Filming on a Killing Ground : ‘Triumph of the Spirit’ is the first film to be shot almost entirely at the Auschwitz death camp

Willem Dafoe is in the ring, sweating furiously, bleeding from a cut over his left eye, and trading real blows. He’s facing a German fighter who’s already sent him tumbling through the ropes and onto the floor.

Determined, he climbs back in--and retaliates. The furious exchange is capped off when Dafoe lets loose a knockout punch--and the kiss-off line, “ Auf Wiedersehen , (expletive).”

At 145 pounds--10 pounds lighter than normal--the 5-foot-9 actor is looking lean and mean. Because of his shaved head, his chiseled features are even more prominent than usual.

He’s been delivering--and receiving--punches in a smoky officers’ club, where banners with swastikas and a large portrait of Adolf Hitler hang on the wall.

Seated to one side of the ring is an audience of 14 SS officers, 4 noncommissioned officers, 11 SS women, 90 German soldiers and 3 waiters.

Like Dafoe and his “German opponent”--actually fight trainer Teddy Atlas--they’ve been here all morning, cheering and taunting the action in the ring.

This scene completed, they briefly disassemble during a break.

The next shot will be set up in the building that has been used as a storeroom in recent years.

Before that, it was the laundry for Konzentrationslager Auschwitz--Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp.

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Outside, where it’s rainy, gloomy and cold--typical for Polish weather this time of year--some SS soldiers are exchanging small talk as they clutch cups of gritty black coffee and await their call to the set.

They draw stares from the occasional tourists who wander by. Some are so shaken by the sight of the uniformed men and women that they can’t hide their anger.

One East German Jew, wearing a yarmulka, is so distraught by the discovery of “Nazis” at Auschwitz, that he begins shouting in anger. Crew members rush to reassure him that this is only a movie.

“Triumph of the Spirit” is the first major motion picture to film almost entirely on location at the infamous death camp. Access was made possible with the assistance of the government-owned Poltel (Polish Television). Shooting has been under way since February.

In the weeks since, Auschwitz seems to have been temporarily transported back in time.

There are “prisoners” in striped pants, jackets and caps lumbering along the road that leads into Auschwitz, and “SS men” strolling beneath the camp entrance, famed for its cynical proclamation, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free).

Several laughing crew members related an incident involving two extras who wore their SS uniforms to a local bar one night and got drunk. The film company got a phone call from the police. The carousers were going to spend the night in jail; did the film people want to send someone over to pick up the uniforms?

At the steps of the notorious Cell Block 11, shouts of “Sieg Heil!” can be heard from the laundry building-film set, located just 35 feet away.

Cell Block 11 is where the gas, Cyclon B, was first “tested” on 850 Russian prisoners of war and ill inmates in September, 1941. The cell block also is fitted with underground suffocation and starvation cells. It adjoins what prisoners called the Wall of Death--where some 20,000 executions took place.

It was surreal to explore its rooms and cells at the same time as young uniformed SS men, actors with their hands tucked casually into the pockets of their tailored costumes.

And to have lunch with the cast and crew at the neighboring death camp, Birkenau.

Equally surreal: Poles--most of whom lost ancestors at the camps--are playing Germans.

Looking down at her “SS woman” uniform, extra Dorota Biaty-Wieczorek (who is also a translator for the film), said that her mother-in-law and her husband’s grandmother had been imprisoned at the camps. “I should be playing a prisoner,” she said. “But, I am also an actress. So I must try to imagine what it would have been like to be on the other side.”

It was odd, too, to see Dafoe in the midst of a rigorous workout in the midst of the former concentration camp.

Then again, boxing is a metaphor for this story of survival--inspired by the real-life story of Salamo Arouch.

A Jew from the Greek village of Salonika, Arouch was the middleweight boxing champion of the Balkans. Then the Nazis came to his village. And Arouch--and his family and friends--were sent to Auschwitz.

When the SS learned who he was, they put him in the ring--against other prisoners. Known for his footwork that garnered him the nickname, “The Ballerina,” Arouch fought here--and won--200 times.

