A GHETTO NAMED BALUTY (2008)

Interview with Pavel Štingl, director of the film

How does your film The Baluty Ghetto differ from classical eyewitness documentaries about the Holocaust?
It would never have occurred to me that one day, shortly after the year 2000, I would come across an inhabited camp with a population from today's world which has so many strange ties with those who suffered in their homes during the war. A ghetto without walls or guards, but where many things look much like they did during the war. I first went there on a private visit with several survivors. As we walked around the former ghetto, these old women suddenly started to discover their old houses, the courtyards where they stood in line for water, their flats in the dark hallways with well-worn tiled floors. It was fascinating, because they began to relate their stories when they saw how the local children were playing hide-and-seek among the courtyards. In places where, back then, people hid from German soldiers during selections for the transports, women today hang laundry in the attics. Today's flea market is held where people sold their last family jewels for potato peels. Suddenly I had the feeling that these ties offered the key for a documentary that I wanted to make ...

How did the ghetto in Lodz differ from other ghettos?
I suppose that each ghetto was a little different. Each had a different purpose, a different population structure. Jews, spread all over Europe, lived in a diverse range of ways. They had different cultural habits, completely different religious lives. Our look at the wartime events is through the memories of members of the Prague transports. These were all assimilated Czechoslovaks who were more used to celebrating Christmas than any Jewish holidays. In Lodz, they encountered a world that did not accept them. They appeared affluent, they did not know how to pray according to orthodox rules and they didn't understand a word of Yiddish. The nature of their encounter with the Lodz ghetto is best illuminated by the fact that one half of them did not survive the first winter.

In your film, the "Balutars" often mention the "Jews" who want to evict them for not paying rent. Are these really Jews, or has the word "Jew" become a kind of general insult?
During the entire period of more than a year that we were filming, I tried to find the roots of this deeply-seated and almost frenzied hatred. Not a single Jewish eyewitness of the events of World War II lives in Lodz today. Those who were not exterminated by the Nazis emigrated because of the politics of the Gomulka government in the 1960s. In Polish, someone is called a Jew if he rips off poor people – and this in all forms.
Put simply: If a landlord wants money from someone who just poured all his earnings into buying smuggled liquor, then they call him a "dirty Jew". If the fans of one football team want to slander those of another, then they spray-paint their name into a Star of David. You can find such images all over town. When I ask why the six-pointed star, I learn that there is no worse insult in Polish than "Jew".

Your film gives the impression that "Balutars" live on the edge of society, that they live in their enclosed world of Baluty. How do Lodz's other residents view this neighbourhood?
Baluty is a special concept in Lodz. It is synonymous for misery, alcoholism, and aggression, but it also represents the town's unique tradition, pride, a strange distinctiveness. Here, you will find the highest amount of smuggled alcohol and cigarettes for sale, street gangs rule with an iron fist covered in complex tattoo symbols. You have to bear in mind that a place that once housed 200,000 people is not exactly a small place. Even today, it is the largest district in Poland's second-largest city. You can't just say that it exists on the fringes. It also dictates style a little bit. It is home to one of the largest street markets, which is an unmistakable part of Polish life. People from nearby areas are afraid of Balutars, but also respect them a little.

Do you think that the people in Baluty understood what kind of film you were making?
We asked everyone ahead of time if they minded being filmed. There are strict laws for this in Poland. We also told everyone that we were making a film about the town, which had been the site of a ghetto during the war, and that we wanted to combine the stories of survivors with today's environment and images and memories of a bygone era. I cannot say if they understood this, but I am quite certain that we didn't do anything against anyone's will.

Your film makes use of unique photographs taken by Henryk Ross. Who was he?
A special chapter in the history of the Lodz ghetto is the ghetto authority. With their Teutonic ingeniousness, the Nazis placed the decision of life and death of the ghetto's inhabitants into the hands of fellow prisoners, who – deathly afraid of the ever-present misery and of being put on the transports – kept order in Hell. The head of the ghetto authority, Chaim Rumkovski, gradually placed himself into the role of all-powerful ruler. His "statesman-like" photographs hung in official offices ... He loved to be photographed, for instance when taking care of children in the orphanage, whom he soon after sent to the gas vans in Chelmno. Henryk Ross was one of the authority's photographers. He decided that, in addition to taking the photographs he was assigned to take, he would create his own testimony of the ghetto, which one day would offer show us its true face.

Do any Jews live in Lodz today?
There is a small religious community in Lodz, but the continuity with the pre-war community has been broken. They care for some historical monuments, primarily the unique Marysin cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. The history of the Jews in Lodz forms a remarkable arc resembling a biblical saga. The town, which arose over the course of a single generation from an insignificant settlement on a trading route, was built in part by raw Jewish capital. In the best Old Testament tradition, the extremely rich and abjectly poor lived side by side. The rich, of whom there were far fewer, managed to escape prior to the Nazi occupation. The poor remained. For the Germans, it was easy to fence in this world with barbed wire, and so the ghetto was established immediately after the occupation of Poland. Behind this barbed wire there perished the tradition of one of Lodz's communities.

What do you think makes Baluty so unique? How far into the past can we trace some kind of connections to the present?
I feel somewhere inside me that Baluty has been stigmatised by some kind of contact with Hell since its very beginnings. It used to be Lodz's poorest neighbourhood. Anyone who remembers Reymont's novel The Promised Land – masterfully filmed by Andzej Wajda – knows that the entire town was born out of cruelty and brutality.
Pre-war Baluty had a reputation as a thieves' quarter, already then inhabited by a strangely respected community. What took place here during the war is horror in its most concentrated form. Such a history has such a long half-life that the walls of Baluty's houses today remain a picture-book of the apocalypse. Today, it is home to saints living as tenants of Hell, or maybe the other way round ...

In some cinemas, the film will be accompanied by an exhibition of photographs by Karel Cudlín. His images capture the places where you filmed. What brought the two of you together?
Coincidence. Immediately after the first filming session in Lodz, Míra Janek and I were talking about the fact that our dialogue of images from the past and present was missing a photographer. We felt that – in this strange world of Baluty – someone familiar with Ross's legacy could find his own vision... By an incredible coincidence, just as we were discussing this – Easter 2007 – Karel Cudlín was walking the streets of the former ghetto with his Leica. He had been photographing, with the same sense of wonder, the strange scenery created by the ravages of time in this part of the world... The next time, we went together...