Wajda's film is at once mournful and courageous in describing the obsessive anti-Semitism of the Polish people during the war years. His portrayal of the advent of the Warsaw Ghetto is unequaled, certainly in Polish cinema: a wall is built by faceless captors, and those Jews who make it to the "other side" are as visitors from another planet. One such pilgrim is Jakub Gold, Wajda's "Samson." As a youth, Gold innocently enters the university where he immediately becomes the target of mob hatred and winds up in jail. The war opens the prison gates but, as Jakub is to discover, "Freedom was not the thing he had imagined in prison." Wajda's trademark fatality is evident in his baroque use of imagery; the wide-angled beauty of Jakub (Serge Merlin)'s face is enough to evoke impending tragedy. Jakub's hallucinatory journey takes him into hiding-and out again: in Jakub Wajda creates an existential parable on the nature of freedom in the midst of oppression. "Only a man can have such an ordeal. Only a man can overcome it." It is also, perhaps, a metaphoric treatment of the political emigré (Jakub struggles to re-enter the ghetto walls). Not incidentally, after this film, Wajda was forced to work abroad for a period.