Centuries-Long Heritage

“The Polish-Jewish relationship,” former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has written, “was so intimate and so complex that any single generalization about it is automatically a distortion.” Jews were a major presence in Poland for almost 1,000 years before an estimated 88% of the country’s 3.3 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust.

Poles passionate about their country’s history have become increasingly interested in its Jewish component. Best-selling author Agata Tuzynska, in her “Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland,” complains with sadness that “no one had pointed out how deeply rooted they were in this land that was mine. No one made me aware of the foundations of the centuries-long Polish-Jewish heritage.”

This painful complicity, the sense that what happened during the Holocaust is as much a Polish story as a Jewish one, has resulted in a provocative body of film work that is the focus of a fascinating six-day UCLA Film and Television Archives series beginning tonight and titled “Remembering the Jewish Experience in Polish Film.”

According to Pawel Potoroczyn, Poland’s consul in Los Angeles, almost 200 Polish films have been made on the fate of the Jews, probably more than any country except Israel. The UCLA series is showing eight of them, starting with tonight’s rarely seen Yiddish-language “Our Children.” If the ones sampled were any indication, these are strong films, both rigorous and disturbing.

The discovery of the festival is “White Bear,” screening Sunday, all but unknown in this country yet a film that feels as vital today as when it was made in 1959.

Directed by Jerzy Zarzycki and given a haunting, snowy film noir ambience by cinematographer Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz, “White Bear” is set during World War II in a Polish ski resort the Germans are using for R&R; for their officers.

Clandestinely making his way to this town is Henrik Fogel (Gustaw Holoubek), a Jewish former professor of physics just escaped from a German transport train. He stumbles on a house being used by the resistance, but though they want to help, no one feels it’s safe to keep him there.

Then, through a combination of circumstances, Fogel ends up in effect hiding in plain sight. The town’s photographer is a resistance member, and Fogel spends his days wearing the polar bear suit the photographer uses as a prop, posing next to those German officers and their girlfriends who want tourist photos to commemorate their vacations.

This surreal situation is beautifully examined both photographically and psychologically in “White Bear.” Scenes of the bear standing by a window at the Nazi officers club, transfixed by the chamber music being played inside, are unforgettable, and the interactions Fogel later has with Nazi officers are equally memorable.

Also memorable is tonight’s co-feature, 1985’s “Postcard From a Journey,” directed with killing restraint by Waldemar Dziki and set in a Jewish ghetto in an unnamed Polish city in the midst of the war.

Starring Wladyslaw Kowalski as Jacob Rosenberg, a former office worker now reassigned to street-cleaning patrol, “Postcard” does a haunting job of exploring the Jewish state of mind in these claustrophobic times, as citizens try to get on with their lives in the face of the knowledge that transport to a camp is just about inevitable.

Rosenberg’s way of coping is to methodically prepare as much as he can for the inevitable. He practices answering the door with dignity so he will not disgrace himself when the soldiers come, and he carefully works out the most effective way to carry the suitcase that will carry all his belongings on that fateful journey.

Finally, in a shattering scene, Rosenberg allows himself to throw a fit of rage in a restaurant, throwing valuable food across the room, just to know how it would feel, if only for a moment, to be a member of the so-called master race. Conversely, the triumph of “Postcard” is the way it portrays the unimaginable without ever losing control itself.

Playing with “White Bear” on Sunday is 1984’s “There Was No Sun,” director Juliusz Janicki’s look at another aspect of the Polish-Jewish wartime relationship, those Poles, in this case rural farmers, who agreed to hide Jews from the Germans and their collaborators.

The Jew in question is a young female doctor, and part of the reason she’s allowed to stay is that the married farmer finds her attractive. Very little about what happens to these people, however, is predictable, as “There Was No Sun” focuses, as does the rest of this series, on how intricate these situations were, how fraught with tensions and complications of all kinds. Only those who’ve lived through times like these, we’re told over and over, have the ability to understand or the right to judge.

BE THERE

“Remembering the Jewish Experience in Polish Film,” UCLA’s Bridges Theater, northeast corner of the Westwood campus, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue. Parking is available for $5. For more information, call (310) 206-FILM.

The schedule:

Tonight at 7:30: “Our Children,” “Postcard From a Journey.”

Saturday at 7:30 p.m.: “Austeria,” “March Caresses.”

Sunday at 7 p.m.: “White Bear,” “There Was No Sun.”

Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.: “The Hunting Beater,” “Still Only This Forest.”