Distant Journey

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Description: Hana Kaufmann, a Jewish doctor from Prague, loses her job soon after the Nazi occupation. Her marriage to a gentile colleague enables her to remain in town while the rest of her family is deported initially to Theresienstadt Ghetto and then on to the extermination camps in the east. Eventually, Hana too is deported to Theresienstadt where she works in the infirmary. At the end of the war, Theresienstadt is liberated and Hana rejoins her husband.

Merits: This is a new digital restoration by the Czech film archive of a film made in 1949 by the stage and film director Alfréd Radok. Radok, whose father was Jewish and whose mother was Catholic, was interred during the war in a labour camp having lost his job in the theatre due to his heritage. All relatives on his father’s side of his family perished in the war.

Distant Journey is valuable principally as a historical document, though not just so. Very much in the style of its period, it features elaborate cinematic sequences and montages, particularly of life in Theresienstadt that may feel affected to contemporary audiences but which some will regard as accomplished and lyrical. Occasionally the Kaufmann narrative recedes into a small inset while the rest of the screen is taken over by documentary footage. This serves to contextualise the story with historical developments. One wonders what contemporaneous Czech audiences made of it. There could not have been many of them. Although the film won international critical success, it disappeared from Czech screens soon after its release.

Rating: Mild graphic violence.

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