Philippe Sands Discusses His Extraordinary Fathers & Sons Documentary, My Nazi Legacy

'My quest to understand the unapologetic Nazis'

By Stephen Applebaum, November 5, 2015

Left to right: Horst von Wachter, Philippe Sands, Niklas Frank

When Philippe Sands was growing up, the Holocaust loomed silently over his world like an unwanted visitor who won't leave. “I've lived with it my whole life,” says the eminent barrister, when we meet to discuss his role in the thought-provoking new documentary, My Nazi Legacy.

“I grew up in a household in which we didn't have German things. My brother and I knew there were things that had happened, but like many families we never talked about it.”

Sands' mother was born in Vienna and survived the war as a “hidden child” in France. She claims to remember nothing before 1945. His grandfather, who was born in Lviv in western Ukraine, never spoke about the war or where he came from. Sands later discovered that he was the only survivor in a family of 80.

“So there was no talking about it, but it's there. And it's a big issue. And it informs and it affects you, and I'm sure it affected the career choices that I made.”

Last year, when filming the documentary with director David Evans, Sands found himself standing in a waterlogged field in Ukraine where the remains of most of his grandfather's family lie - among 3,500 people murdered, with a single bullet to the head, on March 25th, 1943 - to this day.

With him were Horst von Wachter and Niklas Frank, the sons of high-ranking Nazis Otto von Wachter and Hans Frank, whose implementation of the Final Solution wiped out the remaining Jewish population of Lviv and its surroundings.

The trio had already visited a former parliamentary chamber where Hans gave a speech in which he praised Otto for making many of Lviv's Jews disappear; and the imposing disused synagogue where Sands' family worshipped which the Nazis set on fire. Their next stop brought him face to face with current Ukrainian Nazi sympathisers at a chilling commemoration ceremony for the Waffen-SS Galicia Division – the first SS unit to enlist foreign fighters – created by Otto.

The men's lives converged after Sands became fascinated with Frank's father - “He was highly intelligent, highly educated; how could someone take the direction he had taken?” - while researching a book due for publication next year, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. He wrote to Niklas after reading his acclaimed book about his father Hans, In the Shadow of the Reich, and they met in Hamburg, where they talked for hours. While Niklas bitterly distanced himself - psychologically, emotionally, morally – from Hans and his crimes, he told Sands: “You should meet my friend Horst. They're not all like me.”

Left to right: von Wachter, Sands, Frank

 

In the film, Niklas takes out a photograph of his father after he'd been hanged for mass murder at Nuremberg. (He keeps it as proof to himself that he really is dead, but also to remind Germans about what can happen when civil society breaks down.) Horst also shows Sands photographs, but the mood is different. Horst feels no anger towards his father, just love and devotion. It was the system that was wrong, he says, absolving Otto of any responsibility. Unlike Hans Frank, von Wachter was concealed with help from the Vatican, and died before he could be brought to justice. If he had gone to Nuremberg, he would have been acquitted, Horst insists. “Who would speak against him?” he asks Sands, rhetorically. “Only the Jews.”

When Sands visited Horst for the first time, the Austrian and his wife were living in three ground-floor rooms of their crumbling Gormenghast-like schloss. “It was bitterly cold, -2, -3 inside, and he's broke,” says Sands. Horst kept his father's library on the third floor, and the photograph albums he produced astonished and fascinated the lawyer. “You open them and there's Goering and Goebbels and Himmler and 'AH' [Adolf Hitler], and incredible images.”

One day, Horst took a black book down off a shelf. “It was Mein Kampf and it was inscribed by his mother - she'd bought it as an engagement present - 'For our struggle.' So he lives with it and he'll say: 'That's interesting. I didn't know that I had that.'”

Neither Horst nor Niklas hid anything from the film-makers, and even agreed to open up their dialogue to the public in a live discussion at the Purcell Room in London last year, which forms part of the documentary. “We thought there would be a huge explosion, that they wouldn't be talking to each other anymore, and that would be the end of the film,” reveals Sands.

