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Ostatni Etap (The Last Stop, aka The Last Stage, 1947, 110 min., b&w, Polish with English Subtitles)

The Last Stop, filmed largely on location only two years after the camp's liberation, focuses on a group of women inmates at the infirmary of the infamous women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was written by Auschwitz survivors Wanda Jakubowska and Gerda Schneider. The lead character, a Jewish inmate working as interpreter, is loosely based on the legendary resistance leader Mala Zimetbaum (aka "Mala la Belge") who died in a daring escape attempt just before the camp's liberation. The first Polish post-war film by women about women, The Last Stop gives a sometimes disturbingly powerful picture of cruelty, but also one of courage and solidarity.

Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998), who originally studied art at Warsaw University, was in filmmaking for over 60 years, and was Poland's first woman director to win international recognition, namely, with The Last Stop, based in large part on her own personal experience as a prisoner at Auschwitz, which she said she survived thanks in part to her constantly thinking about its eventual documentation. A co-founder of START in 1929 (Stowarzyszenie Milosnikow Filmu Artystycznego/Society for Devotees of Artistic Film), and already an established director before the war, her last feature was The Colors of Loving in 1988, and she continued to work into the mid-1990s.

Stuart Liebman is a professor of the history of cinema at the CUNY Graduate Center and Media Studies at Queens College. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the Association of American Publishers prize for the best single issue of a scholarly journal in 1995. He is a member of the Advisory Board for the critical journal October and a former member of the Board of Trustees of Anthology Film Archives in New York City.