Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Wajda’s films screened in Beijing dlaczego nie w Washington DC?


Pani Miluk,
US Embassy Washington DC
Cultural Section

Klania sie Lech Alex Bajan z Arlington VA CEO RAQport.
Dziekuje za rozmowe.

My blog of Wajdzie:
http://andrzejwajda.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2008-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=12

Polska Ambasada w Washington DC powinna byc pierwsza a nie Polska Ambasada w Chinach.
Trzeba stworzy nowa liste zaproszen na to premiere nie tylko opartej na waszej starej liscie i Polish American Congress.
Jak Jim Costa:
About Jim Costa US Congress.

In January 2005, following a distinguished 24-year career as a member of the California state Legislature, Jim Costa was sworn in as Member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing California's 20th Congressional District.

The grandson of Portuguese immigrants who settled in the fertile San Joaquin Valley near the turn of the 20th Century, Congressman Costa represents a district as diverse in people as it is in crops. Made up of portions of Fresno and Kern Counties and all of Kings County, the 20th Congressional District is home to a thriving agriculture industry which produces much of what America eats. Fresno County is the nation's number one agriculture producing county, Kern County ranks third and Kings County is ninth.

Oraz
Thomas H. Quinn

Partner

thquinn@venable.com

Washington, DC
(202) 344-4701
(202) 344-8300 (fax)
http://www.venable.com/professionals.cfm?action=view&attorney_id=266
Mr. Quinn has been an active participant in political affairs. He served in the presidential campaigns of the late Hubert H. Humphrey and Edward M. Kennedy, and has been continuously active in efforts supporting the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Mr. Quinn served on the Board of International Broadcasting from 1974 to 1982, having been appointed by Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter. In 1993, Mr. Quinn was appointed by President Clinton as the Alternate U.S. Observer to the International Fund for Ireland.

Member, District of Columbia Bar Association; Member, Rhode Island Bar Association; Member, American Bar Association

To jest sprawa wagi panstwowej i persepcji World War II w srodowisku amerykanskim.

Ze wspolpraca z MSZ i Polakami w USA, roznych organizacji.

Zaprosic wielu z US Congress and Senate, Przedstawicieli innych placowek dyplomatycznych
A szczegolnie Israela i krajow Arabskich oraz swiatu mediow aby uznac Katyn Masacre za Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. To mozna osiagnoc ze zmasowana kampania w US Congress w Wh

Musimy zrobit projekcje nowego filmu Wajdy " Katyn "
szybciej teraz w listopadzie, jak najszybciej kiedy film jest na falach Mediow.
A nie na wiosne.



Podaje info jak zrobila Polska Ambasada w Chinach.

Wajda’s films screened in Beijing

Created: Wednesday, October 17. 2007

A selection of movies by Poland’s most respected film director, Andrzej Wajda, have been screened in China’s capital city, Beijing. The Chinese audience got a chance to see “Promised Land”, “Pan Tadeusz” and “Ditch”.

The screenings were held in the Beijing Film Academy 11 and 12 October and were organized by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland.

Meanwhile, Wajda’s latest film “Katyń”, depicting the soviet massacre of Polish officers and civilians, has already been seen by 1.7 million viewers since its opening night on 21 September, informed Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Contributors to the film include prominent Polish actors, cameraman Paweł Edelman, and scriptwriter Władysław Pasikowski.
Wajda's "Katyn" candidate to the Academy Awards
23.09.2007
Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn will represent Poland to the Academy Awards. The film of the Oscar winning legend of Polish film making has been chosen from among 16 candidates, by a special committee. Katyn is the first film in Polish history about the massacre of Polish officers by Stalinist NKVD services in 1940. It is not a historical account of the tragedy , but a story of the Katyn lie, a moving study of the women who for years waited for their beloved ones to return. The film will be the Polish candidate to the category of foreign movies competing for the Oscar.
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Wajda’s Katyn dominates Gdynia film festival
Polish Radio External Service, Poland - Sep 20, 2007
Wajda's Katyn is not a historical account of the tragedy , it is a psychological portrait of mothers, wives and daughters who waited endlessly for their.

Although Putin has apologized for the past in Budapest and Prague, he is unlikely to do so in Poland. During that visit to Poland in 2002, he refused to draw comparisons between Nazi and Stalinist crimes, instead suggesting that it might be possible to extend the Russian law on the rehabilitation of victims of Stalinism to the Polish citizens involved. But when campaigners from Memorial, a Moscow based human rights group, appealed to a Moscow court for the relatives to be granted the status of victims of political repression, the answer was a categorical "no".

The story is very personal. Mr. Wajda's father was one of the victims of Katyn, and Mr. Wajda based the story on the women who waited in vain for their men to return, just like his own mother had done.

Although many VIPs and the "gliteratti" were present at the showing of the film in the Polish National Opera, the mood was somber, and at the end of the film, the silence was truly pregnant with emotion. I could not see him, but I believe Cardinal Jozef Glemp said a prayer at the very end.

Also at the end of the movie a German lady said to me how lucky I was to be an American. Indeed. The burden of history is huge. These are atrocities that we can never, ever forget.

