Weiss was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Prague. Against his father’s wishes (who wanted him to be a lawyer), he got into filmmaking in the 1930s. He fled to England upon the Nazi occupation, where he continued to make films with the help of Basil Wright and Paul Rotha. He also worked for the Czechoslovak government in exile. As a newsreel cameraman, he was present at the liberation of Buchenwald on 11 April 1945. On his return to Czechoslovakia after the war, Weiss discovered that his entire family had been killed in the Holocaust.
Weiss’s return to filmmaking in Czechoslovakia led to his first feature-length film in 1947. In 1958, author and screenwriter Jan Otčenášek published the novel Romeo, Juliet and Darkness and it was an immediate sensation. It has since been translated into 20 languages and adapted for stage plays and operas. Four films have also been made of the novel. Weiss got there first and his film still resonates. He wrote a screenplay of the novel with Otčenášek and the film was produced by the Barrandov Studio.
Because Weiss’s film predated the Czech New Wave by several years, his film wasn’t exported to North America until 1966, when the title was changed to Sweet Light in a Dark Room. The film opens at the story’s end: a young man named Pavel (Ivan Mistrík) enters a deserted attic. Looking distraught, he walks around the room. The wind blows the door shut and gives him a start. He notices a valise on the floor and picks it up. He caresses it and embraces it as if it were a person dear to him. The remainder of the film is his recollections. On a quiet, sunny morning in Prague, people in an apartment block have gathered at the railings to look down into the courtyard as a family, Mr. Wurm, his wife and two children, hurry down the stairs with suitcases. They each wear the star of David on their coats. Wurm’s daughter asks many questions. “Will we come back after the holiday?” "Such curiosity!” her father exclaims. “Will it kill me like it did the cat?” They pile their belongings into a cart and Mr. Wurm pulls it into the broad street, their destination a train bearing them to Theresienstad concentration camp.
Mr. Wurm’s son whispers something to Pavel. We next see the Wurm’s abandoned apartment, and Pavel looking around for something and finding it – the boy’s pet guinea pig, under a bed. The front door opens and in walks a young woman. She, too, has a star of David on her coat. She asks if the Wurms are at home and Pavel informs her they already left. She leaves and is about to walk down the stairs when she sees a German officer coming up the stairs. He is there to inspect the empty apartment so that his mistress can move in. The mistress has a dog, a nasty wire-haired terrier, that continually barks. (I almost cheered when later Pavel accidentally smothers the dog and buries it in the children's sandbox.) The young woman is apprehensive. She backs away from the stairs and looks down over the railing like she’s about to jump. Pavel stops her and leads her farther up the stairs to an attic room. It’s his mother’s storeroom where he and a friend develop photographs. And it is there that Hanka, the young woman, must hide. She becomes a prisoner of a different sort, to a different kind of captor.
Hanka’s presence in the room remains a secret until the historical incident of the attack on Reinhard Heydrich takes place on May 27, 1942 and his death eight days later. Because Heydrich was one of Hitler's favorites, Nazi reprisals on innocent Czechs are carried out, including the massacre of the citizens of two Czech villages.
Eventually knowledge of Hanka’s presence in the attic is found out. The Nazis have ordered everyone to remain in their homes and there are house to house searches. The Nazi officer’s girlfriend tells Pavel that the girl must leave the building or they will all be killed. When she threatens to expose her, Pavel tries to strangle her. Hanka, overhearing the squabble, emerges from the attic and goes out into the street to certain death.
Weiss reminds us that even Shakespeare was writing about the romantic illusions and fumblings of teenagers. The drama is so poignant precisely because it is the work of two dreaming children who don’t quite grasp the severity and finality of their actions. Weiss’s original ending depicted no one trying to stop Hanka from going out into the street. Weiss was accused by Communist Party leaders of making a “Zionist film” and was ordered to reshoot the scene. (1)
Romeo, Juliet and Darkness is a minor masterpiece. Its spareness and subtlety, with so little spoken and everything left just below the surface, gives it a beauty and poignancy that Jan Kadar’s blatant Shop on Main Street (1965) barely touches. It avoids the charge of being soft on Czechs simply because of the experience of Jiří Weiss and his family. It highlights the terror and folly of war as seen through the eyes of two young people who find a degree of sweetness under the harsh conditions of Nazi occupation. The cast is splendid, especially Pavel’s mother, played by Jiřina Šejbalová. Hanka is played by Daniela Smutná. Her unadorned beauty is dwelt upon by Václav Hanuš’s camera like a moth to a candlelight. Vernon Young pointed out ages ago, apropos her performance in Weiss’s The Golden Fern, that smutný is the Czech word for sad.
(1) Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction, Edited by Elisa-Maria Hiemer, Jiří Holý, Agata Firlej, and Hana Nichtburgerová (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2021).
[Update March 24, 2022. The book in which the identity of the person who most likely betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis (Arnold van den Bergh) has since been recalled by its publisher after a backlash from various sources who evidently didn't like the imputation that a Jew was responsible.]
