Filmed in Auschwitz With Former Prisoners, First Holocaust Feature Film Was a Feminist Triumph

Centering around the story of a real Jewish heroine, the first ever Holocaust feature film was a revolutionary female-led experiment. ‘They did everything automatically, as returning prisoners. It was frightening’. Exactly 70 years ago, in the summer of 1949, a distinguished group gathered at a Tel Aviv cinema for a preview showing of a pioneering Polish film. The event was attended by members of the diplomatic corps, government figures and notables from literature and art. The movie was “The Last Stage” – the first full-length feature film about the Holocaust, the first to be filmed at Auschwitz, and the first to show all the stages of killing at the camp. The director, screenwriter and many cast members, all of them women, had been prisoners there.