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| Blanka Waleská in Distant Journey |
Cast: Blanka Waleská, Otomar Krejca, Viktor Okásec, Zdenka Baldová, Eduard Kohout, J.O. Martin, Josef Chvalina, Anna Vanková, Jirí Plachy, Sasa Rasilov, Jirí Spirit, Rudolf Deyl, Zdenek Hodr. Screenplay: Erik Kolár, Mojmir Drvota, Alfréd Radok. Cinematography: Josef Strecha. Art direction: Jan Pacák, Frantisek Troster. Film editing: Jirina Lukesová. Music: Jirí Sternwald.
Films about the Holocaust are so much a part of cinematic history now that it's surprising to see how well one of the earliest, Afréd Radok's Distant Journey, has maintained its power to disturb and move us. The film centers on a Jewish doctor, Hana Kaufmannová (Blanka Waleská), whose marriage to a gentile, Antonin Bures, initially spares her from being sent to the camps along with the rest of her family. Radok intercuts their stories with scenes of the Nazi rise to power, many of which come from Leni Riefensthal's infamous propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). It also includes scenes shot at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which was planned by the Nazis as an intermediate stop before internees were sent to the extermination camps. The word "transport" becomes a recurring motif in the film. By today's standards, Distant Journey is mild in its depiction of the horrors of the camps, but the psychological tension is unabated and the moral impact remains intense. The story is all too familiar: a family uprooted, separated, and sent to detention and possible death. How, we wonder, could people let such things happen? Wouldn't we be outraged if such injustice were taking place in the United States today? But no, that's all in the past, right?