Instead, the men respectfully held their positions without any major fireworks. And it wasn't until near the end of the debate, when Horst proudly revealed that his father is venerated in Ukraine, that the filmmakers knew where to go next. 

“After the Purcell Room, Horst said, 'Well, if we're going to go to the Ukraine, let's go on commemoration weekend and I'll introduce you to all these lovely people.'”

During the trip, Sands becomes increasingly impatient with Horst's refusal to recognise his father's guilt. In a key scene, he presents him with a document proving Otto's involvement in mass murder and is rebuffed. “His reaction, let's just say, irritates me,” says Sands, “and I lose my rag.” He admits he's “uncomfortable” with the scene. As a barrister you're “trained: don't show your emotion, stay cool, be balanced.” But, he adds, “I'm a lawyer and I'm a human being and there are points where one can no longer be excluded with the other.”

Although he never succeeded in eliciting an acknowledgement from Horst, it was important to him to keep trying because “there's a concern that in failing to acknowledge you effectively take ownership of what has happened, and that really bothered me.”

Their last destination, where newly unearthed remains of fallen Waffen SS soldiers were being buried in a ceremony attended by men in Nazi uniforms, is the most troubling. Throughout the film there is a strong sense of the past pressing against and informing the present, and nowhere was this more explicit. “My big theme in this is if you suppress stuff, it will come back,” says Sands. “It doesn't go away. It's my own family story of my grandfather and mum not wanting to talk about these things and nevertheless it comes back. And I think that you see that in the fields in Ukraine.”

The commemoration ceremony was “as shocking a day as I have ever had,” he says. Horst, on the other hand, couldn't have been happier. The inner conflict he sometimes seems to be experiencing up until that point appears too resolve itself as his belief in his father's decency is vindicated by Ukrainian military veterans and younger swastika-wearing attendees. Niklas is disgusted. He tells Sands he believes Horst is a full-blown Nazi and vows to break off contact with him.

“I'm pretty careful who I throw that label at,” says Sands, who regards both men as victims, “and I say in the film I don't think he's a Nazi . . . But he's an apologist, and that's really bad.”

Does he think, at a time when antisemitism is increasing, that the film is a warning?

“Yes, the film is an expression of my own greater consciousness of the seriousness of issues that are out there for the Jewish community but also for other communities. Xenophobia and racism are on the rise, and antisemitism is part of that.

“I think David and I felt very strongly that those scenes in the Ukraine were incredibly important. But I think the heart of it is this sense that it's showing that what happened then is very alive today. Things that are deeply buried don't disappear and we have to be constantly vigilant.”

A slightly edited version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, November 6th, 2015

Come back soon for a full transcript of my fascinating interview with Philippe Sands 

Krystyna Chiger: In Darkness

'These were terrible times': the true story behind In Darkness

 

by Stephen Applebaum

 

Krystyna Chiger, the last surviving member of a group of Jews who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the sewers of Lvov for 14 months, says Agnieszka Holland's dramatisation rings true

 

"I was young but I saw everything," says Krystyna Chiger, "and my experience has stayed with me my whole life. I remember every detail – everything – because it lives with me."

As a Jewish girl growing up in Lvov, Poland, Chiger experienced the Nazi occupation of her city and the ghettoisation, humiliation, and brutalisation of her people. Each day brought new terrors, until finally the ghetto was liquidated in a burst of breathtaking violence.

Chiger and her family escaped with other Jews into the city's sewer, and – with the help of a Catholic sewer worker, Leopold Socha – survived there for 14 months. Their incredible story is now the subject of Agnieszka Holland's Oscar-nominated Holocaust drama, In Darkness. 

Today a retired dentist and author of the memoir The Girl in the Green Sweater, Chiger heard about the movie only after filming was completed, because Holland had thought everyone was dead. As the last survivor, she's disappointed. But she has no qualms about the film's authenticity. "It is very, very realistic," she says. "Agnieszka did it without any beautification or exaggeration. She did it like it was."

