The film's Rapportführer is the most inauthentic character in The Champion; however, one can also notice minor or significant irregularities in the other characters. The camp commandant (played by Marcin Bosak) is presented in a rather one-dimensional, almost caricatured way - he is referred to in the film as "Herr Kommandant", while in the closing credits, he is misleadingly described as Lagerführer (a separate, lower-ranking position) - an uncomplicated individual, devoid of any empathy, capable only of feeling primitive satisfaction at the thought of defeating and humiliating his opponents. The viewer may get the impression that the commandant's greatest concern in the largest concentration and extermination camp was providing entertainment for the SS men and ultimately conquering the Polish boxer, a prisoner of that camp.
The film's undeniable merit is that the characters speak their national languages with great attention to accent. The Rapportführer's or Commandant's German is natural and very fluent compared, for example, to Teddy's, for whom German was a language learned at school - the differences in pronunciation and accent are clearly audible. However, it is not clear why nurse Maria, who personifies the Austrian nurse Maria Stromberger on screen, does not simply speak German but a strange mixture of Polish and German. It is also worth noting that the character of Maria appears in the film after one of Teddy's first fights (spring 1941). In reality, Maria Stromberger began working at the SS infirmary at Auschwitz a year and a half later, in October 1942. She also had the opportunity then to meet Pietrzykowski, who had been working there since mid-1942.
Attempting to highlight the nationality of the screen characters through language, the filmmakers, unfortunately, failed to take into account the fact that from mid-1941, Auschwitz gradually became an international camp. In addition to Polish and German, the prisoner community spoke Russian, Czech, Slovakian, French and many other languages. The Jews brought to the mass extermination also spoke various European languages, while in Barczewski's painting, only Polish and German can be heard. The Jews brought for mass extermination also spoke different European languages, whereas only Polish and German could be heard in Barczewski's film.
Undoubtedly one of the dilemmas faced by the creators of feature films (and other pop culture representations of the subject of KL Auschwitz) is creating credible characters of the camp prisoners on the screen. The most problematic issue is the use of numbers, the fundamental symbol of the prisoner alongside the striped uniform. There is an individual camp story behind all the numbers, which makes their use in a semi-fictional work controversial and problematic in the ethical sense. The fictional prisoner depicted on the screen ceases to be anonymous after being labelled with a specific number. Moreover, the prisoner number and its associated signs (triangle, letter) carry a range of information - they tell us about the nationality of a particular prisoner, the reason and the time of their incarceration in the camp.
Looking at the numbers on the actors' striped uniforms in the first scenes of the film, one gets the impression that the filmmakers, aware of these nuances, made an effort to retain the credibility of the secondary and tertiary characters as well. The numbers on the striped uniforms of most of the actors are blurred or only fragmentarily visible, making it impossible for the viewer to relate the on-screen characters to the fates of authentic people. The numbers of Polish prisoners from the first transport, which are clear, belong to unidentified persons. The Rotmistrz in the film (played by Marian Dziędziel) bears number 73 - the number of a prisoner whose personal details remain unknown. The same is true for the number of the prisoner named Klimko, played by Rafał Zawierucha (no. 161) - historians have also not been able to attribute it to a specific person. On the other hand, number 223, worn by the film Janek (played by Jan Szydłowski), was probably that of Marian Dziedzinowicz (or Dziedziniewicz), a middle-school student who died in Auschwitz in 1941 (determined only based on former prisoners' recollections, as there is no confirmation in documents). These examples would indicate that the filmmakers approached the issue of prisoner numbers with due care. Unfortunately, this conjecture recedes when confronted with further fragments of the film that fail to avoid serious errors in the numbering of actual characters, such as Kapo Ernst (no. 5) and Kapo Walter (no. 14).
The number 5 in KL Auschwitz was assigned to Hans Bock, who served first as Blockältester and then as Lagerältester of the Haftlingskrankenbau (the older prisoner hospital, located in block 20). The most famous kapo named Ernst, on the other hand, was Ernst Krankemann, who arrived at Auschwitz in August 1940 from Sachsenhausen and was marked with the number 3210. He served as kapo of the penal company, among others. The survivors remember him as one of the most ruthless executioners who abused and murdered the camp prisoners. In July 1943, he was part of a transport of prisoners sent to the euthanasia facility in Sonnenstein, where they were murdered with carbon monoxide. Accordingly, none of the stories mentioned above corresponds to the film character of Kapo Ernst.
