72 Books & arts The EconomistJuly 27th 2019
2 show the mechanism for working people
into a state of ecstasy,” Mr Loznitsa says.
The scene reconstructs a real video posted
on YouTube, and is more effective for the
absence of a narratorial voice. He could
never film such an event directly, Mr Loz-
nitsa avers: not only would that “make you
an accomplice”, the presence of a camera
would “draw in the audience to partici-
pate”. Often he conveys a sense that he is
telling one story among many. Elsewhere
in “Donbass”, for example, a businessman
whom the militia are extorting is trans-
ferred to a holding room—where he finds a
legion of other detainees pleading for help
on their phones. The sequence, like many
in Mr Loznitsa’s films, seems at once hy-
perreal and mythic.
The interplay between audience and
spectacle, and the use of news footage to
validate lies, are at the heart of “The Trial”,
which he made just after “Donbass”. One is
a feature, the other is shaped entirely from
archive material, but in their preoccupa-
tions, the films are twins. “The Trial” re-
constructs a tribunal that took place in
Moscow in 1930. A group of Soviet engi-
neers and economists were accused of
forming the “Industrial Party”, which in
collusion with France had supposedly plot-
ted against the Bolshevik government.
In reality, like the Ukrainian “fascists”,
the Industrial Party never existed; the en-
tire case was fabricated. The trial was
held—or performed—not in a court but in
the House of the Unions, a grand hall used
for state ceremonies, illuminated for the
cameras and complete with a 1,000-strong
audience. “The Trial” intercuts passages
from the resulting propaganda film with
shots of crowds demanding the death of
the culprits. In this instance, says Mr Loz-
nitsa, “Stalin was the real director of the
show. I merely helped make it into a film.”
Strikingly, none of the accused—the
main actors in the drama—protested or
tried to clear their names; instead they
helpfully implicated themselves in fantas-
tical crimes. Some were rewarded for their
convincing performances. Leonid Ramzin,
a professor of engineering, was cast as a
leader of the imaginary conspiracy, but his
death sentence was commuted to ten years
in prison. He was amnestied in 1936 and lat-
er showered with awards. Meanwhile, the
prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko, was himself
arrested in 1937 during the Great Terror. He
falsely confessed, too—and was executed
soon afterwards. By then, the era of co-pro-
ductions with Stalin’s prisoners was over.
Russia and separatist Ukraine are not
the Soviet Union, but justice is still sub-
orned to theatre, and facts to interests. Mr
Iampolski argues that in this nihilistic cli-
mate, “inscription”—the act of committing
things to paper or the screen—becomes the
main form of legitimacy. In this way propa-
ganda, including Russia’s demonisation ofUkraine, makes falsehoods credible. Yet
even (or especially) now, scrupulous film-
makers can expose lies instead of spread-
ing them, as Mr Loznitsa shows.
At the end of “Donbass” the grumbling
extras prepare for another stunt. A soldier
enters the trailer and ruthlessly shoots
them all dead. A tv crew soon arrives to re-
port on this latest confected-but-real atroc-
ity. Mr Loznitsa’s camera dispassionately
surveys the scene from above. 7W
itold pileckiis one of the great—
perhaps the greatest—unsung heroes
of the second world war. He volunteered to
be infiltrated into Auschwitz and spent two
and a half years there, not only surviving
but organising an extensive resistance net-
work. Among other feats, he chronicled the
murders and tortures meted out to the in-
mates, and the transformation of a modest
internment and labour camp into the giant
centrepiece of Hitler’s extermination of the
Jews. His first-hand accounts were smug-
gled to the Polish government-in-exile in
London, from which they reached the Brit-
ish and American leadership.
It would be nice to think two things.
One is that the allies reacted speedily to the
news by doing everything they could to
halt the murder machine—bombing the
camp and the rail lines that supplied it,
arming the Polish underground army so
that it could co-ordinate with the resis-
tance inside Auschwitz over a mass break-
out, and highlighting the plight of the Jews
in occupied Europe as one of the greatest
humanitarian crimes of all time. Anotherconsoling assumption would be that after
the war Pilecki’s courage, determination
and ingenuity would be celebrated, not
only in his native Poland, but everywhere.
On both scores, think again. The news
about Auschwitz trickled out slowly. One
agent took over six months to make the
hazardous journey to Britain. The stories
were initially dismissed as fanciful, or, lat-
er, overshadowed by reports of other atroc-
ities, such as the destruction of the Warsaw
Ghetto. President Franklin Roosevelt wor-
ried that publicising Auschwitz would
stoke anti-Semitism—that Americans
would believe Nazi propaganda that the
war was being waged on behalf of the Jews.
Military commanders thought attacking
Auschwitz would be a distraction, and that
the bombs and planes were needed for the
only task that mattered, defeating Hitler (a
leading British sceptic of targeting the
camp was Charles Portal, chief of the air
staff, and this reviewer’s great-uncle).
Nor, alas, was Pilecki treated as a hero
by Poland’s post-war communist regime.
His resistance activities, under the direc-
tion of the émigré leadership in London,
led to his arrest and torture—which was so
bad, he told his family, that Auschwitz was
“just a game” in comparison. His work
fighting the Nazis counted for nothing in
this new tyranny. He was executed on May
25th 1948; his body has never been found.
Jack Fairweather’s meticulous and in-
sightful book is likely to be the definitive
version of this extraordinary life (even if,
slightly jarringly, he calls his subject by his
first name, Witold). The author, a British
former foreign correspondent now living
in America, has tracked down survivors,
unearthed archival documents and ob-
tained family papers. He has woven them
together with Pilecki’s own powerful ac-
counts, written after his escape from
Auschwitz in 1943, to draw a sympathetic
and imaginative picture of wartime Poland
under Nazi occupation. The book is all the
more powerful for the restraint with which
he describes Nazi atrocities and Western
shilly-shallying. And it is all the more wel-
come for its projection of an often-missed
view of the war, in which Poles take a lead-
ing and positive role, rather than being
mere bystanders, victims or accomplices.
The maps and pictures are illuminating.
This is not, as its publicity bumf
claimed, “the first account” of an “untold
story”. In fact, Pilecki’s deeds are already
the subject of films, much journalism and
many books, mostly in Polish but also in
English and Italian. For his part, though,
the author scrupulously cites these sources
in his admirably comprehensive notes. He
ends the book by reiterating Pilecki’s frus-
tration that he had failed to deliver his
message effectively. Then, as now, non-
Western stories and viewpoints are all too
often overlooked. 7Resisting the NazisMessage from hell
The Volunteer. By Jack Fairweather. Custom
House; 529 pages; $28.99. WH Allen; £20