Czy sen. Arciszewska-Mielewczyk może liczyć na pomoc państwa?
pos. Andrzej Dera (2008-12-08)
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Monday, December 8, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
'The bloodshed had to be shown'
'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
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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
'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
Monday, March 24, 2008
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
Polska Gazeta ^ | March 2, 2008 | Herbert Romerstein
COVER UP FOR THOSE WHO CARRIED OUT MASS MURDER
By Herbert Romerstein
When the Nazis announced on April 12, 1943 that they had found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets in Katyn forest, most Americans did not believe them. The Nazis were known to commit mass murder and the extensive propaganda campaign in the United States in support of the Soviet Union had affected the thinking of most Americans.
But the Poles knew the truth. They had been asking the Soviets about the missing men for almost two years. And some Americans knew the truth because they understood the Soviet Union and its history. But, it took some time before these voices of truth could be heard.
The Soviets broke relations with the Polish Government in exile in London because the Poles had asked for an International Red Cross investigation. The Soviets claimed to have been insulted. And they used that as an excuse for recognizing a puppet Polish government that the Soviets set up in Lublin.
The American communists joined in the Soviet propaganda campaign. Corliss Lamont, a millionaire communist propagandist, wrote "Soviet Russia's severance of relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile, over the Nazi-inspired charge that the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish army officers, shows clearly the danger to the United Nations of the splitting tactics engineered by Hitler and definitely helped along by the general campaign of anti-Soviet propaganda carried on during recent months in Britain and America. According to the London Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, 'It is a safe assumption that the Poles would not have taken so tough an attitude toward the Soviet Government if it had not been for the widespread support Americans have been giving them in the cases of Henry Ehrlich and Victor Alter.'"
The reference was to the widespread protests by Jewish and trade union organizations when the Soviets admitted that they had executed Ehrlich and Alter who were leaders of the "Bund", the Jewish trade union organization. According to the communist Lamont, "The shameful anti-Soviet agitation around the Alter-Ehrlich case was followed by the collaboration with Goebbels' propaganda around the German mass murders of Poles." The Polish government had protested to the Soviets about Ehrlich and Alter.
Lamont also quoted from "Professor Lange at the University of Chicago" in support of the communist line. We now know that Oscar Lange had been recruited as an agent of the NKVD by Boleslaw Gebert.
Gebert himself wrote communist propaganda in support of the Soviet Union's false story. In one of his pamphlets, he attacked the commander of the Polish forces fighting in Italy against the Nazis, General Marjan Kukiel. According to Gebert, who was sitting safely in the United States, General Kukiel, who was leading troops in combat against the Nazis, was "Siding with the Germans in their accusations that the Soviet Union was responsible for slaughtering Polish officers and soldiers in the forest of Katyn. The world knew that this unspeakable crime was the work of the Germans…." His pamphlet was published by the communist front "Polonia Society of the International Workers Order". He was the head of that organization, which, of course, did not speak for the majority of Polish-Americans.
Not only did communists and NKVD agents carry out the propaganda campaign but, unfortunately, the United States government helped them. The Office of War Information (OWI) tried to intimidate the Polish-American radio stations and newspapers when they told the truth about the Soviet atrocity against the Poles.
Alan Cranston was head of the Foreign Language Division of the OWI and later a U.S. Senator from California. He called a meeting of OWI officials because the Polish-American radio stations "had taken a rather antagonistic attitude toward Russia" on the Katyn forest issue. Cranston felt that this "was inimical to the war effort and should be straightened out". The radio stations and newspapers were contacted and threatened with being closed down if they continued to tell the truth about the Soviet Union.
In 1952 the U.S. Congress held hearings on Katyn. More Americans learned the truth. When the Soviets recaptured the Smolensk area, they organized their own tribunal to "investigate" the murder of the Polish officers. The American press in Moscow was invited to observe. The American ambassador, Averell Harriman, sent his young daughter to represent the American Embassy. Years later she was asked by the Congressional committee investigating Katyn why her father had sent her instead of someone who was older or was a medical authority. She answered that the Soviets might not have allowed someone more experienced but it would be difficult for them to refuse her. She had believed the Soviet propaganda line; but by 1952 when she testified before the committee, she knew that the Soviets had committed the crime. She testified that she had thought that the Germans did it because the bodies were laid out in methodical manner. Apparently, she thought that the Russians could not do anything in an orderly way.