Chiger had already witnessed many horrors by the time she went underground, during days laced with fear. When her parents went out to work, she stayed at home alone with her younger brother, Pawel; their lives were in her hands. "I was five, and I was as mature as a grown-up person," she says.

How did they survive?

"You become like an animal. You go by instinct. I learned to recognise footsteps: I knew this is German or this is Jewish or this is Ukranian.

"Sometimes, when I recognised the footsteps of Germans, I packed Pawel into a suitcase and pushed it under the bed, and then I hid behind a robe my mother left hanging in the corner. For me, these were terrible times."

Her father was skilled at finding hiding places for his offspring. Even so, Chiger says she was unaware that he and some other men were planning to conceal them in the sewer. "When they didn't want me to know something, they spoke Yiddish so I would not understand," she laughs. "Only when the liquidation came, that night, did I know."

As terrified screams and gunfire filled the air outside, Chiger stood trembling at the mouth of a tunnel leading into the miasmic blackness beneath the city. "I will never forget, I was so scared. I didn't want to jump and I was crying. Then somebody at the back, I think my mother, pushed me. My father was down already and he caught me."

She remembers weeping as he led her by the hand to the living space the men had cleared. "I kept asking: 'How long? How long?' … The darkness, the noise of falling water, this was a terrible moment." 

The siblings contracted dysentry, which lasted for the first few weeks, but eventually adapted to their environment – just as they'd had to do above ground – in order to survive. "The things we were mostly battling were the rats, but the surroundings were terrible: the smell, the dirt, the worms on the walls; it was unbelievable."

Socha, a deeply religious reformed petty thief, was paid to bring the group provisions. When the money ran out, he considered abandoning them. However, he changed his mind and continued to risk his life, and the lives of his family, for free. Chiger still doesn't know why. 

"This is a question that I am sometimes asking myself. He was an orphan, he didn't have a nice life when he was young, maybe something moved in him. My mother used to say that he was an angel that was sent by God to save us."

This belief was strengthened by the nature of Socha's death in May 1945. Soon after achieving his dream of buying a bar, he was killed by a Russian army truck while out cycling with his daughter. "The people who were witnesses, they said his blood was spilling into the sewer. For us this is very symbolic, and this is why my mother felt the way she did." 

Chiger will never forget him. "In my eyes he's like my father," she says. "I feel for him this way." Poles, she believes, see him as a kind of light at the end of the tunnel: a Pole who selflessly helped a group of Jews when so many collaborated in their destruction. She suspects this is why her book was a big seller in Poland: it was about "something good somebody did".

She hopes the film will bring Socha to a wider public, and that it will help in preventing the horrors of the Holocaust from becoming just a distant memory. She'd also like it to encourage people, especially the young, not to give up too quickly in tough times.

"If my father had given up, I wouldn't be here. He was always looking for safe places, and if this way didn't work, then he tried that way. And this is why you stay alive."

First published in the Guardian

Agnieszka Holland: In Darkness

Director Agnieszka Holland is striving for reality and honesty in her film about Polish Jews hiding from the Nazis

By Stephen Applebaum, March 8, 2012

It is late January and two days since Agnieszka Holland's tough Holocaust film, In Darkness, was nominated for the foreign-language film Oscar. She has been in this position before, but 2012 is the first time that the 63-year-old director has represented her homeland: Poland. On the night, the prize will go to Iran's A Separation. For now, though, Holland feels like she is carrying the weight of the Polish people on her shoulders.

"It's like God gave me the honour of Poles and now I have to win the World Cup," she says in heavily accented English. "Normally I am cool about these things, but today I am really nervous."

In Darkness has not been an easy project. Having covered the Holocaust in Angry Harvest and Europa, Europa, the film that broke her in America, and as a screenwriter on Andrzej Wajda's Korzcak - whose final scene led to Holland, the daughter of a Catholic mother and Jewish father, being branded antisemitic - she was not in a hurry to return to it again.

