A Devil of a Holocaust Movie

• Published in: Forward (New York, N.Y.)
• Main Author: Glinter, Ezra
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y The Forward Association, Inc 16.09.2016
• Subjects: Motion pictures; Tiran, Itay; Wrona, Marcin
• ISSN: 1051-340X

The dybbuk, an ancient element of Jewish folklore, was made famous by "The Dybbuk," a play, and later a movie, by writer and ethnographer S. An-sky. In An-sky's story, the spirit of a deceased kabbalist inhabits the body of his beloved, Leah, who is about to marry another man. In "Demon" the dybbuk, Hana, takes similar action, inhabiting the body of the groom because she was denied her own marriage due to her untimely death. Whereas An-sky's play was a reworking of folklore, however, "Demon" is a reworking of history. "The whole country's built on corpses," one character says when told of the skeleton supposedly on the property. When Hana speaks through [Piotr], saying in Yiddish, "Get out of my house," it becomes clear that the property is haunted because it was stolen from dead Jews. The "Demon" of the title seems less a reference to the spirit of Hana than to the demons haunting all the guests at the wedding. As the night wears on they get drunker and drunker, succumbing to what seems like a mass psychosis. "Demon" arrives at a sensitive moment for Poland. Since 2015 the right-wing Law and Justice party has governed the country, and the party's Cabinet approved a bill in August outlawing reference to "Polish death camps," along with other assertions of Polish war crimes. While historians have affirmed that the concentration camps of the Holocaust were the work of German Nazis, not Poles, the law - which makes such references punishable by up to three years in prison - has been viewed as an effort by Poland to whitewash its history. "You may think we took part in it," the government seems to be saying, "but you only think we did."