At the time of the German announcement of Katyn the American ambassador was William Standley. He understood the Soviet Union and did not trust them. He made the mistake of speaking openly to the American correspondents in Moscow. One of them represented the "Daily Worker", the Communist Party USA newspaper. She was called Janet Weaver. She was actually Janet West Ross, the wife of the American Communist Party representative to the Comintern. She regularly reported Ambassador Standley's comments and other information gleaned from conversations with American officials to Dimitrov, head of the Comintern. He passed them on to Molotov. We found a collection of her reports in the Comintern Archives in Moscow. On March 8, 1943, she reported to Dimitrov that Ambassador Standley had revealed to the American journalists that the Soviets were concealing from the Russian people the truth about the massive amount of American war materials supplied. Two days after her report, Harry Hopkins pressed President Roosevelt to remove Ambassador Standley. Hopkins succeeded, and Standley was replaced by the naïve Averill Harriman, who was much more acceptable to the Soviets. It was only in the 1980s that we learned of the evidence that Hopkins was an NKVD agent.
President Roosevelt had heard from Winston Churchill the truth about Katyn. Churchill shared with Roosevelt the information he had received on the Soviet responsibility for the murders. However, when Roosevelt heard from his own representative, George Earle, former governor of Pennsylvania, that he had information that the Soviets had committed the crime, he refused to listen. Earle had been sent by the President to Turkey and Bulgaria under diplomatic cover to report directly to the President, about the Balkans. Before seeing the President, Earle spoke to his friend Joe Levy, of the "New York Times". Levy warned him that "Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the President and the whole atmosphere over there is 'pink'." He advised Earle to be careful when he told the President the truth about Russia. Later, Earle told the President that he wanted to go public about Katyn, Roosevelt wrote to him "I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about an ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy."
Lt. Col. John Van Vliet, Jr. was an American prisoner of war in Germany. He was one of the Allied officers brought by the Germans to Katyn in 1943. When he returned to the United States in 1945, he wrote a report for the United States government revealing his knowledge of the Soviet responsibility for the murders. His report was marked "Top Secret".
The Polish-American community continued to speak out on the truth about Katyn. After the war, they got two valuable allies. One was Arthur Bliss Lane, the U.S. ambassador to Poland 1944-1947. His book "I Saw Poland Betrayed", published in 1948, was the first time many Americans heard the truth about Katyn. The other was Julius Epstein. He was an Austrian born Jew who had escaped from the Nazis. He was now an American citizen and a prominent journalist. Epstein opposed both the Nazis and the Communists. During the war, he had worked for the Office of War Information and was horrified by the pro-Soviet propaganda he saw that agency promoting.
In 1949, Epstein joined Ambassador Lane in forming the "American Committee for the Investigation of the Katyn Massacre". The Committee in coordination with the Polish-American community published pamphlets and articles telling the American people the truth about Katyn.
The Voice of America, the official voice of the American government, briefly mentioned the formation of the Committee, but refused to broadcast former Ambassador Lane's speech. When Epstein visited officials of Voice of America in New York and Washington, he demanded to know why they were not telling the truth about Katyn. They answered "We are playing down Katyn, because it would create too much hatred against Stalin among the Poles." When Epstein asked whether they wanted to create love for Stalin among the Poles at the American taxpayer expenses, he got no answer.
Count Joseph Czapski, a Polish officer had been imprisoned by the Soviets with the other Polish officers. He was released when the Soviets thought that he would be valuable for their propaganda to the West. Instead he represented General Anders in investigating the whereabouts of the missing Polish officers. He was the source of much of the information about the Soviet attempt to cover up before the bodies were found. When Count Czapski visited the United States, the Voice of America asked him to make a broadcast. He submitted the text in advance. Voice of America officials crossed out any reference to the Soviet crime. He could not even mention the word Katyn.
