Remembrance (Polish: Zagubiony CzasGerman: Die verlorene ZeitThe Lost Time) is a 2011 German drama film directed by Anna Justice. A German-Jewish young woman and Polish young man fall in love and escape a Nazi concentration camp. As the film prologue notes, it is based on the true story of Jerzy Bielecki and Cyla Cybulska.[1][2]
The film's story intercuts between a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, in 1944 and New York City in 1976.
In 1944, Tomasz Limanowski, a captured member of the Polish resistance, manages to aid the resistance from inside a concentration camp, where his slave labor includes supervising distribution of loaves of bread. His resistance task in the camp has been to capture photos of the horrifying war crimes taking place and smuggle out the negatives that will reveal the crimes to the outside world.
This is unknown to Hannah Silberstein, a young German Jew in the work camp with whom Tomasz is in love and who has recently discovered she is pregnant. Every night, Tomasz buys off his officemate with a bottle of vodka so that he and Hannah can be alone together in the office in which Tomasz works with the SS, and they share bread that Tomasz has stolen for them.
In 1976, interwoven scenes open the story on the day that Hannah Levine, living in Brooklyn, New York with a successful husband and their grown daughter, discovers that Tomasz, who for 30 years she had believed was dead, is alive. While preparing for a celebratory dinner party for her husband and running an errand at a local dry cleaners, Hannah sees Tomasz in an interview on TV and instantly recognizes him as he shares his story about their love with the interviewer. In a daze, Hannah rushes home, experiencing reactivated trauma that she had shelved, unable to keep her mind on the evening's party and raising the concerns of her family and guests at her distractedness. She desperately calls the Red Cross that day, for the first time since 1946, when her initial search for Tomasz had led to a dead end.
Cutting back to 1944, we see Tomasz implementing a plan for their salvation with the help of fellow inmates, gaining access to an SS uniform and paperwork. On the day of the escape, terrified that it is happening too quickly to be fully prepared, Tomasz dresses up as an SS officer and demands that Hannah follow him, all the while terrified that he will be exposed as a Polish prisoner. Tomasz walks her to the exit of the camp where another SS officer comments that he'd like to rape her; Tomasz barely holds his cover and coldly insists that he have Hannah first. The guard, not picking up on Tomasz's limited German, acquiesces, and Tomasz and Hannah successfully march down the road until out of sight and run off into the woods.
They run for weeks, ending up in Tomasz's hometown, at his mother's house. Tomasz's mother, Stefania, does not approve of Hannah, as the latter is both German and a Jew, and furiously insists that Hannah will cause trouble for their family. Hannah, weak and distressed by the outburst, miscarries the same night that a car is ready to take Tomasz to Warsaw, where he must deliver the photos to his brother, who is in the homeland army. With no other option, Tomasz leaves Hannah in his mother's care and tells his neighbor and family friend, Janusz, to take Hannah to the home of Tomasz's sister-in-law, Magdalena, where Hannah can hide more safely. Tomasz assures Hannah he will only be gone for a few days.
Tomasz winds up being gone for a long while. During her recovery at Stefania's, Hannah comes to experience the woman's full animosity when Stefania attempts to have a German officer discover Hannah, but Hannah suspects her motives and hides. Disgusted at this betrayal, Hannah leaves immediately afterward, taking a photo of Tomasz that his mother had kept framed in a place of honor. Hannah goes to Magdalena's home to wait for Tomasz but is still forced to hide from the world.
When Czeslav, Tomasz's brother, returns home from Warsaw, hopes for Tomasz's return are high. However, after a month of the three living together, Czeslav comes to believe that Tomasz must be dead, a belief that Hannah refuses to accept.
Things are tense but harmonious until Stefania shows up at their home, claiming that the Russians took over her home. She soon turns against Magdalena, accusing her of having brought misfortune to the family and criticizing her for letting Hannah live in the house.
Shortly afterward, the Russians show up at their home and take Czeslav and Magdalena to a Soviet work camp; Stefania and Hannah are left behind. Hannah cannot stay with Tomasz's mother, knowing she cannot trust her, and believes it will be for the best if she returns home to Berlin. She trudges off in winter snow and nearly dies but for a passing Red Cross van that happens upon her.
Back to 1976, Hannah has success - the Red Cross has tracked Tomasz down in Poland. She works up the courage to call him; both are in complete shock that the other has survived. Tomasz initially thinks it is a hoax, but Hannah persists. They speak briefly, at first speaking trepidatiously in German, until they both realize the conversation is much easier in English as both have had much exposure to the language in their subsequent decades. Hannah tells him for the first time that she had been pregnant, a revelation too much for her to bear herself, and she hangs up, promising to call again. A brief flashback reveals that long after Hannah returned to Berlin, Tomasz returned home to find only his mother, who told him that Czeslav and Magdalena had been sent to a work camp, and (disingenuously) that Hannah had died.
Back in 1976, after a wrenching outing of her secret search that anguishes her husband and daughter, Hannah's husband encourages her to go see this man who saved her. Hannah travels to Poland to visit Tomasz, who has a grown daughter of his own and is separated from his wife. The movie ends with Hannah and Tomasz seeing each other after Hannah has just gotten off the bus and Tomasz has come by car to pick her up.
