Ostatni Etap

THE LAST STAGE is the story of the fate of a group of female prisoners who join the resistance movement in the camp. When Marta, the protagonist, is to be hung before the eyes of her co-prisoners following a failed escape attempt, she slits her wrists, even as the Allied airplanes already circle on the sky; “Never again Auschwitz” are her last words. Jakubowska wrote the script for the film together with German communist Gerda Schneider, who was also imprisoned in Auschwitz. Together, they returned to the scene of the crime in 1947 and filmed among the remaining barracks, labor camps and factories with the involvement of many female survivors. “The desire to shoot this film probably stems from the fact that I am still alive in the first place. It protected me from experiencing Auschwitz in a purely subjective manner and later on allowed me to treat everything that surrounded me back then as a special form of documentation. I collected the material by talking to women from different camp commands. I was obliged to depict reality as precisely as possible, although I knew from the beginning that the truth about Auschwitz could not be filmed” (Wanda Jakubowska) Upon its release, the film was received with a great deal of interest worldwide. Later it fell into oblivion and only started being screened again more often from the 90s onwards. In 2019, it was digitally restored.