The second part of the new online project of the MGW Exhibition Department – "WALL / Walls" – consists of a film based on the poem of the same title by Icchak Berensztein, written and directed by Rafał Kosewski, the curator of this project.
November 17 2020
" The impetus for making the film came from reading a text by Icchak Berensztein, which uniquely captures the experience of confinement and loneliness ," says Rafał Kosewski. " The interior of the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital—a place so crucial to the history of Warsaw and Warsaw Jews—from the outset provided a natural setting for illustrating the spiritual landscape of the ghetto, as Berensztein described it. Within the enclosed world of corridors and abandoned rooms, the drama of exclusion and the realization of the impending Holocaust unfolds, accepted—as the poem's author wrote—"without protest and without resignation ."
Yitzhak Berensztein was a literary critic, essayist, and psychologist who collaborated with the underground organization Oneg Shabbat, which, under the leadership of Emanuel Ringelblum, collected materials and created an archive documenting everyday life in the Warsaw Ghetto. The poem "Walls" presents two overlapping realities. On the one hand, it is a record of the inner state of a specific individual struggling with the claustrophobic universe of the ghetto—a world dying, suffering from hunger and disease. On the other, the confinement of the Jews behind the wall is interpreted as a second exile from paradise, which, in the author's mind, takes the form of the nature of the Vistula River.
"Walls" was written and directed by Rafał Kosewski of the MGW Exhibitions Department. Berensztein's words are narrated by actor Jakub Kotyński. Cinematography is by Krzysztof Kiziewicz, Radovan Lee, and Bartek Warzecha, editing by Artur 'franc' Broniszewski, and sound by Mateusz Rychlicki.
Project website: https://mur.1943.pl/
Anna Kilian
Photo: Bartek Warzecha