The filmmakers call Remembrance "a story about the effects of chance and the notion of the path not taken and the life not lived."[3]
Pamela Katz, who wrote the screenplay, has extensively researched Germany's pre-war and wartime history but admitted to feeling some trepidation about the prospect of writing a film about Auschwitz, especially one that entertained the possibility of love and freedom. However, her research unearthed four instances of couples who escaped the camp in 1944, the year in which Remembrance is set, and she incorporated into the script some of the facts she found.[3]
Erich Julius Eberhard von dem Bach-Zelewski was a high-ranking SS commander of Nazi Germany of Kashubian-Polish origin. During World War II, he was in charge of the Nazi security warfare against those designated by the regime as ideological enemies and any other persons deemed to present danger to the Nazi rule or Wehrmacht's rear security in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. It mostly involved atrocities against the civilian population. In 1944, he led the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. Despite his responsibility for numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, Bach-Zelewski did not stand trial in the Nuremberg trials, and instead appeared as a witness for the prosecution. He was later convicted for politically motivated murders committed before the war and died in prison in 1972.
Henryk Sławik was a Polish politician in the interwar period, social worker, activist, and diplomat, who during World War II helped save over 30,000 Polish refugees, including 5,000 Polish Jews in Budapest, Hungary, by giving them false Polish passports with Catholic designation. He was executed with some of his fellow Polish activists on order of Reichsführer SS in concentration camp Gusen on 23 August 1944.
Maria Mandl was an Austrian SS-Helferin and a war criminal known for her role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where she is believed to have been directly complicit in the deaths of over 500,000 prisoners. She was executed for war crimes.
Witold Pilecki, known by the codenames Roman Jezierski, Tomasz Serafiński, Druh and Witold, was a Polish World War II cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader.
Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, was a Polish poet and Home Army soldier, one of the most well known of the Generation of Columbuses, the young generation of Polish poets, of whom several perished in the Warsaw Uprising and during the German occupation of Poland.
The Warsaw concentration camp was a German concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II. It was formed on the base of the now-nonexistent Gęsiówka prison, in what is today the Warsaw neighbourhood of Muranów, on the order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The camp operated from July 1943 to August 1944.
The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz was formed by order of the SS in 1943, during the Holocaust, in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Active for 19 months—from April 1943 until October 1944—the orchestra consisted of mostly young female Jewish and Slavic prisoners, of varying nationalities, who would rehearse for up to ten hours a day to play music regarded as helpful in the daily running of the camp. They also held a concert every Sunday for the SS.
Thomas "Toivi" Blatt was a Holocaust survivor, writer of mémoires, and public speaker, who at the age of 16 escaped from the Sobibór extermination camp during the uprising staged by the Jewish prisoners in October 1943. The escape was attempted by about 300 inmates, many of whom were recaptured and killed by the German search squads. Following World War II Blatt lived in Communist Poland until the Polish October. In 1957, he emigrated to Israel, and in 1958 settled in the United States.
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz was a Polish Jewish artist.
Rut "Rutka" Laskier was a Jewish Polish diarist who is best known for her 1943 diary chronicling the three months of her life during the Holocaust in Poland. She was murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 at the age of fourteen. Her manuscript, authenticated by Yad Vashem, was published in the Polish language in early 2006. English and Hebrew translations were released the following year. It has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank.
Bialystok District was an administrative unit of Nazi Germany created during the World War II invasion of the Soviet Union. It was to the south-east of East Prussia, in present-day northeastern Poland as well as in smaller sections of adjacent present-day Belarus and Lithuania. It was sometimes also referred to by the designation South East Prussia along with the Regierungsbezirk Zichenau, although in contrast to the latter, it was not incorporated into, but merely attached to East Prussia.
The Huta Pieniacka massacre was a mass murder of the Polish inhabitants of the village Huta Pieniacka, located in modern-day Ukraine, which took place on February 28, 1944. Estimates of the number of victims range from 500 to 600-800 to 1,200.
Operation Heads was the code name for a series of assassinations of Nazi officials by the World War II Polish Resistance. Those targeted for assassination had been sentenced to death by Polish Underground Special Courts for crimes against Polish citizens during the World War II German occupation of Poland. The operation's code name, literally "Operation Little Heads", was a sardonic reference to the Totenkopf insignia on Nazi German SS uniforms and headgear.
Witold's Report, also known as Pilecki's Report, is a report about the Auschwitz concentration camp written in 1943 by Witold Pilecki, a Polish military officer and member of the Polish resistance. Pilecki volunteered in 1940 to be imprisoned in Auschwitz to organize a resistance movement and send out information about the camp. He escaped from Auschwitz in April 1943. His was the first comprehensive record of a Holocaust death camp to be obtained by the Allies.
Jerzy Bielecki was a Polish Catholic social worker, best known as one of the few inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp who managed to escape successfully. With the help of other resistance members in the camp, he escaped in 1944 together with his Jewish girlfriend, who was an inmate of Auschwitz II. In 1985 Bielecki received the Righteous Among the Nations award. He also co-founded and headed the postwar Christian Association of the Auschwitz Families.
The organization of underground resistance movements in Auschwitz concentration camp began in the second half of 1940, shortly after the camp became operational in May that year. In September 1940 Witold Pilecki, a Polish army captain, arrived in the camp. Using the name Tomasz Serafiński, Pilecki had allowed himself to be captured by Germans in a street round up (łapanka) with the goal of having himself sent to Auschwitz to gather information and organize resistance inside. Under Pilecki's direction the Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW, was formed.
Stefania "Stefa" Wilczyńska was a Polish educator who was murdered in the Holocaust.
On the night of 5 April 1944, Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp wearing an SS-TV uniform provided by SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek. Pestek opposed the Holocaust; he was a devout Catholic and was infatuated with Renée Neumann, a Jewish prisoner. Pestek accompanied Lederer out of the camp, and the two men traveled together to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to obtain false documents for Neumann and her mother.
Jadwiga Długoborska was a Polish teacher, social and charity worker, and member of the underground Polish independence movement during the World War II, persecuted and murdered for lending aid to Jews.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