When Julius Epstein learned of the existence of the Van Vliet report, he and Ambassador Lane asked Congress to obtain the report. Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan began a campaign to get the Army to release the report. After many excuses, it became apparent that the report was missing. Finally the Army revealed that immediately after Col. Van Vliet submitted his report, it was sent to the State Department. There were no carbon copies kept by the Army. The State Department claimed to know nothing about it. It is interesting to note that the report went to that part of the State Department headed by Alger Hiss. We now know that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. So we can understand the disappearance of the document.
It was only in May 1951 that the Voice of America would allow some discussion of the subject. But even after that, the cover up of the Soviet crime continued, with only occasional mention of the Soviet crimes.
In 1978 at a writer's conference in Poland, the prominent writer and poet Andrzej Braun spoke out against the censorship of the truth about Katyn. The Voice of America Warsaw correspondent, Ron Pemstein, sent a report on Braun's speech to Washington. Pemstein reported that the poet cited as an example of censorship the refusal to tell the truth about "the murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at Katyn forest in 1940". A half an hour after the story reached Washington, the Voice of America had edited out the words "by the Soviet Union" and the date "1940". The story simply said "Braun cited the murder of Polish officers in World War II." Eleven Polish-Americans working at Voice of America sent a protest to the head of the Voice's European Division. He called a meeting and scolded them for complaining. Remember, this happened during the Jimmy Carter Administration in 1978. When this story appeared in the press, Voice of America director Peter Straus said that the censorship was a "error in judgment by the news editor." But more and more Americans were learning the truth. By the 1980s during the Reagan Administration most American knew the truth about Katyn.
In the years between 1945 and 1991, the KGB carried on numerous disinformation campaigns to conceal the guilt of the Soviet Union for the murders. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more and more information became available about Katyn. We now even know that Stalin himself, together with Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan, signed the report from Beria ordering the murders of the Poles at Katyn.
Herbert Romerstein is director of the Center for Security Research at the Education and Research Institute and author of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors.
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
Polska Gazeta ^ | March 2, 2008 | Herbert Romerstein
COVER UP FOR THOSE WHO CARRIED OUT MASS MURDER
By Herbert Romerstein
When the Nazis announced on April 12, 1943 that they had found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets in Katyn forest, most Americans did not believe them. The Nazis were known to commit mass murder and the extensive propaganda campaign in the United States in support of the Soviet Union had affected the thinking of most Americans.
But the Poles knew the truth. They had been asking the Soviets about the missing men for almost two years. And some Americans knew the truth because they understood the Soviet Union and its history. But, it took some time before these voices of truth could be heard.
The Soviets broke relations with the Polish Government in exile in London because the Poles had asked for an International Red Cross investigation. The Soviets claimed to have been insulted. And they used that as an excuse for recognizing a puppet Polish government that the Soviets set up in Lublin.
The American communists joined in the Soviet propaganda campaign. Corliss Lamont, a millionaire communist propagandist, wrote "Soviet Russia's severance of relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile, over the Nazi-inspired charge that the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish army officers, shows clearly the danger to the United Nations of the splitting tactics engineered by Hitler and definitely helped along by the general campaign of anti-Soviet propaganda carried on during recent months in Britain and America. According to the London Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, 'It is a safe assumption that the Poles would not have taken so tough an attitude toward the Soviet Government if it had not been for the widespread support Americans have been giving them in the cases of Henry Ehrlich and Victor Alter.'"
The reference was to the widespread protests by Jewish and trade union organizations when the Soviets admitted that they had executed Ehrlich and Alter who were leaders of the "Bund", the Jewish trade union organization. According to the communist Lamont, "The shameful anti-Soviet agitation around the Alter-Ehrlich case was followed by the collaboration with Goebbels' propaganda around the German mass murders of Poles." The Polish government had protested to the Soviets about Ehrlich and Alter.
Lamont also quoted from "Professor Lange at the University of Chicago" in support of the communist line. We now know that Oscar Lange had been recruited as an agent of the NKVD by Boleslaw Gebert.
