THE CHAMPION OF AUSCHWITZ,
A FILM BY MACIEJ BARCZEWSKI
HISTORICAL REVIEW
According to information in the opening credits, The Champion is a film inspired by real events, precisely the fate of Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, a pre-war Polish boxer and one of the first inmates of KL Auschwitz, who became a teacher, coach and physical education instructor after the war. It is hard to determine what kind of film genre we are actually dealing with. Reviewers describe it as a "sports drama", a "biographical film", or a "historical drama". The filmmakers themselves describe it on the Facebook fan page dedicated to the film as "a drama based on real events" and "a story about a real person", though the director does not shy away from using the term "historical cinema" in interviews. Accordingly, although it is not a documentary film, viewers may feel that they are being presented with a historically accurate, credible and reliable picture. Therefore, this article will examine the compatibility of the picture created by Barczewski with Tadeusz Pietrzykowski's biography and the realities of camp life as a KL Auschwitz prisoner.
Tadeusz Pietrzykowski (called Teddy) was born on the 8th of April 1917 in Warsaw. He took up boxing as a secondary school pupil, which did not always meet with his teachers' approval. As a boxer, I did not have an easy life at school, which I had to change several times - Pietrzykowski recalled years later. He trained at various clubs in Warsaw. One of his coaches, and perhaps the one who had the greatest impact on his sporting development and personality, was the legendary Feliks Stamm - then an instructor, boxing referee and a former boxer who became an independent coach of the Polish boxing team in 1936. Under his guidance, Teddy won the Polish vice-champion and Warsaw champion titles in the bantamweight division before the war.
At the outbreak of war, Pietrzykowski fought in defence of Warsaw. Shortly after the capitulation, in November 1939, he was sworn in and joined the underground organisation. He wanted to cross the border and join the Polish Army under formation in France. However, his expedition failed. He was arrested in Hungary and placed under arrest. On 14 June 1940, he was transferred to the Auschwitz camp and marked as number 77. He was one of the first 728 prisoners of the camp.
At Auschwitz, he initially performed arduous physical work outdoors, including backfilling the ground for the barrack square and working in the mowing squad. Finally, with the help of the Kupiec brothers, he found work in the camp carpentry shop but was quickly expelled in the autumn of 1940, after he was caught smuggling potatoes from the camp pigsty. He was sent to the Porąbek work squad in charge of building a recreation centre for the SS in Międzybrodzie Bialskie. The work was gruelling and aggravated by the mountainous terrain and unfavourable weather conditions at that time of year. Afraid of losing all his strength, Pietrzykowski faked an accident, which resulted in him being taken to the prison hospital in the main camp with a leg injury. Despite the injury, he was declared fit for work and assigned to so-called light labour - doing cleaning work around the camp seven days a week. In this way, he endured the winter of 1940/1941.
Pietrzykowski's first boxing fight in Auschwitz came in March 1941, against the German kapo Walter Dünning, whom as Pietrzykowski mentioned, had won the welterweight championship in professional boxing in Germany before the war (Bogacka suggests that the information about the sporting
Maciej Barczewski's film titled “The Champion of Auschwitz” was screened last December during the 45th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. Its cinema premiere took place on August 27.
Dr Wanda Witek-Malicka, Research Centre of the Auschwitz Memorial