THE ANGELS OF WARSAW
An interesting omission. Of all the horrendous things that happened in Warsaw during World War II, the quarantine and annihilation of the city’s approximately 500,000 Jews was supremely horrendous. First they were walled in. Then they were starved. Then they were “evacuated” to extermination camps in groups of at least 6,000 souls a day. When they organized a resistance, the Polish partisans refused to help them. They chose to fight anyway, and held out until the Nazis demolished the ghetto itself with air attacks and artillery.
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Angels, after all, is a work of hagiography. Inspired by the heroism of Father Jerzy Popieluszko–assassinated in 1984 for his work and words on behalf of Solidarity–it offers us Chamberlain’s loving vision of an activist priest (indeed named Jerzy), who endures his dark night of the soul on a train taking him from Paris to certain death in Jaruzelski’s Warsaw. Chamberlain’s Jerzy has his moments of panic and doubt. He makes wry comments about the Polish national character, considers taking a powder at the West Berlin station, and even makes a play for Clare. But these failings are to be understood as his Eli, Elis–the outcries of a man undergoing his reluctant yet inevitable rebirth as a national hero. As an embodiment of the martyred national spirit.
None of these shortcomings is as destructive, however, as the well-meaning lie at the heart of The Angels of Warsaw. The romantic lie, whose essential ugliness is demonstrated in the fact that it requires that the Jews, once again, be turned to Luft.
