Roman Polanski Photo: IC

Roman Polanski revisits the horror of his Holocaust childhood in a new documentary that premiered Sunday in the controversial Oscar-winning director's Polish hometown of Krakow.

The film follows Polanski as he roams the city with his lifelong friend and fellow Holocaust survivor, photographer Ryszard Horowitz, whom he met inside the wartime Jewish ghetto.  

The documentary is about "memory, confrontations with the past, transience, trauma, fate," said Mateusz Kudla, who directed and produced the movie with Anna Kokoszka-Romer. 

"Through these two characters who were lucky, who survived, we also wanted to show the tragedy of all those residents of the Krakow Ghetto who never made it out," he told AFP. 

In one scene of Polanski, Horowitz. Hometown, which opened the 2021 Krakow Film Festival, Polanski recalls seeing a Nazi German officer shoot an elderly woman in the back, the blood spluttering out like water from a drinking fountain.

"Terrified, I ran through the gate behind me... I hid behind these stairs," says Polanski, who was only 6 years old when World War II began.

"That was my first encounter with the horror," he tells a grim-looking Horowitz.

Horowitz, who was among those helped by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, rolls up his sleeve in another scene to reveal the number inked onto his forearm when he arrived, aged 5, at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. 

"Sometimes I'll randomly glance at it and think it can't be true, it must be some kind of stupid joke. Is it possible that I was there and that I survived?" Horowitz says. 

The filmmakers also captured the moment a visibly moved Polanski met the grandson of Stefania and Jan Buchala, the Polish Catholic peasants who hid him from the Nazis. 

In 2020, Israel honored the late couple with the Yad Vashem title of "Righteous Among the Nations" for those who helped save Jews during World War II.

The film makes no mention of the sexual assault accusations against Polanski, who is persona non grata in Hollywood and cannot return to the US for fear of arrest.

"That wasn't our focus, nor was it our intention to defend or accuse anyone. This film is about a whole other chapter in Roman Polanski's life," Kokoszka-Romer told AFP. 

Kudla asks viewers to consider the possibility that "perhaps in this case Polanski did the right thing by giving [Holocaust] testimony to prevent history from repeating itself."