Exclusive: The Roman Polanski Interview

Peter Flax

Roman Polanski / Photo by Luke Medford

In an exclusive, hour-long phone interview from Paris, the Oscar-winning director recalls the spiraling darkness of a childhood ravaged by the Holocaust, the loss of his mother at Auschwitz, his father’s pain and what liberation felt like.

Roman Polanski is singing an old German show tune in the middle of a horrific, detailed anecdote about the distilled darkness of concentration camps. He recalls a night after the war when he walked into a hotel room and found his father weeping as “O mein Papa” played on the radio. It brought back a nightmare of the day on which prisoners had been forced to stand in the camp’s public square, helpless, as Nazi guards shoved their children onto trucks for liquidation. As the 82-year-old filmmaker recounts, mothers and fathers were “swaying and waving and moaning and screaming and crying and falling on the ground and tearing the mud on the ground” as their kids were forever taken from them while the Germans played music over a public-address system. “It was apocalyptic,” Polanski says simply.

In an exclusive interview conducted Dec. 4, Polanski offered a detailed testimonial of his childhood in Poland and his wartime experiences — and how they impacted his filmmaking. The hourlong conversation, which took place over the phone while the filmmaker was in Paris, did not touch on the Polish appeals court ruling, announced one week earlier, that Polanski would not be extradited to the U.S. — essentially ending a four-decade-long legal saga — and focused instead on his survivor experience and how it affected his life and art.

(Polanski’s legal woes stem from an incident in 1978, in which he was indicted for raping a 13 year old girl in Los Angeles. Polanski served a short sentence but then fled the country the day before another sentencing hearing. He has never returned.)

Read More: Hollywood’s Last Survivors of the Holocaust Share Their Incredible Stories

Polanski was born in Paris, but his family moved to Krakow, Poland, when he was 3 (“Not the best decision,” he quips). He has clear memories of his childhood there, especially the mounting indignities and horror after the Nazis arrived: the end of his schooling, the armband, the confinement in the ghetto, the roundups and barbed wire. He tells the story of the first person he saw killed: “Some old woman was crying and wailing in Yiddish — I didn’t quite understand because I did not speak Yiddish,” says Polanski. “And at one moment she was on all fours, and suddenly there was a gun in the hand of that young SS man, and he shot her in the back, and the blood came out, like the little fountain that we have in the offices, you know, a bulb of blood.”

By the time he was 9, both of his parents had been deported. His mother, whom he later learned was pregnant at the time, was almost certainly killed upon her arrival at Auschwitz. (Polanski recalls getting the news from his father: “He said, ‘They took Mother.’ And he started crying, weeping.”) His father survived the war after a stint doing arduous quarry work at the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

In 1943, Polanski escaped the Krakow Ghetto and assumed the name Romek Wilk and lived in the countryside, aided by a family that had known his father, pretending to be a Christian boy. “I survived because I did not look very much like a Jew,” says Polanski. “Particularly when I was a kid, I definitely looked like a lot of kids in Poland.” Even though at this point he lived no more than 30 miles from Auschwitz, Polanski says this rural area was quiet and free from violence; he knew “nothing about what was happening on the other side of the wires. … I only learned about all the atrocities right after the war.”

Read More: Why It’s Important to Share These Stories Now

Fortunately, liberation came to that part of Poland in January 1945. Days before the war ended, Polanski recalls picking berries in the forest near Krakow when he heard a sound like the thrum of insects, only louder. “And then I realized it was coming from the sky,” he recalls. “I looked up, and these were the American bombers coming, hundreds of them. It was one of the most joyful moments of my young life. I laid down on the ground, and I was watching those planes.”

Though Polanski’s difficult wartime experiences shaped many elements in his Oscar-nominated film The Pianist, which is about a musician’s struggle to survive during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, he was emphatically not interested in making an autobiographical film. “I can tell you I always wanted to make the picture, a picture about those things in that period in particular. But I didn’t want to do it about Krakow — it was just too close to home,” he says. “When you make a movie, you always superimpose the movie set over the real streets and the movie characters over the people that you remembered. … I would never do it.”