Arouch, who today owns a successful transport company in Israel, is a consultant for the movie and he has returned to the camp for the first time to work on it.

Dafoe, who has been sticking to a strict training regimen, is playing Arouch. Robert Loggia plays his father, Poppa Arouch. Edward James Olmos is the Gypsy, a capo who cruelly assists the Nazis in keeping the prisoners in line. Wendy Gazelle is Allegra, the young Greek woman Arouch loves. Her story of survival in the camp will parallel his.

Robert M. Young, who last did “Dominick and Eugene,” is directing. Arnold Kopelson, who produced “Platoon”--which also starred Dafoe--is co-producing and also overseeing production.

Kopelson admits he tried--and failed--to interest the major studios in the project. Independently financed, “Triumph” does not yet have a U.S. distributor.

Kopelson doesn’t appear to be worried. “Platoon” also had difficulties finding financing and distribution.

“The studios didn’t want that movie because they didn’t think audiences wanted to see a story about Vietnam,” he said.

“Now they think audiences don’t want to see a movie about the concentration camps.

“The fact is, the studios don’t know what we’re doing out here. They think we’re making a movie about death.

“They don’t know that we’re making a movie about life.”

Between 1940 and 1945, 4 million people from 24 countries perished at Auschwitz, the main camp, and Birkenau, located 3 kilometers away, also known as Auschwitz II and by its Polish name, Brzezinka.

But, insist the film makers, this is not a movie about the Holocaust. The setting will not envelop the story.

“We aren’t dealing with the deaths of 11 million people (6 million of them Jews), we’re dealing with the lives of a man, his family and the woman he loves,” said Kopelson.

Explaining that the film will not graphically detail the atrocities that occurred here, Kopelson added: “We are dealing with an incredibly fine line. We are dealing with the truth, yet not assaulting the truth.”

In the story line, Dafoe’s boxing opponents face death in the gas chambers if they lose.

“There are moral choices involved,” said Young, who described “Triumph” as “kind of a pilgrim’s progress. By that, I mean a journey that a man takes where he becomes a witness to the human spirit in torment--where people become more than they ever were and people become less than they ever imagined they could be.”

Stressing that the characters have no control over where the fates have put them, Young described a scene of foreshadowing that he feels is a key to the movie: It’s set in Greece, before the villagers have been sent to the camp. Arouch and Allegra have stolen away to be together at a movie theater. “And as they sit there, there’s a newsreel going on with clips of the Third Reich.

“These are two very attractive people we can identify with. But, the world won’t leave them alone.”

If the cast and crew is determined to not allow their story to be dominated by Auschwitz, many have become deeply affected by the location.

Young tells of walking through fields at Birkenau and coming upon thousands of victims’ utensils on the ground. They had once been stored with the rest of the victims’ belongings in what was known as the Canada Unit. “There were rusted plates and thousands of utensils. All these forks. . . . People came here thinking they were starting a new life, you know?

“And these forks, this may sound melodramatic, but, they’re all twisted and bent like ghosts in these gentle kinds of poses. They look like they’re weeping.”

Olmos makes a near-daily pilgrimage to Birkenau--sometimes by himself, sometimes with Israeli crew members.

“We say prayers over the crematorium pits,” he said, adding, “It’s not difficult to come to this place. You come here to pay homage. It’s like going to church.”

Loggia has been so moved by the experience that, in his hotel room in the neighboring city of Katowice, he’s created a “sculpture” with burned barbed wire and rocks collected from near the crematorium.

“This has been life-changing for me. I really don’t what what I’ll do after this. It’s as if the whole course of my life is dammed up at the moment,” said Loggia.

“Being here is special,” Dafoe admitted. “It gets you closer to the ghosts. They do creep up on you, I think.”

He recalled his first visit to Auschwitz: “I expected some sort of enormous emotional reaction. But instead, I was, frankly, quite numb.

“There’s just no way you can take it in when you first see it.”

At the time, Dafoe--like many of his colleagues--was immersing himself in the personal histories of survivors. “I’d read them before I went to bed at night. And somewhere between the depression of being in Poland--which is a very gray place--and the combination of the readings and my own imagination, I’d go to sleep and get everything mixed up.

