The Last Stage (Polish: Ostatni etap) is a 1948 Polish historical drama film directed by Wanda Jakubowska and written by Jakubowska and Gerda Schneider, depicting her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The film was one of the early cinematic efforts to describe the Holocaust. Jakubowska’s film influenced subsequent directors that dealt with the subject, including Alain Resnais, Gillo Pontecorvo and Steven Spielberg.
It was Jakubowska's first theatrically-released film and was both a commercial and critical success. In 1996, Stephen Holden also wrote about the film in The New York Times: "Bleaker and more terrifying than "Schindler's List," this inky, nightmarish film has the atmosphere of a horror movie up until its sentimental ending." In the introduction to Jakubowska's published script, Jerzy Toeplitz wrote: "The value of the film lies in the ideological stand of its maker, who put her great talent and all her strength into the effort to fight fascism, to unmask its genocidal method." Bradshaw wrote: "The Last Stage is a forthright, vehement film with a confident and almost Hollywoodised way of portraying the nightmare, but with a distinctive emphasis on the leftist Polish patriots and their defiant plan to resist. The existence of the gas chambers themselves is casually, in fact bloodfreezingly, invoked, though they are not in direct sight...The Last Stage is essential both as a film and historical document."