Gebert himself wrote communist propaganda in support of the Soviet Union's false story. In one of his pamphlets, he attacked the commander of the Polish forces fighting in Italy against the Nazis, General Marjan Kukiel. According to Gebert, who was sitting safely in the United States, General Kukiel, who was leading troops in combat against the Nazis, was "Siding with the Germans in their accusations that the Soviet Union was responsible for slaughtering Polish officers and soldiers in the forest of Katyn. The world knew that this unspeakable crime was the work of the Germans…." His pamphlet was published by the communist front "Polonia Society of the International Workers Order". He was the head of that organization, which, of course, did not speak for the majority of Polish-Americans.
Not only did communists and NKVD agents carry out the propaganda campaign but, unfortunately, the United States government helped them. The Office of War Information (OWI) tried to intimidate the Polish-American radio stations and newspapers when they told the truth about the Soviet atrocity against the Poles.
Alan Cranston was head of the Foreign Language Division of the OWI and later a U.S. Senator from California. He called a meeting of OWI officials because the Polish-American radio stations "had taken a rather antagonistic attitude toward Russia" on the Katyn forest issue. Cranston felt that this "was inimical to the war effort and should be straightened out". The radio stations and newspapers were contacted and threatened with being closed down if they continued to tell the truth about the Soviet Union.
In 1952 the U.S. Congress held hearings on Katyn. More Americans learned the truth. When the Soviets recaptured the Smolensk area, they organized their own tribunal to "investigate" the murder of the Polish officers. The American press in Moscow was invited to observe. The American ambassador, Averell Harriman, sent his young daughter to represent the American Embassy. Years later she was asked by the Congressional committee investigating Katyn why her father had sent her instead of someone who was older or was a medical authority. She answered that the Soviets might not have allowed someone more experienced but it would be difficult for them to refuse her. She had believed the Soviet propaganda line; but by 1952 when she testified before the committee, she knew that the Soviets had committed the crime. She testified that she had thought that the Germans did it because the bodies were laid out in methodical manner. Apparently, she thought that the Russians could not do anything in an orderly way.
At the time of the German announcement of Katyn the American ambassador was William Standley. He understood the Soviet Union and did not trust them. He made the mistake of speaking openly to the American correspondents in Moscow. One of them represented the "Daily Worker", the Communist Party USA newspaper. She was called Janet Weaver. She was actually Janet West Ross, the wife of the American Communist Party representative to the Comintern. She regularly reported Ambassador Standley's comments and other information gleaned from conversations with American officials to Dimitrov, head of the Comintern. He passed them on to Molotov. We found a collection of her reports in the Comintern Archives in Moscow. On March 8, 1943, she reported to Dimitrov that Ambassador Standley had revealed to the American journalists that the Soviets were concealing from the Russian people the truth about the massive amount of American war materials supplied. Two days after her report, Harry Hopkins pressed President Roosevelt to remove Ambassador Standley. Hopkins succeeded, and Standley was replaced by the naïve Averill Harriman, who was much more acceptable to the Soviets. It was only in the 1980s that we learned of the evidence that Hopkins was an NKVD agent.
President Roosevelt had heard from Winston Churchill the truth about Katyn. Churchill shared with Roosevelt the information he had received on the Soviet responsibility for the murders. However, when Roosevelt heard from his own representative, George Earle, former governor of Pennsylvania, that he had information that the Soviets had committed the crime, he refused to listen. Earle had been sent by the President to Turkey and Bulgaria under diplomatic cover to report directly to the President, about the Balkans. Before seeing the President, Earle spoke to his friend Joe Levy, of the "New York Times". Levy warned him that "Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the President and the whole atmosphere over there is 'pink'." He advised Earle to be careful when he told the President the truth about Russia. Later, Earle told the President that he wanted to go public about Katyn, Roosevelt wrote to him "I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about an ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy."
Lt. Col. John Van Vliet, Jr. was an American prisoner of war in Germany. He was one of the Allied officers brought by the Germans to Katyn in 1943. When he returned to the United States in 1945, he wrote a report for the United States government revealing his knowledge of the Soviet responsibility for the murders. His report was marked "Top Secret".
