By Brad Miner.
Poland has suffered much over the centuries, and the Poles have been made stronger for it, in the spirit of what Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
The Holy Spirit moved in the conclave that elected St. John Paul II on October 16, 1978, to reward Poland for her suffering and courage, especially in the 20th century. And the pope, who raised hundreds to the altars, canonized many Polish people, among them Faustina Kowalska and Maximilian Kolbe.
A new dramatic film Triumph of the Heart, about the great saint, written and directed by Anthony d'Ambrosio, is about to appear. It focuses on Kolbe's two weeks of imprisonment with nine other men in the Hunger Bunker, a subterranean starvation room at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where Kolbe died. This means the film is, at times, claustrophobic. I don't know how it could be otherwise. [The term usually used is Starvation Bunker.]
For those who don't already know: In late July of 1941, a prisoner escaped from the camp, and the Nazi commandant decreed that, as a warning to other inmates, ten prisoners would be sent to the Bunker to starve to death. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, pleaded that he had a wife and children, which moved Fr. Kolbe to offer himself in Gajowniczek's place.
Through flashbacks, we see aspects of Kolbe's life and the lives of the other men with whom he shared confinement. But given that all died, do we know how they interacted with one another? Yes. For one, because a janitor periodically entered the Bunker. And other camp personnel overheard conversations from outside the barred window of the Bunker. Still, much of the dialogue is imagined.
For instance, Kolbe (played superbly by Marcin Kwasny) and another prisoner, Albert (Rowan Polonski in another fine performance), share an imaginary cigarette and talk. Albert, a soldier, wonders why Kolbe doesn't doubt God's existence after what they and all Poland had gone through. Kolbe acknowledges anger at it all, in essence evoking the old notion that Poland was crucified between "two thieves": Russia and Germany. But Kolbe quotes the Lord's words from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (from Psalm 22) Kolbe says God has come to be with them in suffering.
Triumph of the Heart echoes Jonathan Glazer's extraordinary 2023 film, Zone of Interest, the story of the last commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family, who lived idyllically in a home just outside the death camp. Glazer never took us inside. In Triumph of the Heart, there are glimpses of that same home, occupied during Kolbe's time by then-commandant, SS Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch (icily acted by Christopher Sherwood), but most of the film takes place in the Bunker.
And in a scene reminiscent of the great "La Marseillaise" moment in Michael Curtiz' 1942 classic, Casablanca, a woman in Auschwitz begins singing a patriotic Polish song as Germans guards are singing what sounds like a drinking song. A Nazi officer shoots the woman, but her song is picked up by the men in the Hunger Bunker, then by others around the death camp. A fleeting moment of triumph.
Is Mr. d'Ambrosio's intended to counter Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 pro-Hitler Triumph of the Will? It's certainly apt. Later in the Bunker, the prisoners huddle together against the chill of starvation and sing the Salve Regina.
Scenes of brutal depravity are difficult to look at. Of course, this was the truth of Auschwitz and had to be portrayed. But watching men capture, kill, and eat a rat is sickening, as are the guards' taunts that the prisoners will inevitably resort to cannibalism.
Mr. d'Ambrosio has a steady hand. He needs it. An exception is a fictive scene i...
