'The bloodshed had to be shown'

'The bloodshed had to be shown'











At 80, Andrzej Wajda has made the bravest film of his career: a graphic account of the killing of 8,000 Polish officers. He tells Geoffrey Macnab why the story meant so much to him

Friday May 2, 2008
The Guardian


Unravelling the great lies... Katyn



In his home country, Andrzej Wajda's film about what he calls an "unhealed wound" in Polish history has turned into a full-blown phenomenon. Close to three million people have already seen his depiction of the Katyn massacre. Schools and military organisations have been making special trips to the cinema to see it. All of a sudden, Wajda - one of the most revered European film-makers of the postwar era, a figure who built his reputation half a century ago with films such as Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds - has found himself back in the limelight.

Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In many ways, Katyn is the film that Wajda has been building up to throughout his career. His father, Jakub Wajda, was one of the estimated 8,000 Polish military officers murdered in 1940 by Stalin's secret police in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia. Wajda was only a teenager at the time. He witnessed at first hand his mother's "desperate and hopeless" search for his father, not knowing what had happened to him, or even if he was dead. It took three years for news of the mass murder at Katyn to emerge, and it only came out then because the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union and discovered the mass graves. At this stage, as Wajda's film shows, Soviet propaganda blamed the deaths on Hitler and punished anyone who even hinted the Russians might be involved. Only in 1990, at the end of the cold war, did the Kremlin admit that Stalin had given the orders for the massacre.
Whatever else it is, Katyn is bravura film-making. Wajda is in his 80s, but he hasn't lost his knack for marshalling crowds, choreographing elaborate set-pieces, staging chases and cranking up the emotions. The massacre itself is shot in brutal but haunting fashion. Officer after officer is bundled out of Soviet trucks, shot in the back of the head and left to topple forward into a pit.

Wajda doesn't shrink at showing the sheer scale of the slaughter. What makes the sequences all the more chilling is the lack of emotion of the Soviet assassins. Their faces are blank as they pull the trigger. The Poles try to utter the Lord's Prayer when they realise they are doomed, but none has time to get beyond a line or two. Then, as huge lines of corpses lie bleeding in the mud, a bulldozer pushes earth on top of them.

Wajda researched the killing scenes as thoroughly as he could, poring over diaries of the slaughtered officers as well as newsreel footage and official records. "First of all, I decided the massacre must be a part of the film," he says. "Although people knew that these soldiers and intelligentsia were brutally murdered, and could imagine how they were murdered, I still decided that the bloodshed had to be shown. The way the victims were killed was easy to find out after the graves were discovered in 1943."

In the flesh, Wajda cuts a sprightly figure. A silver-haired, bespectacled man in a dark suit, he is clearly relieved that, after so many years of struggle, he has finally been able to make Katyn. The screenplay went through countless drafts with many different writers before Wajda pronounced himself ready to shoot. And when he says that he is the only director who could have made Katyn, his remark does not come across as arrogance.

First, there is his personal connection with the material. Then there is his film-making reputation. Wajda is one of the last links with the "Polish film school", a group of directors who emerged in the 1950s, defining themselves in opposition to Soviet film-making. He wanted to make Katyn in the tradition of that school.

Perhaps as a result, Katyn has an old-fashioned feel to it. Wajda isn't much interested in the complexities of history. He depicts the Polish officers and their families in a heroic light. The Soviet soldiers and the Nazis are villains. There is little grey area between.

Katyn begins with a tremendous sequence, heavy with symbolism - one that sums up perfectly Poland's perennial fate as Europe's football, the country "in between". On September 17 1939, two bands of refugees meet on a bridge. One group is fleeing from the Russians, who have invaded from the east. The others are going in the opposite direction to escape the Nazis, who entered the country a fortnight before from the west.

Wajda has complained in the past that the younger generation in Poland have showed little interest in the country's history. He recalls watching a high-school student interviewed on Polish TV. Asked what he associated with the date September 17, this student mentioned casually "a church holiday". Katyn is intended to jolt such people out of their apathy and to remind them what their parents and grandparents endured.

