Małgorzata Tryuk 

Marta Weiss – a cinematic figure of the interpreter in a Nazi concentration camp.

The case of The last stage of Wanda Jakubowska

Despite a massive amount of the archival material on Nazi concentration camps, the references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief and laconic. Usually they consist of dry facts as related in ontological narratives of victims of the Nazi regime (Tryuk 2010, 2015). In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the picture of Marta Weiss, a fictional figure of a camp interpreter presented in the docudrama Ostatni etap (The last stage) from 1948 by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska who herself was a prisoner in the concentration camp of Birkenau.

To this day The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz” (Haltof 2012), a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives. The Last Stage is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: the realistic images of the camp; the passionate moralistic appeal; and the clear divisions between victims and oppressors.

At the same time The Last Stage is considered to be a leading film for feminist studies. The authors of the film were women: the scenario was written by Wanda Jakubowska together with another fellow ex-inmate, a German communist Gerda Schneider. The main characters of the film are almost exclusively women. They form an international group of inmates opposed to female guards and kapo. Their fate as women, the feminity, the labour and the motherhood in the camp, their solidarity and finally their resistance to the oppressors constitute the main topic of the film (Talarczyk-Gubała 2015).

Finally The Last Stage constitutes a unique, quasi documentary source about the role and place of translators and interpreters in this terrific environment. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrait of Marta Weiss may be undisputed as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, herself translator and messenger in the Auschwitz camp, assasinated in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp (Levi 1987). 

Therefore the paper will present the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies and interpreting studies.

References:

Haltof, M. (2012). Polish Film And The Holocaust. Politics and History. New York/Oxford: Berghahn.

Levi P. 1987. Is this a man . The Truce. trans. Stuart Wolf. London: Abacus.

Talarczyk-Gubała 2015. Wanda Jakubowska. Od nowa. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej.

Tryuk M. 2010. “Interpreting in Nazi concentration camps during World War II”. Interpreting. Vol. 12, no 2, 125-145.

Tryuk M. 2015. On ethics and interpreters. Frankfurt a/Main: Peter Lang Verlag.

bio sketch:

Małgorzata Tryuk,  Ph.Litt., Ph.D., and MA is Full Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Head of the Department of Interpreting Studies and Audiovisual Translation at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland; member of Polish Association of Translators and Interpreters (STP) and member of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST); author and editor of books and papers in Polish, French and English on interpreting and translating in public services, conference interpreting and translating.