Film Reviews
In Darkness (2011) — Poland
Leopold Socha was a Polish Catholic sewer inspector in Lvov, Poland, during the Nazi occupation. He was also a petty thief who hid his loot in the underground labyrinth which he knew like the back of his hand. When he stumbled upon some Jews hiding in his sewers, he offered to protect them for a price. Otherwise, of course, he could turn them over to the Nazis for a tidy profit. They agree on a strictly business transaction, even though both sides deeply mistrust the other. But across the days and weeks Socha's conscience awakens, and for 14 months, until the Russians liberated their city, and long after they stopped paying him, he successfully saved a dozen Jews. Socha is a very ordinary and morally ambiguous hero, and the Jews themselves are often portrayed in a negative light. In Darkness was Poland's nomination for best foreign language film. The movie is based upon the survivors's stories as collected by Robert Marshall in his book The Sewers of Lvov (1991), and by the first-person memoir of the last survivor of the group, The Girl in the Green Sweater (2008), by Krystyna Chigerby, who was a four-year-old at the time. In Polish, German, Yiddish, and Ukrainian with English subtitles.