"But a question I was asked often during the making of the film - and which I asked myself too - was who I was making this film for," he says. "If I was making Katyn for the younger generation, it would have to have a different speed, a different tempo, and to be a different film."

In the end, Wajda didn't make many concessions to younger viewers. This is a very traditional piece of film-making. Nonetheless, the director still believes it is accessible. He describes it as a film more about "individual suffering" than "naked historical facts".

Still, this late flowering must be a source of pleasure for him. Wajda is one of a number of Polish film-makers who risked losing their way at the end of the Soviet era, when they no longer had anything to define themselves against. From the Warsaw uprisings to the solidarity strikes, Wajda's best work was invariably rooted in social and political issues.

A decade ago, he told me he admired Krzysztof Kieslowski as one of the few Polish film-makers who had managed to adjust to the post-communist world. "Kieslowski actually went against the mainstream of the Polish film-making tradition," Wajda said then. "Most of our films were in one way or another political; we were trying to relate to society and history. He chose a completely different way - a psychological, metaphysical way - of dealing with contemporary life. As events have shown, it was the right way."

Wajda had little success when he tried to follow Kieslowski's path in the 1990s with films such as Miss Nobody. It wasn't until 1999 that his revival began, after he had returned to Polish historical subjects, and directed a screen version of the 19th-century nationalist epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Now, with Katyn, he is again probing a painful episode in the country's past.

Despite his father's death in the massacre, Wajda says that the film is not directly autobiographical. "I couldn't make a film about my father because I simply didn't know much about him," Wajda says. "The last time I saw him was 1939 when he went to the front." The director says he had two clear goals in making the movie: to highlight the massacre and to unravel "the great lies" told about it.

The burning issue now is how the film will go down in Russia. At one stage, the producers had planned a public screening of Katyn at the Polish embassy in Moscow on March 5, the anniversary of Stalin's death. But the Russian elections caused some nervousness, so they opted instead hold a private screening, with the first public showing planned for June at the Moscow film festival.

"Katyn is going to be shown in Russia," Wajda insists. "We've not found a Russian distributor yet, but it is enormously important for this film to be shown in Russia if Polish-Russian relations in the 21st century are to be based in truth, not lies.

"This film is not against the Russian people. It is about the horrors of the Stalin regime. In this forest in Katyn, there were many thousands of Russian civilians and soldiers killed brutally and put into mass graves. It was a graveyard for both the Poles and the Russians."

· The Andrzej Wajda season is at BFI Southbank, London, until May 30

Marek Grechuta - Ojczyzna

Marek Grechuta - Ojczyzna


musimy sie cieszyc ze jestesmy Polakami.

Lech Bajan Washington DC

Żydowska skrucha by Profesor Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Żydowska skrucha by Profesor Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Żydowska skrucha by Profesor Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski


Notorycznie Żydzi kultywują mit, że zawsze są krzywdzeni przez gojów. Żydzi sami nienawidzą okazywania skruchy, za krzywdy wyrządzane przez Żydów innym. Faktycznie ofiary krzywd wyrządzonych przez Żydów, są nagminnie przez nich nienawidzone. Stąd pochodzi niesłychana nienawiść do chłopów polskich i ukraińskich w literaturze żydowskiej. Lata terroru Jakuba Bermana, w czasie dziesięcioletnich rządów żydowskich w Polsce z ramienia Sowietów, oraz działalność żydowskiego ruchu roszczeniowego, są obecnie powodem stałych napaści żydowskich na Polaków, w prasie kontrolowanej przez Żydów.

