The Shop on Main Street (Obchod Na Korze) (1965)

Being Jewish and living in Israel gives me an acute awareness of the Holocaust as for years I would watch countless motion pictures depicting this terrible part of my family’s history.

A movie such as Spielberg’s, “Schindler’s List”, would rivet me in its dark harsh reality. That Oscar winning masterpiece was made in stunning black and white, rather than color and I believe that black and white is the true photographic imagery needed in filming a story about the horrendous persecutions and murder of European Jewry during World War II.

That movie spanned a great canvas that hit on may elements of the holocaust by centering its story on giving in-depth characterizations of a few of its main protagonists.

28 years earlier, in 1965, two fairly unknown directors (Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos), collaborated in telling their own deeply personal tale from the Holocaust. Also filmed in stunning black and white, the result of this was, “The shop on Main Street”.

The story is set in the early 1940’s of occupied Slovakia, which after the war unified with the Check republic to form Czechoslovakia. With the fall of the Berlin wall, this country was once again separated into two separate States. This film however was made while the country was unified and part of the Soviet Empire. Which meant the movie needed to pass the approval of the Soviet censors. Being a movie showing the atrocities of the Nazi’s helped get the approval, and this approval justifies why undesirables are mentioned as Jews and Bolsheviks and at one time even Jewish Bolsheviks. Even today it is important for Russia to emphasize the number of Russians killed in WWII, whenever they speak about the Holocaust.

“The shop on Main Street”, tells the story of a timid kind and Gentile carpenter, Tono (Jozef Kroner), whose wife is constantly complaining to him about not making enough money. They live in a small town run by the Nazi’s and their Slovak collaborators who are building a grotesque and unpractical tower in the town square that is meant to celebrate fascism. Tono’s sister-in law is married to a Nazi collaborator who has a high position of authority in the town. Nazi laws are enacted and they include the Aryanization of all business and stores. Each of the Jewish owned establishments are assigned a non-Jewish person to act as their Aryan overseer, learning how to run the business while slowly taking over the business. Tono’s brother-in-law is asked by his wife to appoint Tono as one of these Aryan store managers. Tono is assigned to a small store in the center of the town, right across the fascist tower being built. The store sells buttons and does not make much of a profit. It is also run by the semi-senile, sweet old widow named Rozalia Lautmannova (Ida Kaminska in a powerfully poignant performance). While the store does not make any money, the town has a local Jewish community organization that takes care of its needy and asks Tono to watch over and protect Mrs. Lautmannova for a substantial fee that they will pay him. Since Tono never really wanted to work in a store, he readily agrees and spends most of his time fixing and repairing Mrs. Lautmannova’s furniture, while letting her run the shop herself. She in turn, not understanding his real position and motive, thinks he is a kind stranger who wants to help her, and treats him almost like a son.

Their relationship grows into that of kindness, respect and even love. At this point the film plays out like a heartfelt humanistic drama that allowed me to care about all of the good characters and despise the villains. This is a movie about the Holocaust, and the story takes a devastating turn during its last section that tears apart the soul of the people I identified with.

Like some of the greatest movies about this topic, it forces good people to make horrific choices. It forces people to sacrifice themselves for others and in many cases showing their fear in doing this. For a holocaust movie, the violence is extremely laid back and does not show itself until its powerful conclusion, while still having a power of reality and tragedy that lingered in my mind well after the end of the movie.

There are many scenes found in its torrid end play that reminded me of Spielberg’s movie. Such as the gathering and separation of families, the hiding of children and terrible shouts of the Nazi/Fascist monsters as they gleefully enforce their power.

The filmmakers added a surrealistic ending to the movie that is meant to give a sort of optimism to the true power of the human soul. This ending reminded me quite a lot of another Oscar winning film about the holocaust. That being Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful”. As in that film, I find this optimistic and surrealistic message as being inappropriate when it comes to movies about the Holocaust. I chose to ignore this tacked on ending and prefer to see this movie ending before this dream sequence.

Regardless of the ending, “The Shop on Main Street”, is a powerful heartrending movie about human tragedy that serves as an effective window on how the Holocaust effected the non-Jewish population of Eastern Europe. This is a story well worth telling.