While its stories are charged with dramatic, psychological and moral potential, "you have to go into the reality very deeply, on many levels, for two or three years," she says. "So you read books, watch documentaries, watch movies, talk to people, and then you try to recreate the horrors without being superficial or kitsch. This process is so complicated and so painful that after finishing the film, you feel like you have been there in some way."

Holland (right) believes a tendency towards sentimentality has undermined recent Holocaust films.

The specific "there" in In Darkness is the rat-infested sewers of Lvov, where for 14 months a group of Jews hide from the Nazis following the liquidation of the ghetto, helped by a Polish Catholic sewer worker. The story is true but has so many incredible elements that even Holland admits she thought David Shamoon's screenplay was fiction when she first read it. Adding to this impression was the presentation of the Jewish characters as flawed individuals rather than the noble innocents often found in films. For someone who insists on the truth, in her life and her work, this honesty was appealing.

She was "irritated" by many of the Holocaust films made in the past 20 years or so, she says, because of the tendency of filmmakers to theatricalise events and, in particular, to draw moral conclusions. "I hated Life is Beautiful [Roberto Benigni's 1999 Oscar winner] for this reason. The philosophy of that was so offending to the people that went through this because it says if you love your child, you will save it. And what was worst about the Holocaust is that you could love your child, and still you could not save it… It wasn't that the right people were rewarded and the wrong people were punished, and this absurd, irrational meaninglessness is something which is crucial, I think, to this experience. If you try to embellish it and make it sentimental, you just lie." 

Her commitment to the truth in In Darkness has been praised by Krystyna Chiger, the last surviving member of the Lvov Jews, who declared the film to be "very, very realistic, and accurate. What happened was so terrible that you don't need to dramatise anything. Show the truth of how it was, I think this is the best way. And I think that Agnieszka did this." Chiger had heard about the movie only after filming was completed, something Holland blames on her Canadian producers. "They'd been doing the research and told me everyone was dead," she says. When she received a letter from Chiger, she immediately set up a screening for the Long Island-based retired dentist. 

"I showed her a rough cut of the film because I wanted her to have the possibility of making changes, but she didn't have any comments." What would have been the worst criticism she could have made? "That she found the spirit of the story wrong and emotionally didn't connect to it. It would mean that I'd shot very far away from the target. That, fortunately, didn't happen."

The relationship between Jews and Catholics in In Darkness, and in Holland's other Holocaust films, reflects the filmmaker's own "double identity" as a Pole and a Jew (the "battlefield", she calls it), and her personal experience of antisemitism. In contrast to her own openness, her father never spoke about being Jewish to her, and it was only when some children called her a "dirty Jew" while out playing, aged six, that she discovered this side of her heritage. "I felt intrigued and offended, and I asked my mother what it meant." Her mother, who as a member of the Polish underground had fought in the Warsaw uprising in 1944, explained that Holland's father was really Jewish and that his parents had died in the Warsaw ghetto. "She said I didn't need to feel ashamed or angry, and that I should be proud, and made a speech about Jewish martyrhood." Asked why her dad had been silent, Holland pauses for a moment. "I think he was traumatised. I think he felt guilty. He escaped at the beginning of the war and he left his family behind and they all died, except for one sister." 

He later died in mysterious circumstances while being held by the secret police under suspicion of treason, a victim of one of the post-war Communist regime's antisemitic purges. The Holland name was blacklisted and although Agnieszka had several opportunities to change it, she refused, feeling it her "duty to preserve the line."

Unable to go to film school in Poland, she studied in Prague instead. When she returned home, she struggled to get her films seen. In 1981, she went into exile in France and today lives between Los Angeles and Brittany. 

Does representing Poland at the Oscars feel bitter-sweet? "No, no, no," insists Holland. "After Communism fell apart I started to go there very often and got involved in the inner life, the social life, cultural life, and political life, even. This year I was listed as one of the 100 most influential and important people in Poland." She smiles. "So I am Polish, you know?"

From The Jewish Chronicle, 8th March, 2012