Was reading The Big Goodbye, all about the making of Chinatown and the four men behind it (writer Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, director Roman Polanski and star Jack Nicholson) last night. By Sam Wasson. Terrific read.
Anyway, got to this passage that gave me chills. What you should know going in is that Polanski grew up in Poland during World War II, in Warsaw. Both his mother and father were taken away by the Nazis. Separately. Polanski, on his parents’ instruction, had run away as the Nazis encroached and hid at the home of a friendly family. Which may have saved his life.
His father, Wanda, survived the camps. His mother, who was pregnant at the time she was abducted, died at Auschwitz.
So if you’re keeping score, Polanski’s father’s pregnant wife (and his mom) was murdered in the 1940s and then Polanski’s pregnant wife (actress Sharon Tate) was murdered some 25-plus years later. Nazis. The Manson family. Potato, potahto.
Anyway, this passage takes place after Tate’s murder but before Towne has completed his Chinatown script. Probably around 1969 or 1970 (that’s important, keep it in the back of your mind). Polanski has gone off to ski in Switzerland for a few months and his father has come to join him. What follows is from the book, verbatim:
When Polanski arrived in his father’s hotel room in Gstaad, Wanda was playing solitaire. Under a soft light, his father was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes on the floor. He was crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“No, no,” his father insisted. “It’s just the music.” Beside his bed, a radio. A German song. “O Mein Papa.”
Oh, my Papa, to me he was so wonderful,
Oh, my Papa, to me he was so good.
Polanski sat beside him.
No one could be so gentle and so lovable
Oh, my Papa, he always understood.
“After you ran from the ghetto,” his father began, “and just before the final liquidation of the ghetto, they took all the people.”
Oh, my Papa, so funny, so adorable
Always the clown so funny in his way.
“They called all Jews… we were standing there… suddenly trucks arrived and they started loading children on those trucks. As this was happening, most were parents of those children, they started swaying and moaning and screaming and crying and falling on the ground and tearing the mud from the ground… and the Germans were playing this song.”
Oh, my Papa, to me he was so wonderful,
Deep in my heart I miss him so today,
Gone are the days when he would take me on his knee,
And with a smile he’d change my tears to laughter.
Polanski would try to console him. “This can never happen again.”
“Wait fifty years. You’ll see.”