Profesor Kevin MacDonald opisuje w swojej książce o Żydach pod tytułem „Kultura Krytyki” jak w powojennych państwach satelickich, Żydzi kierowali sowieckim aparatem terroru. W Polsce, czynił to Jakub Berman, który mianował Żydów na kluczowe stanowiska w komunistycznym aparacie terroru. Starsi Polacy pamiętają lata terroru Jakuba Bermana. Podobnie w Rosji, po rewolucji, Żydzi pomagali stworzyć aparat terroru, w tradycji „tysiącletniego terroru rabinów,” który trwał do połowy 19go wieku i jest szczegółowo opisany przez profesora Izraela Shahak’a.

W Polsce, po 1944 roku, szalał przez 10 lat terror Jakuba Bermana, który mordował dziesiątki tysięcy patriotów polskich i przygotowywał na masowe zesłanie żołnierzy Armii Krajowej do Rosji. Jak pogodzić książki J. T. Grossa, z tymi faktami historycznymi i z perfidnym oczernianiem Polaków przez prezydenta Aleksandra Kwaśniewskiego, za pomocą przeprosin i skruchy, podczas gdy w rzeczywistości Żydzi, którzy przeżyli wojnę masowo mordowali Polaków w ramach aparatu terroru Jakuba Bermana.

Taktyka ogłupiania społeczeństwa polskiego jest dobrze zilustrowana w sugestywnym tekście Kwaśniewskiego, który występując w jarmułce powiedział, że wraża przeprosiny i skruchę „w imieniu tych Polaków, którym sumienie nakazuje tak postąpić.” Był to tekst na użytek wewnątrz Polski. Inaczej pisano w Izraelu i w USA, gdzie media podały, że w imieniu państwa polskiego, prezydent Polski, wyraził wobec wszystkich Żydów na świecie przeprosiny i skruchę.

Ukryto fakt, że zbrodnie w Jedwabnem, były dokonane przez „sonder komando” z Ciechanowa, pod dowództwem Hauptsturmfuerer’a Hermann’a Schaper’a, który był skazany po wojnie w Niemczech, na sześć lat więzienia za tą zbrodnię, w dokonaniu której Niemcy użyli około 400 litrów benzyny, do podpalenia zarekwirowanej stodoły i zastrzelili Żydów, którzy nieśli części rozbitego betonowego pomnika Lenina. Jak wiadomo wówczas Polacy w Jedwabnem nie mieli ani benzyny ani broni palnej, których posiadanie było zabronione pod karą śmierci.

Istnieje fałszywa propaganda, krytykowana przez profesora Mac Donalda „że Żydzi bolszewicy nie identyfikowali się z Żydami.” Bogaci bankierzy żydowscy w Nowym Jorku finansowali rewolucję bolszewicką i byli dumni z nieproporcjonalnie wielkiej ilości Żydów w rosyjskim ruchu rewolucyjnym. Mówił o tym z dumą Jacob Schiff, któremu później rząd Lenina zwrócił wielokrotnie pieniądze otrzymane, na opłatę zorganizowanych band zbrodniarzy w celu dokonania puczu bolszewickiego w ST. Petersburgu.

Obecnie, ponad 90 lat po puczu bolszewickim i po upadku Związku Sowieckiego, Polacy są w nienawiści Żydów na drugim miejscu po Palestyńczykach. Od czasu powstania państwa Izrael jest kolej na szczególną żydowską nienawiść do Palestyńczyków, w nieludzki sposób traktowanych w czasie tworzenia państwa Izrael i umacniania go.

Na tym tle wyjątkowym zdarzeniem jest skrucha okazana w Anglii, przez główne zrzeszenie Żydów brytyjskich, pod adresem islamskiej charytatywnej organizacji Interpal, którą Żydzi ci określili jako organizację terrorystyczną i z tego powodu zostali pozwani do sądu. Przed ostateczną rozprawą zrzeszenie Żydów przeprosiło Interpal i wyraziło skruchę.

