The following introduction (see video above) was made by our party’s culture secretary at a screening of the landmark 1948 Polish film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap). Directed by Wanda Jakubowska – a communist, resistance fighter and survivor of Auschwitz – the film was among the first cinematic depictions of the Nazi concentration camps and the organised resistance that developed within them.

Several Auschwitz survivors appear in the film, portraying roles closely connected to their own experiences just a few years after the liberation, adding a rare and powerful layer of direct testimony to its reconstruction of events. Produced in postwar people’s democratic Poland and filmed partly on location at Auschwitz itself, The Last Stage stands as both historical testimony and a forceful affirmation of the role played by communists in the struggle against fascism and genocide.

At a time when our ruling class seeks to discredit communists and anti-imperialists as “antisemitic” for expressing solidarity with oppressed peoples and resisting imperialist war, occupation, sanctions and national oppression, this screening reasserts a clear historical record: communists were at the forefront of the struggle against racism, fascism, colonialism and war.

This event forms part of the party’s wider cultural and political work to defend historical memory, strengthen proletarian internationalism and uphold the struggle for liberation everywhere.

You can watch The Last Stage on YouTube.

Comrades,

I would like to begin not in 1948, but in 2026. At a moment when the relationship between art, politics and historical responsibility has once again returned, almost inevitably, to the forefront of public discussion.

A few months ago, at the Berlinale festival, film director Wim Wenders stated that artists should remain outside politics. It is not particularly important here to examine that statement as an isolated incident. What matters is that it encapsulates a broader attitude frequently encountered in contemporary European cultural life: the idea that art ought to occupy a sphere separate from political conflict; that its task is to speak about humanity in general rather than engage with the concrete historical questions of its own time.

This position does not emerge in a historical vacuum. It is articulated during a period in which millions of people across the world are witnessing, in real time, the genocide in Gaza – the displacement of populations, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the deaths of thousands of civilians. What does it mean to demand that art remain outside politics precisely when history is intruding so violently into human lives?

This question concerns more than the attitude of artists towards contemporary events. It concerns the very way in which the collective west understands politics, memory and culture. For if one examines the post-war history of European intellectual life, one discovers that the separation of art from politics was presented not as a retreat, but as progress. Politics gradually came to be regarded as a realm of danger, conflict and ideology, while art was increasingly celebrated as a space of ‘universal’ human values, personal experience and individual emotion.

It is no coincidence that one of the most discussed films of recent years about Auschwitz has been The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer. The film sought to illuminate the everyday lives of perpetrators and the possibility of an apparently normal existence alongside mass murder. And when Glazer himself appeared on the Oscar stage, he provoked controversy by referring to the dehumanisation of people in the present and to the political instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory.

One need not agree with every aspect of his remarks. Yet it is worth noting that, within a cultural environment that often seems incapable even of naming what is unfolding before its eyes, Glazer at least managed to articulate the question of dehumanisation. He raised, however tentatively, the question of the relationship between the memory of past crimes and crimes occurring in the present.

The film we are about to watch, however, comes from an entirely different historical moment and an entirely different political tradition. It does not merely ask how people coexist with crime. It seeks to explain how crime itself is produced. It is concerned less with the psychology of perpetrators than with the social relations that make possible the camp, the war and fascism itself.

Indeed, the film we are about to see was born in a world in which such a distinction would have seemed incomprehensible. Wanda Jakubowska belonged to a generation that could not imagine art as a neutral refuge from history. She belonged to a generation that experienced Nazi occupation, resistance, concentration camps, liberation and reconstruction. For that generation, the question was not whether art was political. The question was which politics it served and which historical truth it was called upon to illuminate.

Jakubowska herself had been imprisoned in Auschwitz. Thus, when she returned to the site of the camp in 1948 to make The Last Stage, she did not return as a neutral observer of a past event. She returned as a survivor, as a communist filmmaker, and as a member of a generation that believed the memory of fascism could not be confined to the private sphere of mourning.

Here lies perhaps the first great distance between this film and the way we have become accustomed to viewing Holocaust cinema today. For Jakubowska, Auschwitz was not primarily an object of memory. It was an object of knowledge.