The film Walter, whose original was Walter Dünning, a pre-war German boxer that served as a Kapo in Auschwitz, was erroneously marked with the number 14. In reality, this number was given to Jansen Winnant, a bricklayer by trade, who became the Oberkapo of the bricklayers' Kommando in Auschwitz. Based on surviving camp documents, it has not been possible to establish the number or date of Walter Dünning's arrival at Auschwitz, but he certainly was not among the first 30 criminal prisoners. According to survivors' accounts, he arrived at the camp shortly before his first fight with Pietrzykowski in early 1941.
In the forty-second minute of the film, the figure of a bearded giant, a prisoner marked with a black triangle (the category "asocials") and number 31504, appears to fight Teddy. He eventually loses the fight, and in one of the subsequent scenes, his body, deposited on a wooden cart among other corpses, is taken outside the camp. Despite the tragic fate that ultimately befalls him, this character - with some kind of feral aggression, furiously attacks the protagonist in the ring - and thus evokes neither pity nor compassion due to the camp's victims, but rather fear and aversion in the viewer. Who then is prisoner number 31504? The filmmakers do not bother to explain, but an apparent inconsistency emerges when confronted with archival documents. The number 31504, registered on 19 April 1942, belonged to Felix Wachsberger, a fifty-three-year-old Slovak Jew and office worker who barely survived a month in the camp (he died on 21 May 1942). He obviously had nothing to do with the character portrayed in the film. Here, the filmmakers used the camp number completely unreflectively, disregarding the fact that there is a completely different story behind it than the one presented on screen. It leads one to assume that the marking with numbers of the film Calvary Captain, Klimko and Janek may be a coincidence rather than a genuine concern for the identity of the victims.
In concluding the discussions on how KL Auschwitz prisoners are portrayed in Barczewski's film, one should pay attention to the small depicted in the film. In reality, however, the camp was overcrowded. Surviving fragments of documents show that the number of prisoners in the camp exceeded 11,000 on the first day of March 1942. On the first day of May the same year, there were more than 14,000 prisoners. Meanwhile, the film’s Auschwitz appears in almost all scenes as a deserted place, with isolated characters in striped uniforms wandering around. It is absolutely bizarre to juxtapose the commandant's words, who, while planning Teddy's fight with Hammerschlag, orders that Every prisoner is supposed to see it, with the later image of a ring surrounded by no more than a few dozen men in striped uniforms. It completely fails to reflect the historical realities of Auschwitz and creates yet another misconception.
SUMMARY
Summing up, the attention given to the visual aspect of the film is undoubtedly noticeable and deserving of recognition. Equally notable is the effort invested in the physical and athletic conditioning of Glowacki, who plays the leading role. Unfortunately, equal attention was not accorded to the factual content, which, as one might assume, is of fundamental importance for a historical film. Although the filmmakers tried to familiarise themselves with Tadeusz Pietrzykowski and Auschwitz's history, they failed to reconstruct it authentically and credibly in the film. They did not avoid simplifications that trivialise Pietrzykowski's biography through minor misstatements and factual inaccuracies, as well as grave factual errors that are crucial and unacceptable in the context of teaching about Auschwitz. Many images and phenomena portrayed in the film are indeed reproductions of contemporary stereotypes and popular beliefs, distant from the perspective of people who participated in those events and from the objective knowledge accumulated over the post-war years. What the makers of The Champion lack is a broad understanding of the realities of the camp, which can only be obtained through reliable and in-depth acquaintance with memoirs and literature on the subject. Something it seems the creators did not fully realise.
To make matters worse, some of the misrepresentations seem deliberate, aimed solely at stirring up emotions. In interviews, the filmmakers - Barczewski and Głowacki - flaunt their knowledge of Auschwitz history, which is not reflected in the picture ultimately offered to the viewer. As an example, the gruesome phenomena described earlier are depicted inappropriately for the time or place in question. It is unfortunate, given that the events specific to the period of Pietrzykowski's stay in the camp are by no means less significant or dramatic. An analysis of the transports of Polish political prisoners deported to Auschwitz between June 1940 and spring 1943 reveals that, in many cases, 50-70% of them died in the first weeks of incarceration, and often, none of the new arrivals, especially those deported in autumn and winter, survived this period. Out of the 50 deportees to Auschwitz from the Montelupich prison on 26 June 1941, only four survived, while 54 of the 63 transported on 29 July 1941 from the Tarnów prison died in Auschwitz - half of them in the first two months. Of the 141 prisoners brought from Częstochowa on 30 January 1942, 122 died, most before the arrival of spring, while nine of the 171 brought on 20 February 1942 lived to see the liberation.
