WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
The Innocents (French:Les Innocentes) is a 2016 French film directed by Anne Fontaine.
"It is a grim irony that although it had been a member of the victorious alliance, Poland was the ultimate loser of the Second World War. It lost its dependence and almost half of its territory - in defence of which the war had been declared. According to the Bureau of War Reparations, it also lost 38 per cent of its national assets, a gigantic proportion when compared with the figures of France and Britain: 1.5 and 0.8 per cent respectively. These assets included the majority of its cultural heritage, as museums, libraries, palaces and churches had gone up in smoke. But the real losses were far greater than that, and the consequences.
Nearly six million citizens had been killed, a proportion of one in five. The proportion among the educated elites was far higher: nearly one in three for Catholic priests and doctors, and over one in two for lawyers. A further half a million of Poland's citizens had been crippled for life and a million children had been orphaned. The surviving population was suffering from severe malnutrition, while tuberculosis and other diseases raged on an epidemic scale. Another half a million Polish citizens, including a high proportion of the intelligentsia, most of political and military leadership, and many of the best writers and artists, had been scattered around the world, never to return. In all, post-war Poland had 30 per cent fewer inhabitants than the Poland of 1939. But these figures give only a pale picture of the real harm done to Polish society: the Second World War destroyed not only people, buildings and works of art; it ripped apart a fragile yet functioning multi-racial and multi-cultural community still living out the consensual compact at the heart of the Commonwealth.
Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were determined to destroy Polish society. They therefore imported onto the multi-ethnic and socially diverse territory of Poland methods of racial, social and political manipulation they had developed in their own countries. It was these that tipped the realities of war in occupied Poland into a circle of hell far below that reached in any other country.
In October 1939 The Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland came into effect.
The larger Soviet zone was incorporated into the Soviet Union and over the next months about 1,700,000 of its inhabitants were transported to labour camps in Siberia or the far north of Russia.
Hans Frank [the Governor-General of Nazi occupied Poland] announced that the concept of Poland would be erased from the human mind, and that those Poles who were not exterminated would survive only as slaves within the new German Empire.
The process began at once. ....... priests, landowners, teachers, lawyers and other persons of education or influence were summarily shot or sent to a concentration camp at Oswiecim, renamed Auschwitz, in a process that aimed to decapitate Polish society and leave a leaderless and compliant workforce.
Poland's Jewish population was singled out for special treatment. In small towns and villages, Jews were rounded up and shot by the Wehrmacht or special police units following in its wake, and in some cases burnt to death in their wooden synagogues. In May 1940, the Jewish ghetto of Lodz was sealed, and the same happened in Warsaw and other cities. From 1942, the people trapped in these ghettos were transported to camps set up at Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz and elsewhere, for extermination. In all 2.7 million Polish citizens of Jewish origin were murdered.
In Poland, anyone caught assisting or sheltering a Jew faced an automatic death penalty not just for himself, but for his entire family."
The same penalty applied to anyone failing to report that someone else living in the same apartment block was sheltering a Jew.
Adam Zamoyski - Poland a History - first published by William Collins in 2009 - paperback addition published 2015 - ISBN 978-0-00-755621-2
Warsaw 1945
By comparison France suffered little in World War11. After the capitulation of the French Army to the German Wehrmacht, a puppet French government set itself up in Vichy. In so doing, France gained the dubious honour of being the only country defeated by Germany that established a new regime which collaborated with the Nazis. Occupied Paris carried on, as though an invasion had not occurred. Germans and French lived side by side and collaboration was the norm, in business and pleasure. The Arts flourished. Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir continued to write and publish. Camus published L'Etranger and The Mythe de Sisphe in 1942. Pablo Picasso was not able to show his work in public, yet he produced almost 400 paintings in addition to prints, drawings and sculptures during the Occupation, and his works were sold privately. The painter of Guernica continued to live and work in Paris during the Nazi occupation! Unlike Warsaw - which the Germans turned into a desert of rubble, during and after the Polish uprising in 1944 - as the vulture, in the shape of the Soviet Union's army, looked on - Paris was a peaceful paradise. The maintenance of this peace was built on collaboration, including to France's everlasting shame, the internment and deportation of over 75,000 Jews - including 11,000 children - to the Nazi gas chambers in Poland.