Interpal działa na terenie Palestyny i stara się ratować Arabów nieludzko traktowanych przez ekstremistów żydowskich, rządzących w Izraelu. Inerpal zbiera fundusze na służbę zdrowia i szkoły na terenach palestyńskich. Tymczasem na terenach Palestyny, okupowanych przez armię Izraela, Żydzi zbudowali wielką ścianę getta arabskiego i uruchomili 500 rogatek, które paraliżują poruszanie się Palestyńczyków, oraz zbudowali nielegalne osiedla dla 400,000 nielegalnych osadników. Podczas obecnych aktów terroru stosunek strat w ludziach jest 1:40 na korzyść Żydów.

Miliony Palestyńczyków żyją na wygnaniu i państwo Izrael absolutnie nie zgadza się na wypłatę jakichkolwiek odszkodowań za zbrodnie popełnione przez Żydów na Arabach, jak również za stałe gwałcenie prawa międzynarodowego i rezolucji ONZ, potępiających bezprawie i mordy dokonywane na Palestyńczykach.

Tymczasem fałszywa propaganda żydowskiego ruch roszczeniowego i jednoczesne ukrywanie masowych zbrodni żydowskich w ramach terroru komunistycznego, doprowadziło do takiego stanu rzeczy, że o ile zbrodniarzy hitlerowskich postawiono pod sąd, o tyle zbrodniarzy- komunistów przed żadnym sądem nie postawiono. Stało się tak z powodu wielkiego udziału Żydów, w kolosalnych zbrodniach epoki komunizmu. Ten stan rzeczy utrwala w Polsce, między innymi Gazeta Wyborcza i J.T. Gross’a.

Dziesięć lat przez zbrodniami Hitlera, w czasie narzucania kolektywizacji, Żydzi pod wodzą Lazara Kaganowicza, wymordowali głodem dwa razy więcej chłopów w Sowietach, niż Hitler wymordował Żydow dziesięć lat później. Wówczas Żydzi chwalili się w Kijowie, w czasie narzuconego „głodomoru,” że w stolicy Ukrainy, żaden Żyd nie był głodny.

Profesor Norma Finkelstein opisuje szczegółowo w swoich książkach, że sedno samo-zakłamania Żydów uformowane zostało w latach 1945-1967, kiedy skończył się okres żywej pamięci zbrodni, popełnianych przez Żydów, od 1939 roku współpracujących z sowieckim aparatem terroru na polskich terenach.

W 1967 roku zaczął się 40 letni okres skutecznego narzucania zakłamanej propagandy i ostrej cenzury, tak, że obecnie, mało kto, zdaje sobie sprawę, że w dwudziestym wieku, żydowskie ofiary stanowiły mniej niż 3% dwustu szesnastu milionów ofiar masowych mordów popełnionych w tym największym „wieku śmierci” w historii ludzkości. Nic dziwnego, że Żydom udaje się narzucać innym korzenie się i skruchę, a o własnych winach nie chcą wiedzieć i nikogo za te winy przepraszać jak też nikomu nie okazywać skruchy.

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Born Sept. 3, 1921
Lwów, Poland

in Dec 1939 left Warsaw. Dec 30, 1939 arrested by Ukrainians serving the Gestapo in Dukla, then transferred to Barwinek, Krosno, Jaslo, Tarnów, Oswiecim, arrived in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen on Aug. 10, 1940.

April 19, 1945 started on the Death March of Brandenburg from Sachsenhausen; escaped gunfire of SS-guards and arrived to Schwerin and freedom on May 2, 1945.

September 1945 arrived in Brussels, Belgium; obtained admission as a regular student at the Catholic University: Institute Superieur de Commerce, St. Ignace in Antwerp.

in 1954 graduated in Civil Engineering at the top of his class. Was invited to join honorary societies: Tau Beta Pi (general engineering honorary society), Phi Kappa Phi (academic honorary society equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa), Pi Mu (mechanical engineering honorary society), and Chi Epsilon (civil engineering honorary society). Taught descriptive geometry at the University of Tennessee;

in 1955 graduated with M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering.