Go here to read about President Kaczynski's visit to Katyn yesterday, as well as to see some beautiful photos of the victims of the massacre.
The mass execution of twenty thousand Polish POWs by the Soviet security police (the NKVD) is one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II. Stalin and the politburo authorized the executions on March 5, 1940, following their receipt of a memorandum from Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD. Beria reported that NKVD prisons held a large number of Polish army, police, and intelligence officers who were unremittingly hostile to the Soviet system, engaged in anti-Soviet agitation within the camps, and eager to escape and to participate in counterrevolutionary activities. Because these prisoners were all "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority," Beria recommended they should all be indicted by a special tribunal of the NKVD, and then shot.

According to NKVD records there were 21,857 such executions during March and April of 1940. Most of the victims were Polish officer POWs who had been captured by the Soviets
As far as the war was concerned, we were all fearful of it. We knew that the Germans were encircling us. They were not only on the western and northern borders, where East Prussia was, but also in Czechoslovakia, so they were to the south of us. When we first heard about the war it was a shock to us, but we were hoping that our army would be able to withstand the German invasion. Little did we know the disparity in the armaments of both armies or that there was a secret clause in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which Russia and Germany had signed in August 1939. We did not know that the Soviet Union would attack us from the east.

The oil refinery in Drohobycz was bombed a few days after the beginning of the war. The oil burned for a few days and then they bombed our city a second time, not far away from where we were living. First of all the German army came into Drohobycz. They stayed there for about a week and in that time the lorries were transporting goods from the stores westward. Then on the seventeenth of September the Russian army crossed the eastern border of Poland and started to advance. The Germans moved back and the Russians came in and the same thing happened again. The lorries started going to the east.

According to historian Neal Ascherson (1987, pp. 90-1), at half past three in the morning of 17 September 1939, the Polish Ambassador in Moscow was informed that as the Polish state had ceased to exist (which was not true), steps had become necessary to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities in the 'former' Polish territories. An hour later, Soviet troops crossed the frontier. There was little resistance to the invasion, the eastern border being almost unprotected. Irena Makowiecka, reflecting upon the situation as it appeared to many Polish civilians, elucidated:

The Russians claimed that they came as an ally, as helpers, but as soon as they came they disarmed the Polish army who were moving east, away from the German panzer divisions. The Soviets took the retreating army as prisoners of war. Only a small number managed to cross the frontier through Rumania and then on to France, following the Polish government.

As the Soviet forces moved across eastern Poland to a demarcation line along the Rivers Bug and San it became clear that a fourth partition of Poland was taking place. Some individuals from all the major political parties in Poland, including President Ignacy Moscicki, managed to escape via Rumania. These people reassembled in Paris where a coalition government under the lead of General Sikorski, also the head of the remaining Polish army, was formed. Seventy-eight tons of gold from the Polish state bank was also transported to the Rumanian port of Constanza, where it was then taken by a British ship to Turkey, by train to Beirut and from there transported to France by a French cruiser.

The new government was recognised by the British, French and Americans but not by the USSR, which had not yet declared war. Sikorski and his aides had to flee when the Germans attacked France in May 1940. They took up residence in London, which remained their headquarters for the remainder of the war. From this base the Polish government in exile operated for the duration of the war, financed by the state gold which had been smuggled out of Poland in September 1939.
Chapter 2 - Deportation
After the invasion of 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union proceeded to annex territory inhabited by almost 13 000 000 people and which constituted more than half of Poland's post 1918 territory (Królikowski, 1983, p.17). Around 5000 000 of these people were ethnic Poles, the rest were predominantly Ukrainians and Byelorussians. Many Poles, both at the time and even at the time of writing, saw this 'stab in the back' as 'the realisation of a coldly planned design, a natural expression of Russia's attitude to the existence of an independent Poland ever since the Russian state had been born' (Ascherson, 1987, p. 92). Events over the next few years justified the belief that Stalin hoped to 'obliterate the Polish nation both physically and culturally' (Ascherson, 1987, p. 94).

Deportation of Officers
The Soviet authorities carried out an immediate round of deportations and arrests, principally of Polish leaders and those in government posts. In 1948 the Ministry of justice in London estimated that 200 000 Polish soldiers were arrested between 1939 and 1940, with at least 180 000 ending up as Soviet prisoners of war. A further 25 000 were forcibly drafted into the Soviet army, or taken as forced labour (Ministry of Justice, 1949). More recent figures suggest that over the remaining months of 1939, the Red Army rounded up an estimated quarter of a million Polish army personnel and transported them to the USSR (Walters, 1988, pp. 275-6).


Out of that total, between 12 000 and 15 000 officers were interned in camps near Katyn, Ostaskow and Starobel'sk. Relatives received intermittent letters from them until the spring of 1940. The occupying German army in April 1943 discovered the Katyn officers in a forest graveyard. According to Ascherson (1987, p. 123), no trace of the 4000 officers at the Starobel'sk camp nor the 6500 prisoners at Ostaskow has yet been found. Although Polish research in the post communist years is bringing to light more information about localities where NKVD (the secret police, now known as the KGB) victims, including Polish officers, were 'buried', nothing appears to have been published in English. The silence and uncertainty which surrounded the fate of these Polish officers left an enduring, if often understated, impact upon their friends and relatives. Stanislawa Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska (Adamska), whose husband had joined the army three months before war was declared, summarised the events surrounding his disappearance with simple candour:

Alex Lech Bajan
Polish American since 1987
CEO
RAQport Inc.
2004 North Monroe Street
Arlington Virginia 22207
Washington DC Area
USA
TEL: 703-528-0114
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