Polanski is famously wary of speaking to American journalists, but he knows his story is worth telling again, especially with genocide and refugee crises in the news. He recalls a fight he had with his father soon after liberation: “I said, ‘This can never happen again.’ He said, ‘Wait 50 years and you’ll see,’ ” says Polanski. “And, unfortunately, he was right.”

A scene from the Krakow Ghetto, where Polanski lived, in March 1940. / AP Images

The Polanski Survivor Video Remains Under Wraps

A five-hour 2003 testimonial has never been viewed by the public.

“Maybe you can show this in perspective,” suggests Polanski, staring at the camera, addressing the person filming him. It is a spring day, and the famed subject of a survivor testimonial is playing director for a moment as he walks through the streets of Krakow, Poland, annotating details of his experience during Nazi occupation. He stops beneath a window, one he peered out of as a boy one day as the Germans built a wall that soon would imprison the Krakow Ghetto.

Unlike nearly all of the USC Shoah Foundation’s 50,000-plus visual histories, this remarkable video, which was shot on April 27 and 28, 2003, never has been viewed by the public. In fact, until now, only a handful of people even knew this footage existed. Nonetheless, when THR learned of the testimonial and asked the Shoah Foundation’s executive director for permission to watch the video, that request was granted.

Which is why I spent five hours glued to a chair in the USC library watching this video — which features more than three hours of a standard sit-down testimonial, shot inside a historic pharmacy. The filmmaker recounts his childhood (“My parents were not religious at all — I guess they were atheist or agnostic”), cinematic details of wartime horrors (including a remembrance of playing with bomb pieces in an empty lot) and his father relaying that his mother had been deported at a moment they were in a public spot without armbands on (“He started crying on the bridge. He burst into uncontrollable sobs. I didn’t cry right away and begged him to stop”).

The video concludes with an hour of Polanski roaming around Krakow. He points out the spot where he slipped through barbed wire to escape the ghetto, tours the first ghetto apartment his family called home and muses about how opposite sides of a city street could demarcate life and death. He signs autographs for a few girls with a smile, but later, in a public square, as a crowd of tourists start snapping pictures, he declares it’s time to leave. His storytelling is crisp, full of detail and emotion. And though he is the subject of the documentary, he offers direction to the cameraperson on a few occasions; on one street corner, as he describes the grade school he attended for a few weeks before the Nazis ended his education, he points down the block and says, “I would like to cut over there.”

After watching the full testimonial, THR asked Polanski and the USC Shoah Foundation for permission to publish edited excerpts. Though Polanski initially agreed in principle, he later communicated through his assistant and through the Shoah Foundation that he “emphatically” would not approve any use of that footage.

Obama seeks to restore aid to bodies that recognize ‘Palestine’

Hillel Fendel

President Barack Obama / Reuters

The State Department has asked Congress for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to fund UNESCO – the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization – even though this is currently against the law.

The law states that the U.S. may not pay dues to any UN organization that grants the PLO full membership as a state – unless such a state has resulted from an Israel-PA negotiated settlement. Since 2011, when UNESCO voted to admit the “State of Palestine” as a member despite the fact that the above condition was not met, the U.S. has in fact not paid dues, in keeping with the law.

However, not only is the State Department now asking for $160 million to cover past dues and $76 million for current dues, it is also asking for a new law enabling the president to waive the law specifically for UNESCO.

Elliott Abrams, Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy and former Assistant Secretary of State, strongly objects. “The old adage ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ would seem to apply here.” He explains that the current legislation was for the purpose of deterring “UN organizations from giving the Palestinians the diplomatic victory they wanted – being treated as a state – unless and until they negotiated a peace agreement with Israel. And it worked: since the U.S. move in 2011, other key UN organizations have not followed UNESCO down the PLO’s preferred path. The U.S. pays about 22% of the budget of UNESCO and most other UN organs, so the threat of a loss of U.S. dues gets serious attention.”

Abrams writes that if the law was to be “repealed or waived, it’s logical to expect other UN bodies to see that the Americans are bluffing – and to give the Palestinians full membership. Yet that is clearly where the Obama administration is heading, unless Congress blocks them.”

Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) are also against the move. “The [proposal] would undermine over two decades of U.S. policy against funding UN organizations that admit the PLO or other non-state actors as members,” they recently wrote to Senate and House leaders.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has also come out against the move. In a statement, it strongly criticized President Obama for seeking to restore funding to UNESCO, as well as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for supporting the idea. “We hope this is not due to effective White House pressure on Obama’s friend and former colleague, [his] former Special Assistant and now newly-hired ADL national director Jonathan Greenblatt,” the ZOA warned.

“UNESCO has a long history of anti-Israel and anti-American activity, even by the depraved standards of the United Nations,” the ZOA notes. It reminds that the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO from 1984-2003, “only rejoining when UNESCO accepted the need to make certain reforms. In fact, it has changed little and UNESCO continues to harm American interests.”

“U.S. refunding of UNESCO would send the message that, even when the U.S. acts on its law and principles to penalize international actors for their anti-peace actions, we don’t really mean it,” says the ZOA.

The Obama administration has responded that it will combine its UNESCO waiver with a condition that the waiver would lapse if another UN body jumps on the bandwagon and grants the PLO full membership.

“This is senseless,” writes Abrams. “If we collapse on UNESCO, it will be assumed in the UN that we will eventually collapse on any other UN agency that admits ‘Palestine.’ … UNESCO’s member countries decided to [test] American resolve. The Obama administration wants to show that they were right: we fold under criticism and pressure.”

“Congress should ‘just say no,'” concludes Abrams, “and send a clear message to every other UN body: there will be no waivers.”

Poland Turns Hard to Right — and Jews Wind Up in Crosshairs

By Donald Snyder

Rage and a Non Sequitur? To protest against the immigration of Muslims and
Syrian refugees, demonstrators in Wroclaw on November 18 burn
an Orthodox Jew in effigy.

When some 50,000 people turned out in Warsaw recently to protest a plan by Poland’s ruling party to pack the nation’s constitutional court, the hard right-wing political faction responded quickly with a counter-demonstration of its own. Its counter-protest featured, among other things, a placard that mocked those claiming to defend democracy as “the committee to defend Jewish-Communist wealth.”

At around the same time in Wroclaw, Poland’s fourth largest city, crowds at a parallel demonstration to support the recently elected Law and Justice party shouted, “Wroclaw is being de-Polanized as the Jews are buying up homes in the city.”

At another Wroclaw demonstration, held November 18 to protest a European Union plan that would see Poland admit some 7,000 Syrian refugees, demonstrators denounced the proposed immigrants as Islamists — and to somehow add to this point, they set fire to a previously prepared effigy of a Hasidic Jew holding the E.U. flag.

“God, Honor and Fatherland,” the crowd then chanted.

Since the October 25 elections that gave the strongly nationalist Law and Justice Party an absolute majority in parliament, Poland has been a nation in crisis. Like several other countries in Europe, the right-wing party’s rise back to power after eight years in opposition was fueled in part by anti-immigrant furor, but also anger with the corruption of the government led by the incumbent Civic Platform party. A backlash from rural Poles who feel left behind by the country’s free-market reforms also played a big role. But critics charge that Law and Justice is now using its absolute majority to implement anti-democratic measures they denounce as “Putinist.”

And amid all this, somehow, Jews have become a focus of ire among the party’s defenders in the country whose huge Jewish population was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust.

“This government harbors anti-Judaic sentiment which can easily become anti-Semitism,” said the Rev. John Pawlikowski, professor of social ethics and director of the Catholic-Jewish studies program at the Catholic Theological Union, in Chicago.

Among other things, Law and Justice, known also by its Polish acronym, PiS, has failed to denounce the effigy burning in Wroclaw. The party also has appointed a defense minister who’s made anti-Semitic comments and has, via its culture minister, Piotr Glinski, threatened to sue those it believes guilty of “defamation against Poland.”

See You in Court: Piotr Glinski (center), Poland’s minister of culture, has threatened to sue those he believes guilty of defaming his country. / Image: Getty Images

“It reminds me of the Communist takeover in the 1940s,” said Andrzej Zoll, a former ombudsman for the constitutional court.

David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, will soon visit Warsaw to discuss the current situation with members of the new government. In a telephone interview December 1, Harris told the Forward that any move away from the full throttle of democracy that Poland has experienced since 1989 would be a very disturbing development.

