The Cinematic Figure of the Interpreter in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The Case of Marta Weiss in The Last Stage by Wanda Jakubowska

Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief and laconic. Usually they consist of dry facts as related in narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the picture of Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama Ostatni etap (The Last Stage) by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau. To this day The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives.”It is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the fate of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women solidarity and their resistance to the oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique, quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrait of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a translator and messenger in the Auschwitz camp, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp. The present paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies and interpreting studies.

Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief and laconic. Usually they consist of dry facts as related in narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the picture of Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama Ostatni etap (The Last Stage) by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau. To this day The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives.”It is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the fate of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women solidarity and their resistance to the oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique, quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrait of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a translator and messenger in the Auschwitz camp, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp. The present paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies and interpreting studies.