Reeling Backward: Kapo (1960)
Susan Strasberg is a Jewish girl who passes herself off as a thief to escape the Nazi death camps, only to wind up as a concentration camp guard in this arresting, largely forgotten film.
I hadn’t heard of “Kapo,” but in addition to being a marvelous film it was one of the very first features to accurately depict the conditions inside the Nazi concentration camps. It was nominated for the foreign language Oscar, losing to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” and has become something of a forgotten movie.
It actually received mixed reviews upon its release, and odd as it may sound it was harshly criticized by many — including the self-aggrandizing idjits at Cahiers du Cinéma — for dramatizing the Holocaust. There are some hard-to-watch scenes of Jews being herded around naked and piles of rotting bodies that eerily resemble those in “Schindler’s List” decades later, which had a reception of celebration rather than scorn.
Strange… maybe audiences just weren’t yet ready to face the reality of World War II. To my mind, the opposite would be true: 15 years after the war’s end actually seems too late for its atrocities to make it to movie theaters.
“Kapo” was something of an oddball production that freely crossed national boundaries. The main character, a teenage Jewish girl named Edith, is supposed to be French and the early scenes take place there. But the dialogue is mostly Italian, as is the bulk of the principal cast and crew, including director Gillo Pontecorvo (“The Battle of Algiers”), who co-wrote the script with Franco Solinas.
The main star is an American, Susan Strasberg, who won a Tony Award starring in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in its Broadway debut. Despite being 22 when the film came out, she is quite believable playing Edith between the ages of 14 and 16. I think Pontecorvo even did something to fiddle with camera angles or elevations to make her seem much shorter in the younger scenes.
The cinematography by Aleksandar Sekulović is just spectacular, high-contrast black-and-white that grips you with its harsh beauty. It actually reminded me in a lot of ways of “The 400 Blows.”
Strasberg bore a not-uncommented upon resemblance to Audrey Hepburn, and it’s arresting to watch her transform from timid, wide-eyed waif into a stern guard who lords it over her fellow prisoners. The kapos were prisoners chosen by the German guards to act as an extension of their own authority, sort of like a jail trusty.
Their role was much debated in the years after the war, seen by many as traitors who reflected the depravity of the Third Reich. Not a few were lynched at war’s end. Others saw them as survivors who rejected the internalization of the victim mentality so many succumbed to.
Edith is separated from her parents upon arriving at the camp, and a helpful prisoner, Sofia (Didi Perego), sneaks her over to the camp doctor (relieving her of her necklace in the process). At this later stage of the war, Jews are are being liquidated immediately, so the doctor (Sima Janicijevic) disguises Edith as Nicole Niepas, a French thief who has just died.
He even gives her the infamous numbered tattoo, 10099 in her case. She wears the black triangle of the criminal class, and is imprisoned along with the red triangles, political prisoners. The Jews get the yellow triangle, the bottom of the rung.
Edith/Nicole spends the rest of the war passing herself off a gentile. Things don’t go very well for her at first, a delicate upper-class child used to piano lessons and pretty dresses, and most of the women prisoners are focused exclusively on their own survival. The notable exception is Terese (Emmanuelle Riva), who urges Edith not to forget her human dignity. The other prisoners snidely dismiss her as “the countess.”
Edith/Nicole soon shows signs of leaning more toward the general masses, blithely eating a potato Terese had been toasting up for herself on the heating stove in their barracks.
She also soon learns to barter the one asset she has: her lithe young body. Worried about the sores on the palms of her hands that would get her dismissed during the regular medical inspections (meaning death), she bares her breasts to the guards to distract them.
As a result she is selected to join their unofficial brothel in exchange for more food, and winds up befriending Karl (Gianni Garko), an SS guard grown morose over the loss of his hand keeping him off the front lines.
The story then jumps forward about a year, and Edith/Nicole is now one of the top kapos in the camp, second only to the mercenary Alisa (Mira Dinulovic). She even keeps a pet black cat named Faust with an ornamented collar that reads, “Touch Faust and die.” Nicole is widely hated by the other prisoners, but seems not to care and even enjoys her privileged status.
Things change when a group of captured Russian soldiers are brought to do work around the camp. She butts heads with Sascha, a young and handsome fellow played by Laurent Terzieff, and frames him for a female prisoner trying to pass a letter to a local farmer. For this he is forced to stand all night in a square next to to the electrified fence under the watchful eye of the tower gunner — certain death if he falters one way or the other.
Secretly, Nicole watches his torment from afar, rooting for him to survive. Sascha does, and a brief but intense love affair ensues.
Alisa lets Nicole know that all of the prisoners are going to be transferred to another camp to be gassed, and she leaks the word to Sascha and his comrades, who hatch an escape plan. Nicole is tasked with breaking into the electrical room to turn off the fence, but is unaware a siren will sound when she does so, ensuring her own death.
The last act is a massacre of horrific proportion. Most people in the camp, prisoners and guards, are killed. Sascha tips off Nicole about the siren, but still implores her to knowingly make this sacrifice so 2,000 other women can live. She does so, and dies, and ironically is mourned by Karl, who catches her for a final embrace.
I’ll admit the romance with Sascha seemed to me the weakest part of the movie, something tacked onto the third act to give the audience some sort of optimism after all the grim death and inhumanity. Terese, partly due to her sadness at Nicole turning into a kapo, intentionally throws herself into the electrified fence to end things.
Still, it’s a very daring film in a lot of ways. There’s even a scene where the kapos bring some of the more compliant women prisoners into a special area where it’s implied they carry on their own prurient activities of the flesh — mirroring what Nicole herself experienced.
I guess the lesson is that being dehumanized inevitably leads to the victims dehumanizing others, and themselves. “Kapo” is the story of a girl who loses her innocence, someone who is subjugated and made hard-hearted, but finds a way for redemption in the end.
Would that more people turned away from her path, or never stepped foot down it in the first place.