The Polish-American community continued to speak out on the truth about Katyn. After the war, they got two valuable allies. One was Arthur Bliss Lane, the U.S. ambassador to Poland 1944-1947. His book "I Saw Poland Betrayed", published in 1948, was the first time many Americans heard the truth about Katyn. The other was Julius Epstein. He was an Austrian born Jew who had escaped from the Nazis. He was now an American citizen and a prominent journalist. Epstein opposed both the Nazis and the Communists. During the war, he had worked for the Office of War Information and was horrified by the pro-Soviet propaganda he saw that agency promoting.
In 1949, Epstein joined Ambassador Lane in forming the "American Committee for the Investigation of the Katyn Massacre". The Committee in coordination with the Polish-American community published pamphlets and articles telling the American people the truth about Katyn.
The Voice of America, the official voice of the American government, briefly mentioned the formation of the Committee, but refused to broadcast former Ambassador Lane's speech. When Epstein visited officials of Voice of America in New York and Washington, he demanded to know why they were not telling the truth about Katyn. They answered "We are playing down Katyn, because it would create too much hatred against Stalin among the Poles." When Epstein asked whether they wanted to create love for Stalin among the Poles at the American taxpayer expenses, he got no answer.
Count Joseph Czapski, a Polish officer had been imprisoned by the Soviets with the other Polish officers. He was released when the Soviets thought that he would be valuable for their propaganda to the West. Instead he represented General Anders in investigating the whereabouts of the missing Polish officers. He was the source of much of the information about the Soviet attempt to cover up before the bodies were found. When Count Czapski visited the United States, the Voice of America asked him to make a broadcast. He submitted the text in advance. Voice of America officials crossed out any reference to the Soviet crime. He could not even mention the word Katyn.
When Julius Epstein learned of the existence of the Van Vliet report, he and Ambassador Lane asked Congress to obtain the report. Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan began a campaign to get the Army to release the report. After many excuses, it became apparent that the report was missing. Finally the Army revealed that immediately after Col. Van Vliet submitted his report, it was sent to the State Department. There were no carbon copies kept by the Army. The State Department claimed to know nothing about it. It is interesting to note that the report went to that part of the State Department headed by Alger Hiss. We now know that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. So we can understand the disappearance of the document.
It was only in May 1951 that the Voice of America would allow some discussion of the subject. But even after that, the cover up of the Soviet crime continued, with only occasional mention of the Soviet crimes.
In 1978 at a writer's conference in Poland, the prominent writer and poet Andrzej Braun spoke out against the censorship of the truth about Katyn. The Voice of America Warsaw correspondent, Ron Pemstein, sent a report on Braun's speech to Washington. Pemstein reported that the poet cited as an example of censorship the refusal to tell the truth about "the murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at Katyn forest in 1940". A half an hour after the story reached Washington, the Voice of America had edited out the words "by the Soviet Union" and the date "1940". The story simply said "Braun cited the murder of Polish officers in World War II." Eleven Polish-Americans working at Voice of America sent a protest to the head of the Voice's European Division. He called a meeting and scolded them for complaining. Remember, this happened during the Jimmy Carter Administration in 1978. When this story appeared in the press, Voice of America director Peter Straus said that the censorship was a "error in judgment by the news editor." But more and more Americans were learning the truth. By the 1980s during the Reagan Administration most American knew the truth about Katyn.
In the years between 1945 and 1991, the KGB carried on numerous disinformation campaigns to conceal the guilt of the Soviet Union for the murders. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more and more information became available about Katyn. We now even know that Stalin himself, together with Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan, signed the report from Beria ordering the murders of the Poles at Katyn.
Herbert Romerstein is director of the Center for Security Research at the Education and Research Institute and author of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors.
