The Nazis have begun their liquidation of Lvov, randomly murdering Jews for the sport of it and trucking away thousands to concentration camps. Here is a time and place of torture and death where everyone steals from everyone else to stay alive and nobody can be trusted—especially a sour and burly hamhock of a sewer worker and petty thief named Leopold Socha. Between robberies, he one day encountered some Polish Jews trying to escape from the ghetto before the Gestapo found them. For a price, he showed them how to climb down from a hole in the street into the murk and foul-smelling slime of the underground tunnels. Living with rats, eating a raw onion if they were lucky, separating from their families, giving birth to children surrounded by excrement, they miraculously survived for 14 months. When their money ran out, this accidental hero and his hardened, calloused wife above ground somehow discovered a conscience they didn’t know they had and protected their “children of war” from one near-fatal mishap after the next. In time, the lives of dependants and reluctant saviors alike intertwine with such inspired candor and force that the ensemble cast literally takes on the souls of the characters. They are so real that after a while you forget you are watching actors at all. This is especially true of Robert Wieckiewicz, an expressive and celebrated stage star in Poland who does wonders depicting the conflicting moral and religious instincts of Socha, a tough, emotionally detached sewer inspector and predatory crook whose criminal instinct for self-protection was betrayed by his new-found empathy for the disenfranchised. Only a handful of his Jews came through the ordeal alive, but the real Socha has since been honored for his humanitarian efforts, along with other brave Poles who altered human destiny by saving persecuted Jews from the gas chambers—specifically Oskar Schindler.

Warsaw-born director Holland, whose native epics about World War II, such as Europa, Europa, have always surpassed her more commercial English-speaking work (The Secret Garden, Washington Square), does such a thorough job depicting authenticity that the filth and degradation of the claustrophobic sewer eventually get to you. There’s an actual childbirth and the smothering of a baby I could not watch, as well as a deathly flood that proves to be an act of betrayal. It is to the credit of a sound screenplay by David Shamoon that the film carefully balances the fear and selfishness of the victims without sentimentality. Neither Socha nor the Jews are angels. Some of them are despicable on both sides of the equation. Without overdoing the atrocities, Ms. Holland attempts to illustrate the many cruel aspects of war’s effects on its victims as well as its perpetrators. The title is apropos, because most of the film submerges the viewer into a labyrinthine subterranean blackness that makes it difficult to share the experiences. We squint to watch them, and struggle to feel the sexual and emotional attractions that keep their minds from closing the bridge to insanity.

In Darkness is gloomy and hard to take for a running time of 145 minutes, but it’s an important film, related with deep conviction, and uncompromising in its understanding of the remarkable things members of the human race have done—to, for, and against each other—in the wilderness of war.

rreed@observer.com

IN DARKNESS

Running Time 145 minutes

Written by David F. Shamoon

Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Starring Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann and Agnieszka Grochowska

3.5/4

Ms. Guinness.

Did you wake up today with Fashion Week withdrawal? Craving a runway in New York, and unable to hop a flight to London? Remnick & Co. have you covered: The New Yorker's style issue hits stands today, and there's plenty of hemming to fill the pages. Susan Orlean has a nice snapshot of happy-go-lucky French couturier Jean-Paul Gautier, but more arresting is Rebecca Mead's take on the enigma of Daphne Guinness.

There is no shortage of reasons to look into the life of Ms. Guinness -- described in the profile as "an heiress, a muse, a socialite, a designer, and an artist" -- but it helps that The Observer is coming off a week where she seemed to be everywhere. We caught up with her at Steven Klein's harrowing video installation, downed shots of tequila with her at the AnOther magazine dinner, and then hung out with her and Mick Jagger at Electric Room late into Thursday night (for more on that, look for a certain nightlife column in Wednesday's Observer).

The article is behind the paywall, so we'll give the subscription-less a look at the more intriguing reveals imbedded in the piece.

On what clothes by her late friend Alexander McQueen hang in her closets:

She had at least six McQueen bodysuits, made from skin-tight beige silk net embroidered with glass beads in patterns that evoked both corsetry and herpetology.

On a bad fall that resulted from her wobbly, sky-high heel-less Noritaka Tatehanas:

She was delighted to see that her blood matched her shoes.

On her role as mistress to married philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy:

Guinness has often alluded on her Twitter account to the heartbreak of the situation. ("I am a hopeless romantic. I would not think twice to die for love.")

On her relationship with Harold Bloom, the Western Canon's biggest fanboy:

"She has got a kind of precarious beauty," Bloom to me, fondly. "One wonderful day, there she was, looking very young and boyish in a black costume with a white ruff, and I said, 'Daphne, dear, who are you?' And she said, 'Harold, I'm Hamlet.'"

And on the Nazism that once ran through the older generations of her family:

School became even harder to tolerate after the death, in 1980, of her grandmother Diana's second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Mosley were married, in 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolph Hitler as a guest.

Perhaps the most striking quote from Ms. Guinness relates to this arm of her family, and its politics. The icon and writer are discussing Diana and her sister, Unity, who committed suicide after years dwelling in Hilter's inner circle.

"Why didn't Unity shoot Hitler instead of herself?" Guinness said. "Then we'd be descended from heroes instead of villains."