Paris during German Occupation
In January 1945, Soviet Forces invaded East Prussia and began the mass rape of German women as the they sped towards Berlin. "NKVD rifle regiments did not punish their own soldiers for rape, they punished them only if they caught venereal disease from victims who had usually caught it from a previous rapist. Rape itself, in a typical Stalinist euphemism, was referred to as an 'immoral event'. It is interesting that Russian historians today still produce evasive circumlocutions. One writes: 'Negative phenomena in the army of liberation caused significant damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the armed forces and could have a negative influence in the future relations with the countries through which our troops were passing.' This sentence also indirectly acknowledges that there were many cases of rape in Poland. But far more shocking from a Russian point of view is the fact that Red Army officers and soldiers also raped Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian women and girls released from slave labour in Germany. Many of the girls were as young as sixteen when taken to the Reich; some were just fourteen. The widespread raping of women taken forcibly from the Soviet Union completely undermines any attempts at justifying Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union."
Anthony Beevor - Berlin The Downfall 1945
The Innocents is set in Polish countryside in 1945, after the events described above. A guerrilla war is being fought, outside Warsaw, as Soviet forces and Polish communists quell nationalistic Polish resistance. (Mathilde, the main player in this film narrowly escapes being raped in an encounter with a Soviet patrol controlling a road block.)
Winter covers the landscape under a silent canopy of ice and snow. Not only is the landscape depressed, but also the spirits of the medical staff working in a Red Cross hospital rehabilitating French soldiers and French Jews, former inmates of work camps established by the Germans in Poland and Germany. Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laage), a young French doctor bearing a frosty demeanour, works in the hospital. A nun emerges from the throng of beggar orphans outside the hospital entrance. She finds her way into the hospital and begs Mathilde to help a sister who is seriously ill. Mathilde turns her away. Another begging Pole. Later, resting beside a frosted window, she sees the same nun, in prayer, on her knees in deep snow. Touched, Mathilde answers the nun's prayers and goes with her. They arrive at the convent, isolated and defenceless, on the edge of a forest - black tree trunks, stretching upwards, still and silent, from a floor of white snow - beautiful to the eye, but in the mind foreboding, because of what it may conceal. The cold, grey-stone interior of the convent, and a bare unlit altar do nothing, to allay the sense of foreboding. Are there no priests left? But the sister is not ill or suffering from disease. She is about to give birth. Mathilde assists her and the baby is delivered.
The following day, Mathilde revisits the convent and finds several more pregnant nuns. Soviet soldiers had raped them. Mathilde confers with Sister Maria (Agata Buzek) and the Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza) and it is agreed Mathilde will assist the remaining pregnant nuns. The Mother Superior stipulates the pregnancies are to be kept secret, and the infants placed by her in outside communities - her motive - to preserve the reputation and continuity of the convent community. Mathilde, an atheist, witnesses with secular indifference, the nuns struggling to retain their faith in God, given their rape, the irreversible loss of chastity, the baby and motherhood. Mathilde remains aloof, impersonal and professional. When she witnesses the nuns, singing, beautifully uplifting anthems of prayer, she begins to melt. Then the nuns, despite their anguish, open up to her, with affection and gratitude. Mathilde is defrosted. Hauteur to empathy. She engages warmly with the remarkable Sister Marie, ( "..twenty four hours of doubt for one minute of hope"), - the go-between - who holds together the vital communication between Mathilde and the prickly Mother Superior - and who kindles trust between Mathilde and the expectant nuns. When Mathilde realises she cannot cope on her own with multiple deliveries, she persuades her professional colleague and casual lover to help her deliver the babies. He is Jewish, scarred permanently by the holocaust, in which his family disappeared, and openly hostile to the Catholic church. If it was not for Mathilde he would not be in the convent.
The mother Superior, driven by her ardent desire to protect the convent and her charges, commits an unforgivable crime. Agata Kulesza gives the best acting performance of the film. She is brilliant, transforming the Mother Superior into a tragic Shakespearian character, who plunges irredeemably from grace to damnation. Despite her iniquity, you cannot fail to grieve for her, as she lies in bed, her chastity, her gift to God, ruined by the defilement of rape, guilty of mortal sin, waiting the final audit.
Sadly, the end of the film lapses into modern-day sentimentality.
Postscript: This story is based on the experience of a Red Cross doctor, Madeleine Pauliac in Poland, after World War11
Audience reaction: Silent rapture from start to finish.
Literary sources for this review:
Adam Zamoyski - Poland A History
Michael Curtis - Verdict On Vichy
Anthony Beevor - Berlin The Downfall 1945
Primo Levi - Is this a man
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