It is not enough to remember; one must understand.

It is not enough to be moved; one must interpret.

It is not enough to mourn the victims; one must understand the social and historical forces that produced the imperialist crime.

This starting point is deeply connected to the world that emerged after the defeat of fascism. The Last Stage was not simply the first major film about Auschwitz. It was a product of the early post-war period of the people’s democracies – a period in which the memory of war, cultural policy and socialist reconstruction were understood as interconnected processes.

Today it is easy to forget how remarkable it was that a devastated country such as Poland invested immense resources in creating such a film. We are speaking of a country that had lost millions of people, whose cities lay in ruins, and whose economy had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Yet under those conditions film production was regarded as necessary – not as a luxury, not as entertainment, but as an integral part of social reconstruction itself.

This is difficult to grasp if we approach cinema solely through the logic of the market. For the world that produced The Last Stage, culture was not a commodity. It formed part of a collective effort to understand what had happened and to shape a new social consciousness upon the ruins of old Europe.

And it is precisely here that the significance of socialist realism begins to emerge.

Too often, discussions of socialist realism are reduced to questions of aesthetics or state policy. Yet in the case of The Last Stage, the more important question is different: How does a socialist society confront trauma? How does it speak about a catastrophe of such magnitude? What is the purpose of memory?

The answer offered by the film is characteristic. The purpose of memory is not to retreat into trauma; nor is it to transform suffering into a permanent moral point of reference. Memory serves an educational purpose: it exists in order to help us understand history, to illuminate the social relations that produced fascism, to teach future generations what occupation, exploitation, racism and war mean – and above all, to teach what collective resistance means.

This is the perspective from which we should approach the film. Not as simply another work about the Holocaust, but as one of the earliest and most fully developed communist attempts to interpret Auschwitz and fascism historically.

Auschwitz as a social system

If there is one feature that radically distinguishes The Last Stage from much of the later cinema of the Holocaust, it is the way it approaches the camp itself.

The film does not seek to explain evil through the psychology of individual perpetrators. It shows little interest in why a particular SS officer is cruel or why another is sadistic. The emphasis is not on the individual but on the system.

The camera follows the camp’s procedures: registration, classification, reporting, surveillance, transportation, selections and labour. The camp appears as an organised social mechanism.

This is crucial. Jakubowska refuses to present Auschwitz as an eruption of irrational barbarism detached from the course of European history. She presents it as an institution: an organised form of social power; a mechanism operating through rules, hierarchies, administrative procedures and economic purposes.

Here we encounter a profoundly Marxist perspective. Human beings within the camp are transformed into numbers, records and labour power. Their value is determined by their usefulness. As long as they can work, they remain temporarily necessary. Once they can no longer work, they become expendable.

The film does not describe this process in the language of political economy; it shows it. And perhaps that is why it remains so powerful.

The prisoner appears not merely as a victim, but as a prisoner-worker: a human body incorporated into a process of production and exhaustion.

In this respect, the film enables us to see something that often disappears from later representations of the Holocaust. The camps were not merely machines of death; they were also machines of labour, machines of exploitation, machines for the production of value within the Nazi wartime economy.

This does not mean that economic function alone explains the entirety of the Nazi crime. It does mean, however, that without this dimension we cannot fully understand the camp as a historical phenomenon.

And Jakubowska understood this. That is why her film remains so different from later works that approach Auschwitz primarily as a site of moral horror or as the backdrop to individual stories of survival.

The camp and the colonisation of eastern Europe

To understand this dimension fully, we must view Auschwitz not as an isolated location but as part of a much broader project.

The history of the camps is often detached from the historical environment within which they developed. In reality, Auschwitz formed part of a comprehensive Nazi strategy for the reorganisation of eastern Europe.

The displacement of populations, mass expropriations, the destruction of entire communities and the settlement of new colonists were not secondary phenomena; they were integral components of a wider colonising project.