in 1955 started working for Shell Oil Company in New Orleans. After one year of managerial training was assigned to design of marine structures for drilling and production of petroleum.

in 1960 started working for Texaco Research and Development in Houston, Texas as a Project Engineer. Authored total of 50 American and foreign patents on marine structures for the petroleum industry;
wrote an article: The Rise and Fall of the Polish Commonwealth - A Quest for a Representative Government in Central and Eastern Europe in the 14th to 18th Centuries. Started to work on a Tabular History of Poland.

in 1972 moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. During the following years worked as Consulting Engineer for Texaco, also taught in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as Adjunct Professor in the College of Civil Engineering teaching courses on marine structures of the petroleum industry. Designed and supervised the construction of a hill top home for his family, also bought 500 acre ranch (near Thomas Jefferson National Forest) where he restored 200 years old mill house on a mountain stream.

in 1978 prepared Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. The dictionary included a Tabular History of Poland, Polish Language, People, and Culture as well as Pogonowski's phonetic symbols for phonetic transcriptions in English and Polish at each dictionary entry; the phonetic explanations were illustrated with cross-sections of speech (organs used to pronounce the sounds unfamiliar to the users). It was the first dictionary with phonetic transcription at each Polish entry for use by English speakers

in 1981 prepared Practical Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1983 prepared Concise Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. Wrote an analysis of Michael Ch ci ski's Poland, Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism. Also selected crucial quotations from Norman Davies' God's Playground - A History of Poland on the subject of the Polish indigenous democratic process.

in 1985 prepared Polish-English Standard Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. Also prepared a revised and expanded edition of the Concise Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, also published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1987 prepared Poland: A Historical Atlas on Polish History and Prehistory including 200 maps and graphs as well as Chronology of Poland's Constitutional and Political Development, and the Evolution of Polish Identity - The Milestones. An introductory chapter was entitled Poland the Middle Ground. Aloysius A. Mazewski President of Polish-American Congress wrote an introduction. The Atlas was published by Hippocrene Books Inc. and later by Dorset Press of the Barnes and Noble Co. Inc. which sends some 30 million catalogues to American homes including color reproduction of book covers. Thus, many Americans were exposed to the cover of Pogonowski's Atlas showing the range of borders of Poland during the history - many found out for the firsttime that Poland was an important power in the past. Total of about 30,000 atlases were printed so far.

In 1988 the publication of Poland: A Historical Atlas resulted in a number of invitations extended by several Polonian organizations to Iwo Pogonowski to present Television Programs on Polish History. Pogonowski responded and produced over two year period 220 half-hour video programs in his studio at home (and at his own expense.) These programs formed a serial entitled: Poland, A History of One Thousand Years. Total of over 1000 broadcasts of these programs were transmitted by cable television in Chicago, Detroit-Hamtramck, Cleveland, and Blacksburg.

in 1990-1991 translated from the Russian the Catechism of a Revolutionary of 1869 in which crime has been treated as a normal part of the revolutionary program. Started preparation of the Killing the Best and the Brightest: A Chronology of the USSR-German Attempt to Behead the Polish Nation showing how the USSR became a prototype of modern totalitarian state, how this prototype was adapted in Germany by the Nazis.

in 1991 prepared Polish Phrasebook, Polish Conversations for Americans including picture code for gender and familiarity, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1991 prepared English Conversations for Poles with Concise Dictionary published by Hippocrene Books Inc. By then a total of over 100,000 Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionaries written by Pogonowski were sold in the United States and abroad.

in 1992 prepared a Dictionary of Polish, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish Terms used in Contacts between Poles and Jews. It was prepared for the history of Jews in Poland as well as 115 maps and graphs and 172 illustrations, paintings, drawings, and documents, etc. of Jewish life in Poland. This material was accompanied by proper annotations.