Kanye West (Getty Images)

Rapper Kanye West marked the occasion of his new album with Jay-Z to compare himself to a certain German dictator. At an English music festival, the rapper reportedly told the crowd: "I walk through the hotel, and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm f---ing insane, like I'm Hitler... One day the light will shine through, and one day people will understand everything I ever did."

We don't understand quite everything Mr. West attempts (he was speaking in particular about his violent "Monster" music video), but we are fairly familiar with his metaphor. We understand! It's the sane convenient metaphor for cruelty that Lars von Trier reached for at Cannes and the same go-to emotional outburst that John Galliano stumbled upon in Paris.

Godwin's Law indicates that as any online conversation continues and grows more heated, a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis is inevitable. For figures who live in the public eye by choice, the unceasing, hyperbolic conversation about their faults and their foibles would seem to prove the point. (A corollary indicates that anyone who mentions Hitler ends the conversation, which seems true only online.)

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

What if the Nazis had greeted each other with high fives instead of that stiff-armed, sharp-handed salute? What if Germans had been allowed to say hello to one another by name instead of invoking their Führer?

Tilman Allert’s The Hitler Salute, a joyously sharp account of a massively evil slice of human history, doesn’t treat the Nazis’ obligatory two-word, one-arm greeting as a product of evil, but as its enabler. He argues, movingly, that the salute wounded Germans’ sociability, connectedness and personal sovereignty, warping the holy human order.

A nation that’s forced to adopt inhuman gestures, in other words, is fated to oblige inhuman horrors: First hellos disappear, then morality.

MR. ALLERT IS a professor of sociology and social psychology, not a historian, and it shows. He gives almost nothing in the way of a pre- or post-Nazi account of the Hitler salute—which is odd for a book that happens to be titled The Hitler Salute. (It would also have been nice to learn how nearly the same gesture, the Bellamy flag salute, earlier came to accompany the pledge of allegiance in American schools.)

But if you’re willing to piece together the historical details that get sprinkled around, a terrifying chronology emerges. It starts on July 13, 1933, when the Hitler salute officially became “a general civic duty” (that’s half a year after its namesake became chancellor, and one day before he banned all other German political parties). An Interior Ministry memo instructs that the right arm, or left “in the case of physical infirmity,” must be raised voluntarily and joyfully, palm down and open at eye-level, and the accompanying hail must be articulated clearly. Even written correspondence had to end with the salute.

On July 24, 1933, students and teachers were ordered to salute one another at the beginning and end of the school day, between classes, or whenever an adult entered the classroom. Plus: “Individual pupils who encounter fellow pupils inside the school building or on school grounds are also required to use the Hitler greeting.”

In a local police memo sent on July 23, 1934, the government complains about “traveling vaudeville performers training their monkeys to give the German greeting on command.” The police are ordered to “see to it that said animals are destroyed.” By the end of that year, special courts were established to punish the Germans who refused to salute. Offenders, such as the Protestant preacher Paul Schneider, could be sent to concentration camps.

By 1935, the “greeting” entry in a German pictorial dictionary has the Hitler salute as the first illustrated example (a handshake is ninth); toy figures were fashioned with pivoting right arms; Sleeping Beauty was reworked so that the prince gives Hitler’s salute to his damsel when she wakes up.

And by 1937, Jews were forbidden to use the Hitler salute; street signs reminded True Germans how to greet one another; department store clerks said, “Heil Hitler, how may I help you?”

ALL THIS TOOK its toll. Mr. Allert reverently imagines social greetings as dramatic dances over wide personal gulfs, expressions of individual character that also make for communal bonds in a shared moment. So a disruption of traditional German gestures presented a massive threat to interconnectedness—especially because of the strange and estranging stiffened arm, which pushed people away just when they should’ve been brought together.

The slogan “Heil Hitler,” which essentially translates to “health to Hitler,” or “may Hitler keep you well,” was just as odd. The Führer wasn’t there to enjoy his subjects’ good wishes, or to bestow wellness on them—so each salute hoisted him further above reality. The Hitler salute wasn’t an actual human greeting; it was a one-on-one party rally.

Consider, also, that Hitler was invoked in place of the greeted person’s name—or in place of goodness (“Guten Tag”) or God (“Grüß Gott”). A link with one’s neighbor, or a shared link with the divinity, was replaced by a tense-armed, tense-tongued oath to Nazism. “There are no free spaces in which the individual belongs only to himself,” the chairwoman of the National Socialist Women’s League boasted. “The age of personal happiness is over. From now on we will know only communal happiness.”

Even in translation, the prose of The Hitler Salute can be just as stirring as that fantastic fascistic slogan. This 100-page English edition, which comes three years after the book was first published in Germany, is handled acrobatically by Jefferson Chase, who has previously translated Nazi nonfiction and also Thomas Mann. Within the span of two sentences, we’re liable to hear about “ghostly spectacle,” “magical fascination” and the “triumph of social radicalism over the fragile space of human dignity.”

And the moral of the story? Tilman Allert urges us, in parting, to be “wary of obligatory rituals, especially when they are imposed from above.”

Max Abelson is a reporter at The Observer. He can be reached at mabelson@observer.com.