Broken Promise, Slovakia’s entry for best foreign-language film at last year’s Academy Awards, is a cinematic monument to the near destruction of its Jewish community during the Holocaust. It is based on a true story.
Jiri Chlumsky’s two-hour drama, due to be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, Nov. 21, at the Silver City theatre in Richmond Hill, treats the topic with high-minded seriousness.
The central character is a young Slovak Jew named Martin Friedmann (Samuel Spisak) who survives the war by masquerading as a Catholic.
The film unfolds against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism in Slovakia, an ally of Nazi Germany. Slovakia’s reactionary regime persecutes its Jewish citizens, and most of them are caught in its net.
Martin’s parents perish in Auschwitz, but he manages to survive in a labour camp and a Catholic monastery.
Chlumsky foreshadows the approaching disaster by various means.
The Jews in Martin’s town, Banovce, discuss the prospect of emigration. From 1941 onward, they are forced to wear the yellow star. Anti-Semitic signs pop up. Martin’s soccer coach advises him that Jews can no longer play for the local team. An anti-Semitic mob taunts and throws rocks at a Jewish team well on its way toward winning a game against a Christian squad.
Despite the writing on the wall, Martin’s father, a poultry dealer, seems oblivious. He does not want to leave Slovakia, nor does he believe the Nazis intend to wipe out Jews.
With deportations having begun and with the verbal abuse of Jews escalating, Martin finds refuge in a work camp and then in a monastery.
In 1944, he joins a partisan band led by Soviet commanders. He discovers that one of its leaders, a man who likes him, hates Jews. Martin, being strong and resilient, conceals his feelings stoically as he goes about the business of killing German soldiers in the scenic Carpathian mountains.
Broken Promise, whose title is derived from a unfulfilled pledge made by Martin and his family, is a well-crafted film characterized by fine performances.
A caption at the end reminds viewers that about 80 per cent of Jews in Slovakia were murdered. This reminder endows Broken Promise with profound sadness and fearful symmetry.
