Gene Gutowski

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Gene Gutowski , born in Witold Bardach (born July 26, 1925 in Lemberg , Poland , today Ukraine ; † May 10, 2016 in Warsaw , Poland ) was a Polish producer at international film.

Live and act

Witold Bardach, son of a Jewish lawyer and a concert singer, fled with his parents from the German Wehrmacht in the fall of 1939 to the (initially still) unoccupied Polish east, before the Red Army moved there in accordance with the secret additional protocol and annexed this part of the country. While his family was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and later murdered, Witold Bardach managed to escape to German-occupied Warsaw. There he made his way as a photographer and found employment at the German Junkers aircraft yard located at Warsaw Airport , where he collected important information for the Polish resistance. Bardach took the underground name Eugeniusz Gutowski and was used by the Todt organization as the head of a construction team. At the end of the year the Germans deported Bardach / Gutowski to the Third Reich, where the Pole was liberated by the Americans at the end of the war in 1945.

Gutowski immediately joined the US secret service and initially participated in the hunt for National Socialist war criminals who went into hiding in early post-war Germany. Gutowski was allowed to enter the United States in the spring of 1947. There he made his way initially as a fashion illustrator before joining television, where he found employment in the mid-1950s as a recording and production manager for the series I Spy .

He settled in the UK in 1960 and began making films for a good decade. In the mid-1960s, he had three great successes, some artistic, some commercial, in quick succession when he produced the productions Ekel , Wenn Katelbach comes ... and the dance of the vampires of his compatriot Roman Polanski . The Polish producer Sam Waynberg, who shared almost the same fate as Gutowski and was almost the same age, was involved in the first two films . Gutowski ended his career as a producer in 1972 and did not return to production until around 30 years later, again with Polanski as director, to realize a cinematic affair of the heart: the internationally produced, later Oscar- winning masterpiece The Pianist .

With this film Gutowski returned to his and Polanski's childhood, which was marked by persecution, fear of death and life underground during the German occupation from 1939 to 1945 . He himself described The Pianist as "his personal catharsis". His last film appearance was again a reminiscence of life in the horrors of war and Nazi terror and had strong autobiographical traits: the documentary Dancing Before the Enemy: How a Teenage Boy Fooled the Nazis and Lived, which his son Adam Bardach directed.

Filmography

literature

  • International Motion Picture Almanac 1965, Quigley Publishing Company, New York 1964, p. 116

Individual proof

  1. BBC obituary

Web links