Two of the best films on the Holocaust, “Schindler’s List” by Steven Spielberg and “The Pianist” by Roman Polański, both feature exceptional Germans performing noble actions during the second world war. In a similar vein, “In Darkness”, directed by Agnieszka Holland, and Poland’s nominee for the 2012 Oscars, tells the story of a Polish Catholic sewer-maintenance worker who first out of greed, and then out of a newfound sense of duty, saves a group of Jews in the sewage of Lviv. Both films are based on historical facts–with some Hollywood icing.

A new Polish film, “Pokłosie” (Consequences), released few months ago, is different. There is no hero, however unlikely, battling the forces of Nazi evil. And the plot is only vaguely based on the historical facts of a pogrom that took place in Jedwabne in North Eastern Poland in July 1941, when several hundred Jews were burnt in a barn by their Polish neighbours.

The film’s director, Władysław Pasikowski, calls it a thriller, though this does not seem to be the right category for the film. Perhaps its working title, “Kaddish”, the Jewish prayer read by mourners at funerals, would have been a more apposite choice for the title and description of its narrative.

The film describes the attempt made by two brothers, Jozek (Maciej Stuhr) and Franciszek, to break the conspiracy of silence among the residents of the village where the massacre against their Jewish neighbours had taken place. As they progress with their research about the past, the majority of villagers turn against them.

Pokłosie may be the most controversial Polish film ever made, for it touches a raw nerve among Poles: that of past anti-Semitism in Poland and its persistence today. Within days of the film’s release, two Polish weeklies ran covers showing the film’s lead actor, Mr Stuhr. Angora, one of the weeklies ran a photo of the actor with ‘Stuhr you Jew!’ scrawled across it. The headline for the incendiary photo read: “They are attacking Maciej Stuhr for playing the role of the honest Pole”. The front page of Wprost, another weekly, showed Mr Stuhr with a star of David superimposed on his face. The magazine was thus also illustrating the widespread reaction in Poland to the film: that of turning against the actor for personifying a Pole who “sided with Jews” by uncovering what Poles did to them.

Such a type of cover could have appeared in magazines in other countries. In 2008 The New Yorker (disclosure: the author was once a staff writer at The New Yorker) had Barack Obama, the American president, portrayed as a terrorist and his wife Michele as a mujahedeen. The cover provoked strong reactions. But because in Poland political opponents scrawl this sort of graffiti on centrist and left politicians’ electoral posters the message is at best of bad taste.

A third weekly splashed an explicit cartoon on its cover, in which a group of people push the Polish coat-of-arms’ white eagle to the abyss, a stone hanging from the bird’s neck. “This is how Polish memory is destroyed”, explains the headline. “Films such as Pokłosie make the Polish-Jewish dialogue more difficult,” adds a subtitle.

A discussion about the film could be cathartic, but some comments (mostly about the history of Polish-Jewish relations, not about the film itself) in the articles of the three magazines are abominable: “Many [Polish] peasants had nothing to eat during the [Nazi] occupation so stealing from a wandering Jew who often had jewels or cash was a way to enrich themselves.” They even come close to denying the historical facts established about the role of Poles in the massacre that serves as inspiration for Pokłosie: “Until today, who knows what happened in that barn in Jedwabne? The film Pokłosie shows only one version, the most vicious and toughest for us, Poles.”

The attacks on Mr Stuhr relate to the film’s narrative, which is about contemporary attitudes towards past crimes whose factual veracity is not put in doubt by historians of the Holocaust. Anna Bikont, the author of a book “We, from Jedwabne”, wrote a pertinent comparison between the dialogue in Pokłosie and some utterings she heard during her research.

The film’s premier led to a huge wave of internet activity with strong doses of anti-Semitism, mostly pointing to the presence of Jews in the state security apparatus of Communist Poland (the suggestion being that there were good reasons to be anti-Semitic). Many labeled the film “anti-Polish” and therefore refused to see it. The head of the conservative Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, seemed to agree when he said: “I have not seen Pokłosie and do not intend to see it.”

Even so, some newspapers and magazines published serious discussions of the film, praising the director for having the courage to approach such subject matter and the actor for playing the role. Andrzej Wajda, a famous Polish film director, endorsed it. A company monitoring the web (www.sentione.pl) found that when anonymous commentators post their opinions about Mr Stuhr they are overwhelmingly (78%) negative, while on Facebook and Twitter (where authors identify themselves) the same subject attracts 72% of positive chatter. In other words, anti-Semitism still exists, but by and large anti-Semites are not showing their ugly faces in public.

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)