A Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland (whose family returned from France on the eve of war), Polanski survived a feral childhood. Is adapting the Dreyfus Affair, then, a means by which Polanski might ponder his own history (as victim and victimizer)? (The Dreyfus Affair seems reflected in The Trial and In the Penal Colony.) But if Dreyfus was still off-limits in France, Polanski was perhaps a Derridean pharmakon—at once poison and cure. At a crucial moment in the film, Picquart urges Dreyfus not to cop a plea.