A real hero - Witold Pilecki - A Volunteer for Auschwitz
A real hero - Witold Pilecki - A Volunteer for Auschwitz
A real hero - Witold Pilecki - A Volunteer for Auschwitz
Pilecki i Anders
Ochotnik do Auschwitz/Volunteer for Auschwitz - W. Pilecki
("Let's Reminisce About Witold Pilecki")
Witold Pilecki was born in Poland in 1901. When the German Army invaded the country in September, 1939, Pilecki joined the Tajna Armia Polska, the Secret Polish Army.
When Pilecki discovered the existence of Auschwitz, he suggested a plan to his senior officers. Pilecki argued he should get himself arrested and sent to the concentration camp. He would then send out reports of what was happening in the camp. Pilecki would also explore the possibility of organizing a mass break-out.
Pilecki's colonel eventually agreed and after securing a false identity as Tomasz Serafinski, he arranged to be arrested in September, 1940. As expected he was sent to Auschwitz where he became prisoner 4,859. His work consisted of building more huts to hold the increased numbers of prisoners.
Pilecki soon discovered the brutality of the Schutz Staffeinel (SS) guards. When one man managed to escape on 28th October 1940, all the prisoners were forced to stand at attention on the parade-ground from noon till nine in the evening. Anyone who moved was shot and over 200 prisoners died of exposure. Pilecki was able to send reports back to the Tajna Armia Polska explaining how the Germans were treating their prisoners. This information was then sent to the foreign office in London.
In 1942 Pilecki discovered that new windowless concrete huts were being built with nozzles in their ceilings. Soon afterwards he heard that that prisoners were being herded into these huts and that the nozzles were being used to feed cyanide gas into the building. Afterwards the bodies were taken to the building next door where they were cremated.
Pilecki got this information to the Tajna Armia Polska who passed it onto the British foreign office. This information was then passed on to the governments of other Allied countries. However, most people who saw the reports refused to believe them and dismissed the stories as attempts by the Poles to manipulate the military strategy of the Allies.
In the autumn of 1942, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a member of the Polish Communist Party, was sent to Auschwitz. Pilecki and Cyrankiewicz worked closely together in organizing a mass breakout. By the end of 1942 they had a group of 500 ready to try and overthrow their guards.
Four of the inmates escaped on their own on 29th December, 1942. One of these men, a dentist called Kuczbara, was caught and interrogated by the Gestapo. Kuczbara was one of the leaders of Pilecki's group and so when he heard the news he realized that it would be only a matter of time before the SS realized that he had been organizing these escape attempts.
Pilecki had already arranged his escape route and after feigning typhus, he escaped from the hospital on 24th April, 1943. After hiding in the local forest, Pilecki reached his unit of the Tajna Armia Polska on 2nd May. He returned to normal duties and fought during the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. Although captured by the German Army he was eventually released by Allied troops in April, 1945.
After the Second World War Pilecki went to live in Poland.The Polish Secret Police had him executed in 1948. It is believed that this was a result of his anti-communist activities.
Only Ghosts And Echoes -
Posted by Felis in Heroes, History (Sunday February 12, 2006 at 5:03 pm)
I learnt about Witold Pilecki only by accident, when my maternal grandfather dropped his name while talking about his former associate and the then Polish Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz.
- Cyrankiewicz, he said, could have saved Pilecki but of course his own heroic tale could have been ruined.
I started asking my grandfather additional questions and learnt a few things about this man, Witold Pilecki, who according to my grandfather’s patchy story, volunteered to go to Auschwitz to gather intelligence for the Home Army (Polish Military Underground Organization) operating during the German occupation.
It was, I think, 1967 and Witold Pilecki as far as the communist authorities were concerned, officially never existed.
My grandfather knew Jozef Cyrankiewicz because both of them were members of PPS -Polish Socialist Party before WWII (PPS was a social-democratic party). Cyrankiewicz was captured and sent by the Germans to Auschwitz in 1942 but my grandfather was saved from being captured by his new identity supported by false documents. After the war, most of the members of PPS accepted the communists’ offer to join the Soviet bandwagon in exchange for good positions within the new administration and sometimes because they weren’t sure what might happen to them if they refused.
This move gave the communists more legitimacy among Western countries as well as the desperate Polish nation.
Or so they thought.
The communist party members were mostly imported from the Soviet Union.
