of torture and violence a la Auschwitz. Except that he was making better scenes. By the way, it is this staging that catches the eye first. One gets the impression that if “comrade” Genevine worked in the zoo, there would be animals in the frame.
And here are the main children and old people. In colorful clothes, rags, sometimes a kind of uniform. Everyone has a yellow Star of David on their chest. It shows that the quality of the film is not always good: on this occasion, Mr. Genevine conducts intensive correspondence with the film manufacturer - the company "Agfa", where meticulously notes how the shades of color change from one batch of film to another. These color slides of the ghetto and shot in black and white format today's streets of Lodz Dariusz Jablonsky connects into the body of the film. The same streets with the same houses. Turns out they haven't gone anywhere. Only people who live in them do not remember, or perhaps do not want to know, their past. Above the picture lies a sound - a cacophony of live street life, consisting of coughing, barking dogs, crying children and shuffling soles on the cobblestone pavement.
In addition to Genevine, the author represents two more people - one is represented in the frame, the other - phantom arises from the stories. The first is a participant in the events of those years, Arnold Mostovich, who was first a doctor in the ghetto - provided medical care, and then - towards the end - performed a decorative function. By order of the German command, the procedure of “selection” of prisoners was decorated for medical examination. Patients were separated from healthy people in white coats and sent to the hospital.
- I knew that not to treatment, but to death, says Mostovitch. But the Germans had to have my signature under the list sent for liquidation!
Mostovitch himself would later become a prisoner of Auschwitz. He'll survive.
The second came from the ashes. The head of the Judenrat is the three times cursed “king” Chaim. Chaim Rumkovsky. We see him in the photo next to Heinrich Himmler, when he and his retinue visit the Lodz ghetto. Like all Judenrat leaders, Rumkovsky was forced to maneuver between trying to preserve the Jewish population of the ghetto and following Nazi orders. His administration was called dictatorial. He controlled all aspects of life in the ghetto, from food and work to marriage. Rumkovsky believed that the work of Jews in favor of the occupation authorities would avoid the destruction of the ghetto, and therefore 120 enterprises were established in the ghetto, where prisoners worked. When the Nazis ordered the surrender of Jewish children to a death camp in September 1942, he gave a speech to the residents of the ghetto with the refrain “Give me your children!”, trying to convince them that the lives of many other prisoners of the ghetto could be saved.
Deported with his family to Auschwitz, where he was killed.
Walter Genevein survived the war and returned to his native Austria, Salzburg. Where he continued to work in the field of accounting. He lived to a very old age. Never said a word about slides or about his administrative position in the ghetto.
At a trial held in 1947, Genevine denied that he was entering the ghetto: it was forbidden to non-Jews by order of the command.
P.S. The last negative on Genevine's album is the scariest. Through the glass clearly visible figures of naked emaciated people hugging themselves by the shoulders. Clearly visible thin whitish jets from the heads of the shower under the ceiling "soul"... The slide is monochrome, reddish. Carefully inserted by a pedantic photographer into a cardboard frame. Numbered. With the hand of Genevine the inscription "Jewish Bath" ...
10 out of 10