I just lived this film. It gets a lot right about Jews and Poland

There’s a lot that A Real Pain gets right about Polish Holocaust tours, from the eerie stillness of Majdanek, explored through a series of mostly silent shots, to the information overload from the non-Jewish tour guide, when Jewish people need to acknowledge what is, in fact, missing.

But it also glosses over a lot that, had it been included, may have raised some eyebrows in the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.

A Real Pain, which headlined this year’s Jewish International Film Festival follows the journey of cousins David and Benji on a week-long tour of Poland to discover their late-grandmother’s pre-Holocaust world.

Earlier this year, I also went on a week-long tour of Poland with a mostly non-Jewish group and two fabulous Jewish tour guides to learn how modern Europeans relate to the memory of the Holocaust.

Seeing parts of my journey reflected back at me on the screen was as cathartic as the tour was traumatic, and I felt the need to both honour the rawness of the film and shed some light on the more difficult aspects of Poland which the film only hints at.

If you’ve seen A Real Pain, you’ll remember the train scene, with Benji's emotional outburst declaring that Jews shouldn’t be in first class, when a couple of generations ago, we would have been herded to the back like cattle.

I had a similar thought as I hurtled through the beautiful, green countryside, in a semi-private cabin shared with an adorable blonde, blue eyed baby named Teodor, and his doting mother, who chatted with me the entire ride. I felt conflicted knowing that had we met 78 years prior, this woman would have likely turned me over to the authorities.

One of the most interesting aspects of A Real Pain is its awareness of the relationship between modern day Poland and the Holocaust.

The film’s well-meaning tour guide James explains that he is not Jewish, but is “obsessed” with Jewish history, which is “beautiful, and at times tragic.”

I heard this sentiment incessantly from volunteers and tourists who use Jewish trauma and suffering to satisfy their own morbid curiosity about human psychology; and from researchers and tour guides hell-bent on offsetting the fact that many Poles happily complied with the Final Solution, by highlighting pre-war Jewish life.

We met a group of gorgeous non-Jewish Polish university students who opted to join us for a portion of our tour. They were remarkable, dedicating themselves to learning about Jewish studies and history, often with an intimate knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish and Jewish culture. However, even amongst this group of highly educated and committed students, there seemed to be a tension between the way we understand and perceive even the most mundane aspects of our past and present.

This was brought into sharp focus when we went to Majdanek and experienced two separate tours: ours in English and theirs in Polish. Upon our debrief at the end of the day, some very interesting differences were brought to light. Their tour guide had told them that the mountains of personal items looted from the Jewish people held there were fake and replaced every few months as a shock-value tourist attraction. In the English-speaking tour, we were told they are authentic - which I still believe they are.

This was just one of many differences in the way that many Polish locals and Western tourists experience the Holocaust.

Like David and Benji in the film, many Holocaust tourists don’t interact with living Polish people. The only substantive interaction we see between Jews and Poles in the film occurs when Benji and David split off from their tour group to find their grandmother’s old home. They symbolically place stones on her doorstep, as Jews do on a grave, but are interrupted by locals who complain the stones are a tripping hazard.

There are a few aspects of this scene which feel confusing; why don’t David and Benji knock on the door? Why do they acquiesce to this request so easily? Why don’t they simply move their stones to the side? The moment is a climax in the movie, the pair have come to lay a stone of remembrance and instead must compromise their moment of ritual and memory.

Poland’s Holocaust industry is carefully curated by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. It is responsible for the Polish tour in Majdanek which claimed that the stolen Jewish goods were mere replicas or frauds. It perpetuates a narrative that the primary victims of the Holocaust were Polish without any further racialised preference. It establishes museums which honour Poles who saved Jews, whilst failing to acknowledge that they stand at the sites of some of the worst massacres of Jews committed by their Polish neighbours, without any Nazi presence or intervention.

Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg touted his film as a ‘love letter to Poland,’ the land from which his family hailed. I understand. I couldn’t help but feel something akin to pride as I learned about the eight centuries of Jewish progress which took place in Poland.

Seeing the hidden remnants of Jewish life peeking through the cracks everywhere we went, both in person and in the film, filled me with joy. The opportunity to learn about the life my family would have lived, and to see the surviving Jewish remnants makes me excited to visit Poland again someday. In fact, one of the first notes I wrote down while I was walking through the streets of Warsaw with the sun on my face was, “I finally understand why they didn’t want to leave.”

But when I look a little bit deeper at Poland’s calculated agenda to minimise the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, and erase the voluntary complicity of Polish civilians, I can’t help but empathise emphatically with Benji’s outrage at the sheer injustice of it all.