in 1993 prepared Jews in Poland, Rise of the Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. in 3000 copies. Foreword was written by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard University, and Pogonowski's school mate in the Keczmar school in Warsaw. Part I included: a Synopsis of 1000 Year History of Jews in Poland; the 1264 Statute of Jewish Liberties in Poland in Latin and English translation; Jewish Autonomy in Poland 1264-1795; German Annihilation of the Jews. In appendixes are documents and illustrations. An Atlas is in the Part III. It is divided as follows: Early Jewish Settlements 966-1264; The Crucial 500 Years, 1264-1795; Competition (between Poles and Jews) Under Foreign Rule, 1795-1918; The Last Blossoming of Jewish Culture in Poland, 1918-1939; German Genocide of the Jews, 1940-1944; Jewish Escape from Europe 1945-1947 - The End of European (Polish) Phase of Jewish History (when most of world's Jewry lived in Europe). Pogonowski began to write a new book starting with the Chronology of the Martyrdom of Polish Intelligentsia during World War II and the Stalinist Terror; the book in preparation was entitled Killing the Best and the Brightest.

in 1995 prepared Dictionary of Polish Business, Legal and Associated Terms for use with the new edition of the Practical Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary and later to be published as a separate book.

in 1996 Pogonowski's Poland: A Historical Atlas; was translated into Polish; some 130 of the original 200 maps printed in color; the Chronology of Poland was also translated into Polish. The Atlas was published by Wydawnictwo Suszczy ski I Baran in Kraków in 3000 copies; additional publications are expected. Prepared Polish-English, Eglish-Polish Compact Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1997 finished preparation of the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics including over 200,000 entries, in three volumes on total of 4000 pages; it is published by Hippocrene Books Inc; the Polish title is: Uniwesalny S ownik Polsko-Angielski. Besides years of work Pogonowski spent over $50,000 on computers, computer services, typing, and proof reading in order to make the 4000 page dictionary camera ready; assisted in the preparation of second edition of Jews in Poland, Rise of the Jews from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel published in fall of 1997. Prepared computer programs for English-Polish Dictionary to serve as a companion to the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary printed by the end of May 1997.

in 1998 Pogonowski organized preparation of CD ROM for the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary, Practical English-Polish Dictionary, Polish Phrasebook for Tourists and Travelers to Poland, all published earlier by Iwo C. Pogonowski. The Phrasebook includes 280 minutes of bilingual audio read by actors. Started preparation for a new edition of Poland: A Historical Atlas. New Appendices are being prepared on such subjects as: Polish contribution to Allied's wartime intelligence: the breaking of the Enigma Codes, Pune Munde rocket production; Poland's contribution to the international law since 1415; Poland's early development of rocket technology such as Polish Rocketry Handbook published in 1650 in which Poles introduced for the first time into the world's literature concepts of multiple warheads, multistage rockets, new controls in rocket flight, etc. Poland's Chronology is being enlarged to reflect the mechanisms of subjugation of Polish people by the Soviet terror apparatus. Continued preparation of the Killing the Best and the Brightest: A Chronology of the USSR-German Attempt to Behead the Polish Nation, including the 1992 revelations from Soviet archives as well as the current research in Poland. Continued preparation of two-volume English Polish Dictionary, a companion to the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary published in 1997. Reviewed Upiorna Dekada by J. T. Gross.

in 1999 Pogonowski continued writing Poland - An Illustrated History and preparing for it 21 maps and diagrams and 89 illustrations.

in 2000 Pogonowski prepared, in a camera ready form, Poland - An Illustrated History; it was published by Hippocrene Books Inc. NY 2000 and recommended by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under President Carter, as "An important contribution to the better understanding of Polish history, which demonstrates in a vivid fashion the historical vicissitudes of that major European nation."

Myśląc Ojczyzna Swieto Pierwszego Maja red. Stanisław Michalkiewicz

Myśląc Ojczyzna Swieto Pierwszego Maja red. Stanisław Michalkiewicz
"Myśląc Ojczyzna"
red. Stanisław Michalkiewicz (2008-04-30)
Felieton
słuchajzapisz