Around Auschwitz there emerged a vast “zone of interest”. Thousands of Poles were expelled from their homes and farmland, and their property was handed over to German settlers transferred from other regions of eastern Europe. At the same time, major corporations exploited slave labour to support wartime production.

All these elements belonged to the same project: a project aimed not merely at Germany itself, but at the reorganisation of an entire continent in the interests of the dominant political and economic forces of European capitalism.

In this sense, the history of Auschwitz cannot be separated from the history of occupation, colonisation and wartime economy. And this is one of the themes the film invites us to consider, even when it does not state it explicitly.

Collectivity against dehumanisation

Yet there is another aspect of the film that is equally important. Jakubowska was concerned not only with the functioning of the camp but also with the forms of resistance that emerged within it.

Here lies perhaps the greatest distance between The Last Stage and much subsequent Holocaust cinema.

Contemporary culture has become accustomed to searching for the hero: the exceptional individual; the solitary figure who survives, resists and endures.

Jakubowska followed a different path.

Her attention was directed towards the relationships between prisoners: solidarity, mutual assistance, political organisation and the possibility of collective action even under the most extreme conditions.

The film is filled with different languages, people of different origins with different life histories. Yet what emerges is not their difference but their shared position within a system of oppression.

This is deeply rooted in the antifascist and internationalist culture of the period. Resistance is not presented as the moral virtue of exceptional individuals; it is presented as a social possibility born from collective action.

This is both an aesthetic and a political position. It refuses to accept that human beings are transformed entirely into objects, even under the most extreme conditions of domination.

Solidarity appears as a force that survives despite terror; a force that allows people to remain subjects of history.

And perhaps here we find the film’s deepest optimism: the conviction that human collectivity cannot be eradicated, even when everything around it has been designed for precisely that purpose.

Postwar memory and the political uses of the Holocaust

To understand the film fully, however, it is not enough to examine the world in which it was created. We must also examine the world that followed.

For The Last Stage is not simply a film made in 1948. It is also a film that, over the decades, moved increasingly far from the dominant narratives surrounding the Holocaust.

This was not accidental.

When the film was made, the memory of war remained inseparable from the victory over fascism. The experience of camps, executions, persecution and occupation formed part of a broader antifascist narrative.

The central question was not merely what happened to the victims, but what social and political system had produced such barbarism.

The emphasis lay on causes, structures, social relations, war, resistance, liberation and the construction of a different future.

This is precisely the perspective embodied by Jakubowska’s film.

Yet as the decades passed – and particularly as the so-called cold war established new ideological boundaries – this balance changed. The antifascist interpretation gradually receded. In its place emerged a different politics of memory.

The centre of gravity shifted from historical explanation to moral condemnation, from social causes to trauma, from collective experience to individual experience.

This was not simply an academic transformation. It was a profoundly political process.

For every society chooses not only what it remembers but how it remembers. And the manner in which it remembers often shapes how it understands the present.

In this process, the figure of the prisoner-worker recedes. The image of the camp as an element of a wartime economy recedes. Discussion of fascism as the historical product of specific social relations recedes.

In their place, the victim increasingly becomes the central figure of memory.

This is not to diminish the suffering of victims; quite the opposite.

The question is: What is lost when trauma is detached from the history that produced it? What is lost when emotion replaces explanation? What is lost when memory ceases to be an instrument of understanding and becomes exclusively a moral obligation?

These are questions that The Last Stage compels us to ask.

l would therefore like to conclude by returning to the work we are about to watch.

The Last Stage is not merely a cinematic document. It is not merely a testimony. It is not merely the first major film about Auschwitz.

It is a work born from the victory over fascism and from the conviction that history can be understood.

That even the greatest crimes are not beyond explanation.

That the social forces which produce them can be analysed, and that people can organise themselves to prevent them.

Jakubowska does not ask the viewer simply to feel sorrow; she asks us to understand.

She does not ask us merely to remember; she asks us to learn.

She does not ask us to stand before the past in awe; she asks us to examine it critically.

And perhaps this is the film’s most valuable quality today.

It reminds us of a time when memory was not only an act of mourning; it was also an act of political knowledge.

With that thought in mind, let us proceed to the screening.