Landscape After Battle is perhaps the definitive Polish film on the psychic ravages of World War II, and what Albert Johnson called “the complex inner struggles between poetic impulse and patriotism in the Polish temperament.” Set in Auschwitz after its liberation by the Allies, the film is an unlikely blend of ravishing color images, dark humor, and documentary re-creations of the painful transition from captivity to a freedom that is dubious at best. In the DP camps where thousands of Poles are held for months on end, a culture of imprisonment is fostered by the church and the liberators. Daniel Olbrychski gives a brilliant performance as a bookish young man, Tadeusz, who struggles to bring himself to escape the familiar confines of the camp with his Jewish girlfriend. Wajda based Landscape After Battle on the autobiographical stories of Tadeusz Borowski, who, having survived Auschwitz and the DP camps, committed suicide in 1951.