Zbrodniarz Franciszek Kłos (z projektu filmu Stanisława Lenartowicza)

Abstract

This article is devoted to film adaptation of Stanisław Rembek’s novel Wyrok na Franciszka Kłosa (The Judgement on Franciszek Kłos), which was unrealised in 1963. The main character of this project, set in Poland during the Second World War, is a Polish policeman serving in the German police who murders civilians—including Jews in hiding—and fights against the Polish independence underground. An analysis of the elements of the film project which determined that Stanisław Lenartowicz could not obtain permission from the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland to make the film, seeks to determine what it would have been for the collective memory to raise the subject of betrayal and collaboration. Indeed, the script (and the novel) does not show the scale of the actual involvement of policemen in, for example, the Holocaust, and the main character, a degenerate, is shown as a special individual. Yet the very showing of such a traitor would strike at the fundalmental common myth of the unity of Polish society during the German occupation.

Keywords

• betrayal
• shoah
• second world war
• polish ‘blue’ police
• resistance movement
• collaboration
• fascism
• polish film school
• collective memory