“Occasionally, I’d wake up in a cold sweat.”

Dafoe hastened to add that that was then.

“Right now, to some degree, you become familiar with it and it becomes where you work. It becomes a movie set.”

“This is above and beyond a film location,” said Loggia.

Scenes have been filmed of people lined up outside the gas chamber. The cameras have gone inside the crematorium. One snowy night at Birkenau, the cameras captured the arrival of a train bringing Arouch and his family to Auschwitz.

Located in the village of Oswiecim (the Nazis changed the name to Auschwitz), just 34 miles west of Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau is today a state museum.

An estimated 600,000 visitors come here annually.

Auschwitz has a visitor’s center, exhibits in cell blocks--including Cell Block 11 (the prison that existed within Auschwitz)--a gas chamber and crematorium.

At Birkenau--which sprawls out over a staggering 10 square miles--there are barracks, the ruins of four crematoria, cremation pyres, a pond containing the ashes of countless victims, the platform where deportees were subjected to “selektion” (selection), and the International Monument to the Victims of Fascism, which was built in 1967.

A veritable death factory, Birkenau’s crematoriums had a combined capacity of 4,456 corpses daily. Because the gas chambers had an even greater killing capacity, corpses were also burned in pyres and buried in pits.

It’s easy to find bone fragments in the fields of Birkenau.

To make the movie “feel” as real as its austere and monumental setting, the production has employed a number of consultants, like Arouch, who still weeps when he vividly recounts experiences from his two-and-a-half years in the camp.

Explaining that his wife, who is also an Auschwitz survivor, would not make the trip with him, Arouch said that he couldn’t sleep for the first week after his return, “because everything came back.”

Survivor/consultant Tadeusz Sobolewicz today lives just 17 kilometers from the camp where he was interned for almost three years. Author of a book about his Auschwitz experiences, “Wytrzymalem Wiec Jestem” (“I’m Still Alive”), he said that for many years he “kept his distance” from Auschwitz. “With these hands, I took people--dead people--from the hospital to the crematorium . . . that is what I did with these hands.” Now he works with the museum--and wanders around the camp.

Teddy Atlas, who worked with the late Cus D’Amato training Mike Tyson, was there for Dafoe.

Surveying the nearby cell blocks, Atlas said, “This movie gets right down to the fact that life ain’t fair. And this place--this place was the most unfair of them all.

“But in a ring, life is fair. It’s man against man--with rules. So this boxing is a little bit of fairness in an unfair world.”

Known for meticulously tackling his roles, Olmos worked with a group of gypsy consultants who helped him with a special song he performs in Romany, language of the gypsies.

“All the gypsies of the world will understand what I’m singing,” said Olmos, who revealed that the lyrics tell the Nazis “to go to hell, to rot and die--and that sort of thing.” But the Nazis don’t know what he’s singing, “because I’m doing the lines with a smile on my face.”

His is a colorful role--involving theatrics on the stage of the SS officers’ club. (Olmos implored a writer not to give away the details of his club act.) His character is also complex; he has chosen to work for the Nazis, in order to live.

But, stressed Olmos, “This is not the story of a gypsy in a concentration camp. It’s Salamo’s story. So I’ve had to ask that some of my scenes be cut.

“The challenge here is to not overdevelop the part. And to keep perspective on the story we’re doing.”

Loggia described the filming of the train’s arrival, that night in Birkenau: “It was snowing, there were hundreds and hundreds of extras. We had on frayed clothes and our Jewish stars and had to jump from the box cars. And we were freezing.

“We re-created that scene--we didn’t act it.”

Added Loggia: “We have really bitten the bullet on this. Because with this movie, if you start to do any (expletive) acting out there, other than just dealing with the cold and the craziness of the situation, you’re going to look phony. You’ll be spotted as some fake by the audience.

“The way (Bob) Young is making this movie, it’s as if you’re inside the vortex--in the maelstrom.

“This movie doesn’t allow a German guy to smirk--or do any of those numbers.”

