The Real End of the Great War

Primo Levi gave the title The Truce (La Tregua) to the second volume of his memoirs. It deals with the events in his life from his liberation from Auschwitz to his eventual arrival in his native city of Turin. The book's alternate title is The Reawakening, but it ignores the point that Levi was making with The Truce. In his Paris Review interview, Levi spoke about an incident that had an effect on his understanding of war:

Have you read my book The Reawakening? You remember Mordo Nahum? I had mixed feelings toward him. I admired him as a man fit for every situation. But of course he was very cruel to me. He despised me because I was not able to manage. I had no shoes. He told me, Remember, when there is war, the first thing is shoes, and second is eating. Because if you have shoes, then you can run and steal. But you must have shoes. Yes, I told him, well you are right, but there is not war any more. And he told me, Guerra es siempre. There is always war."(1)

The end of the war for Primo Levi, then, was only a temporary suspension of hostilities, a truce. This is an especially sobering reminder on this Day of Remembrance, marking 101 years since the armistice that ended the First World War, the "war to end all wars," as Europeans disingenuously called it. Another survivor of the war against fascism, a Pole, is represented in the fictional film The Real End of the Great War (Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny - 1957). Juliusz Zborski is liberated from a concentration camp (2) physically and mentally enfeebled, unable to communicate beyond smiles and nods to everyone around him. His wife Róża, who had given him up for dead, is compelled to become his caretaker. The film opens like a horror movie - a woman (Róża) is disturbed by someone, or something, fumbling at the door handle of  her cluttered bedroom. She runs to the door and presses against it, speaking as if to a child on the other side to let her sleep. The noise stops and the woman turns to face us with tears in her eyes. She returns to bed, closes her eyes and we fade in to a 1938 New Year's Eve party where the woman, the camera taking her place, is dancing with a smiling handsome man. The dance finished, we return to the woman in bed. She turns out the light. And we realize that the person trying to open the door is Juliusz, the same man with whom Róża was dancing.

The following morning we are shown the sleeping arrangements: Juliusz is exiled to the sofa, and Róża sleeps in the bedroom behind a locked door. Róża has moved on, just as Poland did when the catastrophic war was over. Early in the film, when Juliusz runs an errand for the housemaid (who dotes on him), we are shown Warsaw in the process of recovery, with construction cranes prominent against a morning sky. Juliusz wanders, smiling, across a bustling construction site. He had been an architect before the war (the camera shows us the nameplate on the front door of his flat), and two men on the construction site recognize him and address him. He merely nods and smiles at them, and walks away. 

Before the war, Juliusz was also a man who loved to dance. The scene of him leading Róża in a dizzying waltz at the opening of the film is shockingly mocked in the film's first flashback to Juliusz in the concentration camp, with the camera spinning, this time from Juliusz' perspective. The prisoners are forced to hobble and twirl in a mad, exhausted imitation of dancing, while a conscripted band plays. And they must dance until they drop. Juliusz is the last one standing - dancing, as the guards stand around and laugh at him. The flashback is provoked in Juliusz when, at a party, a guest tries to dance with him. When she turns her attention to tuning the radio to a suitable station, Juliusz drops the glass platter he was holding and, to everyone's alarm, begins to spin on the spot where he stands, the room spinning and dissolving in flashback to the camp.

Róża is tentatively involved with a colleague, Professor Stęgień. She is still young and attractive, and she wants to be happy. Lucyna Winnicka, the actress who plays her in the film, was the wife of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, who directed. She would later appear, to international acclaim, in Kawalerowicz' Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels. 

The Real End of the Great War never had a theatrical release in the U.S., probably due to its baleful subject. Because it never had an American distributor, the film couldn't find its way to home video. Way back when I was a dedicated and intrepid filmgoer, I was tantalized by a review written from Europe by Vernon Young that called it "a Polish masterpiece": 

Kawalerowicz is one of a nucleus of Polish film-makers which, mainly within the last four years [this was written in 1959], has produced a half-dozen films equal to any which have emerged from Europe since the rise of Italian neo-realism over a decade ago. The True [sic] End is the most deeply disturbing of those I have seen (and each of them disturbs, by either its crucial violence or its wounding sadness). Were it not for Kawalerowicz' dazzling virtuosity, I would be moved to acknowledge the film as virtually insupportable, since it conveys an ordeal so painful as to refute that vestige of belief which the most professedly disenchanted among us nourish in their hearts - the belief that there is a finally discernible compensation for the infliction of extreme suffering.(3)

I got on with my life without seeing the film, all the while keeping it, as I've grown older, on that ever-shrinking list of "films to see before I snuff it." I found it not long ago and I watched it over the weekend. I wasn't disappointed - it's everything I expected it to be. Kawalerowicz' triumph is in not passing judgement on any of the characters. Juliusz tries to reach Róża in any way he can. But he fails, and when he sees how complete his failure is, he takes the only way out that he knows. Róża is freed, but in the film's final shot, as she and the maid in their mourning dress walk past the waiting Professor Stęgień, she shows us her commitment to Juliusz. 

The three flashbacks are presented somewhat too expressionistically, almost as if Juliusz were changing into Mr. Hyde. But the camp scenes themselves are presented exclusively from Juliusz' perspective, dancing deliriously. Until the guards pick him up off the floor in the last flashback, an SS orgy with topless girls, and throw him through a window. Everything else in the film is presented with the utmost subtlety.

Vernon Young noticed the resemblance in the film's last scene to the last scene of The Third Man, with Alida Valli walking away from Harry's grave past Joseph Cotten:

She walks on by, as all those bloody leaves fall, and that, too, is an image that will remain ... When Europe stood aghast at what it had done to itself, that was the hour to make a film on the subject. Later, it was too late without overreaching. I think the only other film that expresses a phase of the tragedy as deeply is The True End of the Great War (Kawalerowicz) but its so unbearable one can't see it twice. Many I know couldn't sit it once.(4)

The obscurity of Real End of the Great War is unpardonable. It deserves a place beside the best films on the subject of the aftermath of war, which are actually very few in number. It invokes neither history nor politics in its portrayal of unheroic ordinary people suffering the after-effects of war.


(1) Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction No. 140, The Paris Review.
(2) There were 23 main German concentration camps in Poland, with hundreds of "subcamps".
(3) Vernon Young, "A Condemned Man Escapes: Five Films on the Subject," 1959.
(4) Vernon Young, "A Sad Tale's Best for Winter: On Re-seeing The Third Man," 1969