For One Life: Early Post–World War II Film Representations of the Holocaust in East Central Europe

ABSTRACT:The article analyzes early post–World War II representations of the Shoah in East Central European films. I argue that several filmmakers attempted to challenge the political memory of the war that universalized the Nazi persecution of the Jews and denied the complicity of the local gentile population in the Shoah. The key examples in support of the main thesis come from the recently discovered scripts of For One Life (Pro jeden život) a Czechoslovak Holocaust film planned for shooting in 1948. The existence of three different versions of the script allows us to analyze how several main topics developed in response to formal and informal feedback, and how the counter narratives were gradually replaced by the already established political memory of the war. In this way the article provides novel conclusions concerning the memory of the war and the Holocaust in the region.