Pointing out that the script originally depicted his character doing a Greek dance before being led to the gas chamber, Loggia said, “That scene would never work--not the way we’re doing this picture, now. I told them that’s ‘Zorba the Greek’ time. That’s Tony Quinn time. But it’s not for me--not here.

“We’re going to have a real Poppa in this picture.”

Kopelson first heard the story of Salamo Arouch in 1983. At that time, he declared, he made “an emotional commitment” to doing this picture.

The project was brought to him by Shimon Arama, who has produced films in France and in Israel.

Arama, who researched and wrote the story that evolved into “Triumph,” is co-producing with Kopelson. The $15-million production is the first film for Nova International Films--of which Arama is president.

Kopelson, who foresees a late-1989 release, refuses “to even think” that he might encounter problems finding a U.S. distributor.

“Are you kidding? I’m looking at the dailies. I know what we’ve got. Listen, I have the same feeling with this film that I had with ‘Platoon.’ In fact, I have a greater feeling with this movie.”

“Platoon,” the independently financed movie about Vietnam that the studios didn’t think audiences would want to see, went on to win the 1986 Academy Award for best picture--and to make about $250 million worldwide.

Explaining that he once approached “Platoon” director Oliver Stone about doing this movie, Kopelson said, “In retrospect, while Oliver is brilliant, he’s also very dark. He’s gone through hell himself.

“I don’t think he’d have done the movie we’re doing.

“He might have been out there, bulldozing the bodies, going into those aspects.”

Under Young’s direction, “Triumph” will not graphically explore “those aspects” of the concentration camps.

“We don’t want to hit viewers on the head,” said Kopelson.

But Kopelson is concerned about “whitewashing” the realities of Auschwitz. Especially the realities of the gas chamber.

According to Kopelson, Sonderkommandos (the inmates who assisted in the camp killings) have described how the chambers were jammed so tight that naked inmates had to raise their hands. And then small children and babies were tossed in.

The scenario has come to obsess Kopelson.

In fact, he wants it filmed.

But Young--whom Kopelson refers to as “Saint Bob”--won’t do it.

“We’re trying to tell this story by staying very close to the characters and experiencing what happens to them. And then we lose them in the maze of people, then we find them again, then we lose them. . . . “

Added Young: “Think of Salamo as a cork bobbing on the surface of the sea in a storm.

“The cork is covered with spume and it’s tossed about. And once in a while it’s tossed up in the air and, for a moment, you get in some awesome view of the sea. But you stay with the cork.

“In this movie, Salamo comes into Auschwitz in a boxcar. The doors are opened. All of a sudden he’s on a platform. People are pushing him here, there. It’s like there are forces beyond his control. He’s trapped in a whirlwind.”

During this entrapment, said Young, there will be peripheral glimpses of camp horrors.

When Arouch and the rest of the camp laborers march out of Auschwitz, they will pass by the gallows where men are hanging.

When Arouch’s brother, Avram (played by Costa Mandelas) is summoned to work in the crematorium, the scene is shot so that the audience will know what he is seeing. This according to Young, who said somberly, “As he comes to the front of the crematorium, the light from the furnace hits him and it’s red. And it comes into a close-up of his face.

“And it’s like he’s being born into hell. . . . But he refuses to be born into hell. He refuses to work in the crematorium. “

Admitting that he could not watch the TV mini-series “Holocaust,” because “it was too relentless,” Young added, “I believe a film has got to be an aesthetic experience--because it’s not reality.

“I also think there are some things you don’t deal with. I think it’s like pornography.

“Well, I’m not going to turn this movie into a horror picture--which is what it would become if I showed atrocities. This is not a movie about special effects.”

And so, said Young, he won’t shoot the gas chamber sequence. “I don’t want to psychologically experience that moment myself.

“That scene also involves a child. Well, I’m not going to terrorize a child by subjecting him to something like that. I happen to have children.”

A former documentary film maker, Young is known for “small” feature films, modest in budget and scope, which deal carefully with complex issues.

