“GOD’S PLAYGROUND”: POLAND AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN WAJDA’S CINEMA GABRIELLA ELINA IMPOSTI Suddenly, in 1939, everything collapsed. My father was lost; he went to war and never came back. My mother could not stay at home, she had to go to work, we became workers. Our intelligentsia family found itself in completely different surroundings .… My father, Jakub Wajda, lived only to the age of 40. He was captain in the 72nd Infantry Regiment and died at Katyń. But until 1989 we were not allowed to make an inscription on the family tomb, saying where he was killed. This is how Andrzej Wajda, born in Poland in 1926 and thirteen-years old at the outbreak of the Second World War, remembers the shattering events of those years and their aftermath. Young Andrzej did not have “good papers”, so in order to survive, he had to work in his uncle’s locksmith’s shop in Krakow: Thanks to my father’s brothers, I was able to survive the occupation; I probably owe them my life, because my papers [documents] were very insufficient. I had to stay at home, I was scared even to go to the tram stop, because there was always some kind of control going on …. This work later helped me understand what physical labour really means, what it means to work every day, to go to work in the morning, and when later, in the 50’s, there was talk about the workers, the working class, I could say to myself ‘I have also been a worker’. It was not strange to me. Later he became part of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the Polish Resistance, albeit only with minor tasks. He witnessed those terrible years that left a profound scar on the consciousness of the Polish people, who at the end of the war found their country part of the 236 Gabriella Elina Imposti Soviet bloc and radically changed in its boundaries and in its social and ethnic composition: I could have been sent to Auschwitz; by a strange twist of fate it didn’t happen. I could have been arrested and sent to Germany as a slave labourer. I had a little luck, but this is a country where you actually have to find excuses for your luck. Because it is also true that all those who were braver, more determined, more desperate, more eager to take up arms, are mostly dead. And it must be said that these certainly were the best people.1 This sense of guilt and responsibility for those who did not survive, for the “submerged” – to use an expression of Primo Levi’s – was probably one of the reasons that conditioned the keen interest of the Polish filmmaker in history, especially the history of the Second World War, and the role the Poles, as individuals and as a nation, played in it and the Shoah. This was an interest, or rather an obsession, that Wajda shared with other filmmakers of the “Polish Film School”, which blossomed in the late 1950s. As the famed actor Zbigniew Cybulski put it in an interview: For Poles war is an obsession. What is more, the filmmakers who created the Polish Film School belonged to a generation who took part in the Second World War. Our obsession is a kind of psychological appendage that lasts right up to the present time.2 Of nearly forty films for the cinema and about twenty television programmes Wajda has produced during more than five decades of activity as a filmmaker, a third investigate history. The historical sweep goes as far back as the Middle Ages, to the time of Crusades, and right up to contemporary events, such as the rise of the Solidarity Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At twenty-eight Wajda started his career as a filmmaker with a film on the Second World War. There had been other films on this topic. In 1 Excerpts from a speech in the film The Debit and the Credit (for the text see http://www.wajda.pl). 2 See the interview with Zbigniew Cybulski in Małgorzata Furdal and Roberto Turigliatto, Dalla scuola polacca al nuovo cinema (1956-1970) (Milan: Ubulibri, 1988), 162 (my translation). .