Harris cited AJC’s partnership with the Forum for Dialogue, the largest Polish nongovernmental organization dealing with Polish-Jewish relations, which has sponsored wide-ranging Polish-Jewish dialogue since 1996.

“If the forum continues to flourish, it will be a good and welcome sign,” Harris said. “If this is not the case, everyone should be concerned, and it will be a good litmus test.”

AJC has been involved in Poland for 26 years. “We will continue to remain involved with democratic forces there,” Harris said.

Many see the new government’s drumbeat for Polish patriotism as cause for concern.

Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at Warsaw University, said she saw the form of national identity that PiS promotes as an immature and simplistic model that constitutes a setback in Polish thinking about the past.

Citing historical research in recent years that deals with Polish crimes against Jews, such as the 1941 massacre at Jedwabne and the murder of Jews elsewhere during the German occupation, Engelking said she had hoped this research would give the national discussion a deeper dimension that would force serious reflection and help build a mature, complex national identity with an awareness not just of Polish victimhood, but also of the crimes that Poles have committed against Jews.

Jan Zaryn, a PiS senator, disagrees. During a phone interview, he denied that nationalists were rewriting history. “We do not have to lie about our history, because it’s beautiful,” he said, citing the valor of the Polish underground during the German occupation and the loss of 3 million non-Jewish Polish lives under the Nazis, the same as the number of Polish Jews. Zaryn also denied that there is deeply rooted anti-Semitism in Poland.

Polish prosecutors are considering a libel suit against Jan Gross, a Polish-born Princeton University professor who recently wrote an opinion piece that appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt, in which he claimed Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans during the German occupation. Gross is the author of several books about Polish atrocities during World War II, including “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,” about the 1941 Polish massacre of Jews.

The Polish American Congress, representing 9.5 million Polish Americans, doubts that its countrymen murdered between 350 and 1,000 Jews, as generally estimated by historians, in Jedwabne then. Frank Milewski, who is in charge of documenting Holocaust information for the organization, said German bullet casings were found in the barn where the Jews were burned to death. He said no conclusions could be reached unless the bodies were exhumed. Frank Spula, president of PAC, declined comment.

In America, the Anti-Defamation League has expressed concerns about the government not taking the opportunity to distance itself from expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic acts. Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski responded to a call by the ADL on the government to condemn the burning in effigy of a Hasidic Jew at the November 18 Wroclaw protest by invoking “the Jewish lobby” and calling for Poland to create its own lobby and narratives.

At a November 17 conference in the Presidential Palace, called by President Andrzej Duda, representatives from Polish museums and other cultural institutions were told to galvanize Polish nationalism and to discard narratives that brought Poland shame. Glinski told the gathering that building a national identity was an important component in the PiS philosophy of government.

Notably, there was no E.U. flag in the conference room. According to Marcin Zyla, an editor at the Krakow-based liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, the absence of the E.U. flag was a symbolic rebuke to the secular Western European community, which PiS sees as an existential threat to Catholic Poland.

“The push to create a bright image abroad is not new, but this government is promoting PiS policy much more brazenly and aggressively,” said Jan Grabowski, a Polish-born professor of history at the University of Ottawa, in Canada.

Polish xenophobia was very much evident during the November 18 demonstration in Wroclaw, when demonstrators demonized Muslim refugees, warning that the refugees were not welcome in Poland.

“Raped, beaten and murdered by the Islamic savages,” the crowd shouted. “Do you want it on our streets?” But what was the connection there between that and the burning in effigy of the Hasidic-looking Jew holding an E.U. flag, an action that Poland’s B’nai B’rith was quick to denounce?

“The Jew has always been portrayed in Polish folk culture as an eternal threat and a stranger,” said Piotr Pazinski, editor in chief of Midrasz, a Jewish cultural magazine in Warsaw. “Holding an E.U. flag fortifies their racist belief that Jews are orchestrating an E.U. plot to destroy white Catholic Poland.”

Powerful Pair: Poland’s new defense minister, Antoni Macierwicz (left) has suggested that the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion may be valid. Prime Minister Beata Szydio (right) has rebuffed demands to revoke his appointment. / Image: Getty Images

Read more: Poland Turns Hard to Right…