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 in which Lagerführer Fritzsch tells Kolbe that the escaped prisoner never actually escaped. He tried to burrow out through a latrine and died there. Fritzsch enjoys adding one more spiritually crushing burden on the priest.
The truth, however, is that Zygmunt Pilawski did escape and was recaptured in 1942, ten months after Kolbe’s death.
Towards the end, the suffering Christ and the Blessed Virgin appear amidst a sepia tableau of dead prisoners’ faces. All but Kolbe’s. But on Day 14 of the ordeal, guards enter the Bunker and Kolbe is given a fatal injection of carbolic acid. He dies thinking of St. Paul’s words: I have fought the good fight . . .
I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing. (2 Timothy 4:7-8)
As a boy, Kolbe had a vision of Our Lady in which she held two crowns: one for a life of heroic virtue and another for martyrdom. He must choose one, she said; he chose both.
The film ends, it seems, in Heaven: a Polish home in winter, in which there is joyful dancing and vodka – or is it simply blesséd water for those who had so thirsted? All the former prisoners are there, Catholics and Jews: a lovely, very moving scene.
Psalm 22 ends not with further suffering (I am a worm, and no man; / scorned by men, and despised by the people), but with surrender to God’s love:
I will tell of thy name to my brethren;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee:
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
all you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel!
And all you sons of Rome!
