We need to talk about genocide, says Polish director

MIRAH LANGER

“Film is some kind of catharsis. It helps with an exorcism,” she said, speaking to the SA Jewish Report while in Johannesburg last week for the screening of her film, Birds are Singing in Kigali. It was screened as part of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre’s (JHGC’s) commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.

Too often, people believe that if they deny there are problems after genocide, the past will disappear, Kos-Krauze said, considering her own experience in creating this film. However, she insisted that, “It will come back, and it will be the next wave, and [affect] the next generation.”

Kos-Krauze said that the film focused on exploring the aftermath of the genocide, and how trauma is processed. “The movie is more about how to live after a genocide. How post-traumatic stress disorder can last for generations.”

Kos-Krauze, who was born in Poland, noted that both she and her late husband and fellow filmmaker, Krzysztof Krauze, had always wanted to make a film about the Holocaust. They had searched for a “key”.

They spent extensive time in Rwanda, including three years at the site of the exhumations of victims of the genocide. It was a piece of information about the vulture population during the genocide that struck a chord for the couple. It detailed how at a time when the general population of vultures was decreasing in various parts of the world, in Rwanda, vultures thrived as they fed off the corpses of genocide victims. Afterwards, the vultures preyed on all the smaller singing birds in the area, leaving the landscape silent.

This snippet of information became the springboard for the script they then wrote together for Birds are Singing in Kigali. The film tells the fictional story of a Polish ornithologist who is working in Rwanda at the time the genocide breaks out. The ornithologist saves the daughter of a Rwandan colleague who is killed, bringing her back to Poland. Later, both travel back to Rwanda as the daughter tries to find fragments of closure after the massacre. The film explores how individual and collective trauma manifests in the aftermath.

In the film, Kos-Krauze repeatedly draws links between the Polish Holocaust experience and the Rwandan genocide.

“We have a duty that in every generation we should ask about the roots of violence. There is something very, very dark in our nature, that is what I believe. Frequently, as humankind, we decide to commit the same act of genocide.”

Even the South African past of apartheid resonates with its violence and the trauma it has left behind.

“If you ask me: do I believe in the process of reconciliation? I am very sceptical… you cannot vanish by one act of saying sorry, and then it’s done – no trauma.”

Instead, trauma is intergenerational.

Kos-Krauze worked with her husband making films for 17 years. He died from cancer in 2014, just six days into the shoot for Birds are Singing in Kigali.

She said that it was always the pair’s aim to tell the story of the oppressed, and to “strike debate and discussion”.

“The most important aspect was to make movies on the side of weaker people, be the voice of the speechless, of those who have died, who do not have the power to fight.

Kos-Krauze, although not halachically Jewish, has long been interested and involved in the Jewish community in Poland. During the 1990s, she worked for the Lauder Foundation in helping to rebuild the Jewish community in the country. She remembers helping to organise the first Jewish summer camps and schools. Minyans (prayer quorums) were set up, Yiddish books began to be republished, and cultural festivals were held.

In terms of future plans, Kos-Krauze has a script ready and is waiting for funding for a film about the Jedwabne massacre in Poland that took place in July 1941. This was when hundreds of Jews from this Polish town were murdered in one night, mostly after being locked in a barn that was set on fire. Non-Jewish Polish citizens collaborated in this mass killing.

Kos-Krauze said she decided to write the script after reading the testimony of one of the women whose male relative had been involved in the killings.

“She told that for many years, there was one small house where the wives, lovers, sisters, and daughters of the killers were meeting; crying out, and sitting together in silence because they had to live with the killers.”

Some of the men involved had wanted to kill, others had been forced into it, but either way “the women were conscious that they were killers and rapists, and that they had to live with them”.

“The women had to rewire something deep inside them to live with a man that they knew had killed.”

Often, they had to lie to others, even to their own children in order to be able to cope, said Kos-Krauze. The complicated nature of this reality fascinated her.

Kos-Krauze said that when it came to facing its past, it was clear that Polish society remained traumatised. However, it did seem to be becoming aware that it had no choice but to interrogate its history.

“[Poland] is dealing [with it]. It’s a shocking process. So many years have passed, and people are not able to speak properly about it, and face things like [the fact that] some Polish people were involved in murder during the World War II.”

The younger generation seemed more able to start these conversations, she said.

Yet, she said Europe’s current reaction to refugees itself revealed a blind spot.

People were unable to see how the refugee situation was linked to slavery and colonialism, for which Europe was responsible.

“Europe is changing. It will be a completely different Europe in the next 15 years. We have to prepare for the meeting with the other, and that depends on us. Are we going to make them strangers [or make a different choice]?”