Ashes and Diamonds

"From you, as from burning chips of resin,
Fiery fragments circle far and near:
Ablaze, you don't know if you are to be free,
Or if all that is yours will disappear.

Will only ashes and confusion remain,
Leading into the abyss? or will there be
In the depths of the ash a star-like diamond,
The dawning of eternal victory!" - Cyprian Norwid

The poem above – read by one of the characters in Ashes and Diamonds from a plaque hanging on one of the few remaining walls of a bombed-out church, where Christ on his cross hangs upside down, watching over recently murdered Polish workers who are being embalmed – lays at the center of the main character’s great struggle. All Maciek knows is war and darkness; the ashes of Poland swirl all around him, reflected in the shades of his sunglasses, while the Poles that populate the film cannot help looking ahead to the future with a healthy cynicism. Both the Home Army and the incoming Communist government know that a power vacuum has been created by the war’s end, and the group that moves slowest against its enemies will be sucked under.

Maciek’s life is upended upon meeting Krystyna, a local bar maid in a town where he has been assigned by the Polish Home Army to assassinate a newly appointed Communist minister. The beginning of the film shows Maciek and his companion Andrzej mistakenly assassinating the wrong men outside a small country church. Maciek unloads his machine gun into the back of an innocent, catching the man on fire as he falls at the feet of an icon of Christ. Maciek cares neither about blasting a man into a holy house nor where he himself will end up; he and his partner ditch the guns and make a speedy getaway. Only upon meeting Krystyna does Maciek begin to care about the direction of his life and the possibility that a good and meaningful life is within his grasp.

Zbigniew Cybulski, who played Maciek, was known as Poland’s James Dean and in watching Ashes and Diamonds, one can see that the resemblance goes beyond the physical. In Rebel Without A Cause, Dean is torn between his parents’ expectations and the life that he wants to lead; Cybulski’s Maciek is torn apart by his loyalty to the Home Army that has enabled him to survive and the woman who promises a life beyond what he has come to think of as normal. Ashes and Diamonds becomes one of the great tragedies committed to film through its star-making central performance. There is no other end for Maciek, and his fate intertwines with that of Poland itself in the dark days following an already pitch-black era of humankind.