This 1963 Polish film, “Requiem for 500,000” was produced by Jerzy Bossak and distributed by the German Institute for Film and Motion Pictures in Sciences and Teaching (FWU) looks at the history of the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII. This version is presented in German. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during WWII and the conditions of overcrowding, starvation and suffering there came to symbolize some of the worst atrocities perpetrated by the German fascist government during the Holocaust. The Ghetto was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. At its height, as many as 460,000 Jews were imprisoned there, with many of them forced to perform labor in support of the German war machine. The uprising in the Ghetto in 1943 was the largest, and symbolically most important Jewish uprising in WWII, and first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe. For more information about the Ghetto visit: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw
The film begins with the occupation of Poland by Germany and scenes of relative normalcy after the creation of the Ghetto. This includes a theater performance and a café for the wealthier members of society. This is followed by stronger repression by the Nazis, which led to widespread starvation and the eventual deportation of the inhabitants to the extermination camps. It ends with footage from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Ghetto’s complete destruction, which is paired with Handel’s solemn “Messiah”.
0:11 titles 0:34 footage from the German invasion of Poland in 1939, 1:00 German troops deporting and executing Polish men, 1:52 prisoners in a concentration camp, 2:32 people being forced to work, 3:53 inauguration of Hans Frank as Governor General of occupied Poland, 4:32 Jewish people wearing armbands with the Star of David, 4:59 establishment of Jewish Ghettos in large cities, 5:53 posters with orders of where Jews are forced to live, 6:14 Jews moving with their belonging into ghettos, 7:30 “Requiem for 500,000”, 7:36 street footage from the Warsaw Ghetto, 8:36 meeting of the Warsaw “Judenrat”, 9:26 officers of the Jewish Ghetto Police, 9:44 street views from Warsaw Ghetto, 10:32 forced laborers working in German factories in the Ghetto, 10:59 men with rickshaws transporting people, 11:36 the wall cutting off the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw, 12:08 German soldiers checking papers, 12:32 shots of everyday people selling goods on the street, 13:39 children dancing in a circle and doing a theater performance, 14:18 a fancy café for the rich of the ghetto, 14:32 a funeral, 14:50 posters for a concert, 15:01 a theater performance, 15:14 signs indicating quarantined areas after a plague outbreak to allow for further repression, 16:06 a German soldier harassing children who stole food, 16:44 people begging and starving on the street, 17:36 a soup kitchen for the poor, 18:01 starving children, 18:47 corpses on the street, 19:09 burial ceremony in a mass grave, 19:48 people waiting to be deported to extermination camps, 20:55 forced laborers working in German factories, 21:22 Jewish Ghetto Police forcing people out of their homes to be deported, 22:11 pictures from the mass deportations, 22:36 people boarding trains to the extermination camps, 24:11 footage from the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the subsequent Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 27:12 footage of destroyed buildings after the end of the uprising, 28:31 all footage is from German sources, 28:41 a film by Jerzy Bossak and cinematographer Waclaw Kazmierczak, production Film Polski Documentary Film Studio, Warsaw.
Jerzy Bossak (1910-1989) was a well known Polish filmmaker who also directed “Peace Will Win” in 1951.
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