The Final Station

The Final Station records Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's obsession, as a Christian Pole, with the extermination of the Jews during World War II before the eyes of the Poles and, often, with their collaboration. Rymkiewicz places the Umschlagplatz - the area of the Warsaw ghetto where Jews were gathered for deportation as part of the final solution - at the center of his narrative, because "it happened right here, in the midst of our lives." Juxtaposing the past and the present, the personal and the historical, The Final Station includes a reconstruction of the minutest details of genocide (very much like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah) and a fictional account of an I. B. Singer-like summer at a resort near Warsaw where a group of Jewish and Christian friends meet shortly before the war for a last season of tennis, debating, and romance. In this relentlessly probing narrative, Rymkiewicz examines for the first time in all its complexity the Poles' relationship to the Holocaust.