For this edition of Fight The Power: Films of Resistance, we’re screening Andrzej Wajda’s searing 1958 masterwork Ashes and Diamonds. Set in the final hours of World War II in Poland, the film follows a young resistance fighter assigned one last mission on the day of Germany’s surrender—a portrait of a generation shaped entirely by occupation, forced to ask what resistance means when the war is already over.

Screened to commemorate Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Ashes and Diamonds offers an opportunity to confront the landscape of Nazi-occupied Poland, where three million Polish Jews were systematically murdered and where acts of Jewish resistance—armed uprisings, underground networks, everyday survival—have too often been buried beneath dominant national narratives of the war.

The screening will be preceded by an introduction addressing that history directly: what Jewish resistance in occupied Poland looked like, why it has been marginalised, and what is at stake in remembering it now: when the Holocaust’s memory is increasingly contested, while ethnonationalism, the targeting of minorities, and the normalisation of dehumanisation are once again on the rise across Europe and beyond.

 

Lilit Zeltsburg is a researcher and policy advisor with a background in Middle East Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Through her involvement with Oy Vey, a radically inclusive grassroots Jewish group, she has contributed to the organisation and presentation of various initiatives, including film programmes and the Oy Vey film festival.