Children Must Laugh

Given the extraordinary context of a Polish/Jewish film made in 1936, the images of children here are heart-stopping, overcoming at least some of the more tedious aspects of what is clearly propaganda. It actually starts as more of a simple fundraising film, and as one of the opening (modern) title cards explains, the film was sent out to solicit funding from Jewish communities around the world to support the Medem tuberculosis sanitorium near Warsaw. Naturally, it presents the sanitarium in a positive light, with smiling children getting medical care, having fun outdoors, and collectively looking out for one another. Eventually we begin to hear what is a recurring theme, the news of a coal-miner's strike in the world, with the implied abuse of the laborer under capitalism, and the workers and their families going hungry. Towards the end, the children are singing how they are the "young guards of the proletariat," and the political position is clear.

Director Aleksander Ford was a committed communist during this period and for decades afterwards, running Film Polski after the war. The film was made during the middle of a decade of atrocities committed by Stalin, the extent of which would not yet be fully known, but it still reeks of being wildly naïve. It's also bitterly ironic given Stalin's brutality in Poland before, during, and after the war. Still, it's the fact that in 1942, the Nazis murdered all of the children and staff members who were then at the sanitorium by shipping them off to Treblinka, and that of the six million people murdered during the Holocaust, half were Polish, that's absolutely devastating while watching this film.

Who cares that they're acting for a film with its own agenda, the children in this film are absolutely adorable. One sings a lullaby as Ford gives us close-ups of the others' rapt faces. Another pretends to be her old grandmother, full of aches and pains. A third sings of a radish dancing with a horseradish with great animation. Yet another plays Vivaldi's Concerto on the violin, and on and on. It's obviously not a documentary about life in the sanitarium, but just having images survive of these children bears at least some witness to their lives, to brief moments of happiness that are absolutely haunting.

This Yiddish language documentary intended to raise money for the Medem Sanitorium in Poland, a facility where poor, urban Jewish children could spend a month or two in the country. Decried as communist at the time, copies were smuggled out to be shown in France and the United States. It was funded in part by the Jewish labor unions in Poland. As we all know, all unions are communists, and all charity government seizure of wealth.

It's mostly children: children awkwardly reciting speeches asking for support, children at play, children reciting poems. It also has Academician-style editing at the beginning, showing the poverty that these children lived in.

The facilities of the sanitorium were looted when the Germans invaded in 1939. The Jewish communities kept it limping on until 1942, when the entire staff and children present were seized and sent to a concentration camp. Some of the children who had been to the sanitorium took place in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April of 1943. I don't know what the position of the current Polish government is, but I did hear a Polish official, when asked about it, announce that it was a general uprising of the brave Polish people.