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Using
radically refashioned archival footage of the Warsaw ghetto, this interview with Jon Avnet
the director of Uprising talks about Marek Edelman who is an evocative memoir of his role
in the rebellion that held back the Nazis for almost a month in 1943. The film begins with
the growing list of prohibitions and regulations leading to the virtual imprisonment of
about half-a-million Polish Jews in an old slum district of Warsaw with inadequate space
and plumbing. An overhead tracking shot shows the number of people assembled in the first
months of the relocation. The daily struggle against hunger and disease, especially among
the dispossessed arrivals seen in their pitful rags, is aggravated by the German demands
for "deportations to the east" that many begin to suspect are camouflaged mass
murders. By the close of 1942, people living in the ghetto realize they are doomed, and
the rudiments of resistance are planned by a handful of the young, including Edelman.
Following some sporadic, spontaneous fighting at the ghetto railhead, the Umschlagplatz,
in January, led by Moredecai Anielewicz, the scene is set for the more famous and
prolonged battle that will begin on 19 April 1943. In the intervening time, many of the
ghetto residents construct hidden shelters or bunkers in the basements and cellars of the
buildings, often with tunnels leading to other buildings. The handful of fighters who have
weapons take to these shelters, giving the uprising the advantage of defensive positions. Summary written by Leonard Rubenstein |
