Jakubowska’s film influenced subsequent directors that dealt with the subject, including Alain Resnais, Gillo Pontecorvo and Steven Spielberg.

[6] Marta Weiss (Barbara Drapińska [pl]), a Polish Jew, arrives by cattle car to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

A prisoner frees her wrists and hands her a knife before she is to die, and she tells the camp that the Russians are coming and slashes the face of the Nazi commander who tortured her.

[5] In 1946 she travelled to Moscow with a filmic novella of the script translated into Russian and met with Mikhail Kalatozov, who was then responsible for Soviet cinema.

It was reviewed by Bosley Crowther for The New York Times in 1949: "...this latest import from Europe is a stark and uncompromising film... it carries a powerful comprehension of the shame and pathos of one of history's darkest hours.

"[8] 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.

[2] 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in fact bloodfreezingly, invoked, though they are not in direct sight...The Last Stage is essential both as a film and historical document.

"[2] In the same year it was described as a "masterpiece" by Sight and Sound magazine: "The Last Stage accords respect and dignity to the prisoners, shows them as complex human beings, puts them at the centre of the narrative.