One could list countless examples of these dramatic statistics illustrating the death rate among Polish political prisoners deported to Auschwitz in the first years of its existence. They contrast starkly with the picture presented in Barczewski's film, in which only a few Polish prisoners die (most of them as a result of punishment for some offence). The viewer may be under the mistaken impression that the blind extermination involved only Jews, while the political inmates, as long as they were punitive, submissive and diligent in their work and did not commit any offence in the camp, had a pretty good chance of survival, which is not true.
In his review, Łukasz Muszyński described Barczewski's work as another heart-warming story inspired by authentic events . The structure of the film, particularly its ending, seems to confirm that such was the filmmakers' intention. Ultimately, the main character - who embodies goodness, morality and the principles of fair play - wins in an uneven fight with evil personified by Germans, representatives of the camp authorities. He rises from the very bottom of suffering and defeats an SS man in the ring, thus depriving the commandant of the opportunity to enjoy the expected defeat and humiliation of a Polish boxer. He gains respect and the title of champion. The sense of satisfaction he deprived his enemies of becomes shared by his fellow fighters. Pietrzykowski's presence in the camp and his triumph change everyone. Even the Rapportführer seems to have thought and understood something deeply, thanks to his acquaintance with Teddy. Thus, the victory has a moral as well as a sporting significance. Teddy survived this ordeal and returned to life after the war to fulfil his dream of raising the next generation of athletes.
It is another contemporary image that allows one to deceptively believe that the sun just comes out once the war is over, and people joyfully welcome their long-lost loved ones and return to their jobs, to their pre-war lives and work for the sake of a bright future. Such a narrative leaves no room for the authenticity of the post-war dramas. It says nothing about how people counted their losses, licked their wounds, struggled with trauma, searched for and said goodbye to their loved ones after the war, or how they tried to recover from their grief, navigate the new political realities, bear the burden of difficult experiences and survive a reality which only brought misery, fear and uncertainty for many. A happy ending in relation to war, and even more so to the camp experience, is an illusion.
So, is Maciej Barczewski's film worth seeing? Do the factual errors presented in this text invalidate its value? That's a difficult question, especially for a researcher whose profession places factuality, objectivity and reliability in the foreground, which is the complete opposite of artistic work. A scholar may bridle at the notion that the art of cinema should prioritise the construction of a film as an independent work of fiction, treating the historical background as a side issue . They may feel an inner discord at seeing the disregard for authenticity in cultural products and a nonchalant approach to facts. They are entitled to a negative assessment of such practices. Ultimately, however, they have no choice but to accept that art has its rights and cannot expect the creator of a work of art to restrict their imagination and abandon its interpretation in favour of strict adherence to sources. After all, that is what science serves to achieve. Artistic freedom is essential to the cultural process and must not be reduced to documenting or imposing a framework of factual correctness. Inevitably, there must be a conflict here between fiction and reality, between the memory of history and its artistic interpretation. Science is supposed to understand and remember, while art is supposed to move. And since it is impossible to change the assumptions and purposes of art, it seems somewhat reasonable to act didactically in order to change the way viewers think about a historical film (literary work, painting, etc.). Such is the purpose of this review - not to discourage people from seeing The Champion, but to remind them that it is not a biographical film in the strict sense of the word, and even less a documentary as the filmmakers honestly emphasise in interviews. It is merely inspired by real events. It should be treated as such by the viewer - not as a picture upon which one can build knowledge about the fate of Tadeusz Pietrzykowski and the realities of KL Auschwitz, but as an inspiration to seek this knowledge independently, not on the level of art, but in historical sources and scientific creations, with full consent that the story one discovers as a result of this search will turn out to be far more complex and different from that portrayed in the film.
Going back to the question - is this film worth seeing? Firstly, it is worth it for the excellent cinematography by Witold Płóciennik; secondly, for the already acclaimed set design, costumes, and props. Thirdly, for the superb cast, including Marcin Czarnik as Kapo Bruno and Marian Dziędziel's episode as Calvary Captain, and particularly for the acting and physical metamorphosis of Piotr Głowacki. Nevertheless, the film is worth seeing to awaken the desire to learn more about Tadeusz Pietrzykowski and attempt to acquire reliable knowledge about Pietrzykowski. Moreover, it may also provide information about the history of the camp and its first prisoners and the underground and sporting activities carried out behind the wires.