Given the extraordinary context of a Polish/Jewish film made in 1936, the images of children here are heart-stopping, overcoming at least some of the more tedious aspects of what is clearly propaganda. It actually starts as more of a simple fundraising film, and as one of the opening (modern) title cards explains, the film was sent out to solicit funding from Jewish communities around the world to support the Medem tuberculosis sanitorium near Warsaw. Naturally, it presents the sanitarium in a positive light, with smiling children getting medical care, having fun outdoors, and collectively looking out for one another. Eventually we begin to hear what is a recurring theme, the news of a coal-miner's strike in the world, with the implied abuse of the laborer under capitalism, and the workers and their families going hungry. Towards the end, the children are singing how they are the "young guards of the proletariat," and the political position is clear.
Director Aleksander Ford was a committed communist during this period and for decades afterwards, running Film Polski after the war. The film was made during the middle of a decade of atrocities committed by Stalin, the extent of which would not yet be fully known, but it still reeks of being wildly naïve. It's also bitterly ironic given Stalin's brutality in Poland before, during, and after the war. Still, it's the fact that in 1942, the Nazis murdered all of the children and staff members who were then at the sanitorium by shipping them off to Treblinka, and that of the six million people murdered during the Holocaust, half were Polish, that's absolutely devastating while watching this film.
Who cares that they're acting for a film with its own agenda, the children in this film are absolutely adorable. One sings a lullaby as Ford gives us close-ups of the others' rapt faces. Another pretends to be her old grandmother, full of aches and pains. A third sings of a radish dancing with a horseradish with great animation. Yet another plays Vivaldi's Concerto on the violin, and on and on. It's obviously not a documentary about life in the sanitarium, but just having images survive of these children bears at least some witness to their lives, to brief moments of happiness that are absolutely haunting.
Director Aleksander Ford was a committed communist during this period and for decades afterwards, running Film Polski after the war. The film was made during the middle of a decade of atrocities committed by Stalin, the extent of which would not yet be fully known, but it still reeks of being wildly naïve. It's also bitterly ironic given Stalin's brutality in Poland before, during, and after the war. Still, it's the fact that in 1942, the Nazis murdered all of the children and staff members who were then at the sanitorium by shipping them off to Treblinka, and that of the six million people murdered during the Holocaust, half were Polish, that's absolutely devastating while watching this film.
Who cares that they're acting for a film with its own agenda, the children in this film are absolutely adorable. One sings a lullaby as Ford gives us close-ups of the others' rapt faces. Another pretends to be her old grandmother, full of aches and pains. A third sings of a radish dancing with a horseradish with great animation. Yet another plays Vivaldi's Concerto on the violin, and on and on. It's obviously not a documentary about life in the sanitarium, but just having images survive of these children bears at least some witness to their lives, to brief moments of happiness that are absolutely haunting.