“Alambrista!” is about a Mexican national who is exploited when he comes to the United States illegally. “Short Eyes” is about a child molester who has been sent to prison.

Told from differing points of view, “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” follows a posse’s search for a Mexican (played by Olmos) who has killed a sheriff. Last year’s “Dominick and Eugene,” is about the relationship between two brothers--one of whom is developmentally handicapped.

The latter convinced Kopelson to go after Young for “Triumph.”

But at first Young turned the project down. “I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was dangerous material,” he said. “It was trying to tell how these people had suffered--and how the audience, in turn, should feel. I didn’t like that. I consider that sort of thing breast-beating.”

Kopelson wound up talking him into doing it.

Young has since taken the script--which has been through numerous revisions and bears numerous writers’ names-- and reworked it.

In fact, he’s rewriting daily--often with Olmos and screenwriter Arthur Coburn. “Almost every night, I’m writing the scene for the next day,” admitted Young. “I tell you, it’s been very scary. There’ve been nights where I’m up until 4 in the morning because I’m having anxiety attacks.”

According to Young, the script’s “whole structure is changing,” with new scenes being added.

“In many ways, the script needed to be done here, in Auschwitz. It needed the rawness and the reality of this ,” said Young, adding: “There are elements in this story that I’m just discovering.”

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In an earlier draft, there was an exchange of dialogue that found Salamo bragging to a German named Heinrich that he can assure his major he’ll fight in the ring--and win.

“He can bet his life on it,” said Salamo.

“Not his life . . . yours,” retorted Heinrich.

Kopelson loved that line.

“But then,” he shrugged, “those guys talked Bob out of it.”

“Those guys” are Hartmut Becker and Burkhard Heyl--the only Germans in the cast.

Becker is playing SS Major Rauscher; Heyl is SS Lt. Heinrich. Both acknowledge that it has not been easy for them to be on this set, wearing SS uniforms.

Both are working with Young to bring more insight to their supporting roles.

According to Young, there are now subtle moments to show that the character of Rauscher--who happens to be a former Olympian athlete--identifies with Arouch. In a sense, he boxes vicariously, through him.

Heinrich’s character carries a volume of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. He is similar to Arouch’s brother, Avram (who is put to death because he will not work in the crematorium), in the sense that he ultimately decides he cannot continue living--because he cannot accept what he has done at Auschwitz.

“These are not the German stereotypes,” said Becker, adding, “We wanted to see a little opening door--a little quality in these people. They are some sort of survivors, too.”

Explaining that his father was a German Army sergeant who was killed at Leningrad (when Becker was 3), he recalled: “The bullet that killed him went through a little book filled with family pictures. Later, the book was sent to us. As a boy, I used to sit and look through it. . . . “

Heyl’s father was also in the German Army. Hospitalized for frostbite in Russia, he was asked to read poetry aloud to Russian officers.

Acknowledging that his character’s interest in poetry might seem odd amidst the daily horrors of Auschwitz, Heyl said, “I’m not searching for sympathy. But--I must play a person. I know that it is a perverse situation to be in Auschwitz and read poems. But poetry can be his mode of escape. It’s a lie--but, perhaps that’s how he did it. Perhaps that’s how he kept his sanity there.”

There were some jokes on the set the first day that Becker and Heyl appeared on the set in their SS uniforms.

Becker and Heyl had anticipated them. (They’d conferred nervously among themselves, before making their “debut.”)

What Becker wasn’t prepared for was an encounter with a group of tourists as he walked across the camp dressed like an SS major.

“The looks in their faces. The looks. I could see that I hurt those people so much.

“They hurt me, too.”

Admitting that if he had it to do over, he probably wouldn’t have agreed to do this movie, Becker said: “I was not prepared for what I would feel when I got here.

“You know, when I was young, I saw the documentaries about the camps. And I have been to Dachau and to Buchenwald.

“But this place . . . And Birkenau . . . When I saw it for the first time, well, it is so huge.”

Fingering the silver skull insignia emblazoned on the right collar of his jacket, he said, “Did you know that this is the designation for the death camp?

“When I first saw this, I felt a kind of chill.”