These people, officially Polish, very often could not speak the language and like the first President Boleslaw Bierut were full time NKVG (Soviet Security) employees (the real Polish communist who ended up in Russia after 1939 were mostly executed by Stalin in the 40’s).
And so PPS and PPR (Polish Worker’s Party) were amalgamated into PZPR (Polish United Worker’s Party).
My grandpa was one of those scoundrels, who joined the new organization and for the rest of his life tried to convince himself that his decision was morally justified. He never really made it to the “top†and that is probably why he felt resentment towards Cyrankiewicz for not assisting his old comrades a little bit harder.This is how I learnt about Witold Pilecki for the first time. My grandfather made bitter comments about Cyrankiewicz’s duplicity.
I digress.
I started searching for some more information about Pilecki and slowly a picture emerged, which as much as it was depressing, gave me the feeling of faith in certain moral values, which I thought were long time dead.
Witold Pilecki was rehabilitated only in 1991 and so as I was searching a few days ago for some extra materials about him, I discovered this Wikipedia entry.
There are more sources available on line but because most of them are in Polish, I decided to quote and to translate some additional and interesting aspects of Pilecki’s life story to pay a tribute to the man, who I think, deserves much more recognition.
It was 1940 the Secret Polish Army received conflicting reports about this “new facility†being built and expanded by the Germans in Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish) near Kraków.The commanders of the underground, secret army were also receiving requests from the Polish Government, in exile in London; to investigate and to report about German activities around Auschwitz as the unconfirmed rumors about atrocities taking place there reached the allied forces. Witold Pilecki, a lieutenant in the underground army, was the man who volunteered to Auschwitz.
Witold Pilecki was born in 1901 in Oluniec in Russia, where his family was exiled for taking part in the 1863 uprising against Russian occupation of Poland. In 1910 his family moved back into the remains of their property (Pilecki family were small gentry-landowners) near Wilno (today Vilnius). In 1918, he volunteered for the Polish Army that was being formed at that time, and then fought in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920.
Witold Pilecki in his cavalry uniform
In 1921 Pilecki took leave from the army to pass his High School Certificate exams (Matura). He attempted studying fine arts at the Stefan Batory University for a while.
Finally, he finishes Military school of Cavalry Reserve in Grudziadz and after being transferred to the Army Reserve as a second lieutenant, he takes over the farm management in his family property in Sukurcze in 1926. He lived and worked in Sukurcze until the outbreak of WWII. These were the happiest years of his life.
Witold Pilecki in before WWII
In 1931 Pilecki married Marianna Ostrowska, a teacher from Masovia. They had two children, a son Andrew and daughter Zofia. In the September campaign of 1939, Pilecki fought as a member of the “Prusy†army group. In November after the collapse of Polish defenses, he helped to found the Secret Polish Army, where he served as the Chief of Staff. In August 1940 Pilecki volunteered to infiltrate Germany’s Auschwitz Concentration Camp at Oswiecim
with the following objectives in mind:
Setting up of a secret organization within the camp to:
Provide extra food and distribute clothing among organization members.
Keep up the morale among fellow inmates and supply them with news from the
outside.
Preparing a task force to take over the camp in the eventuality of the
dropping of arms or of a live force (e.g. paratroops).
Report all of the above to the Secret Army headquarters
On September 19, 1940, with the permission of his commanding officers, he intentionally allowed himself to be captured by the Germans during a round-up in Warsaw’s suburb Zoliborz.
He arrived at Auschwitz at 10 P.M. on September 21, 1940, in the “second†Warsaw transport, under the name Tomasz Serafinski. He was registered as number 4859.
Â
Oswiecim - Pilecki’s mug shot
Â
Fragment of Pilecki’s diary (1) translated from Polish:
They made us run straight ahead towards the thicker concentration of lights. Further towards the destination (the SS troopers) ordered one of us to run to the pole on the side of the road and immediately a series from a submachine gun was sent after him.
Dead.
Ten other inmates were pulled out at random from the marching column and shot with pistols while still running to demonstrate to us the idea of “collective reprisal†if an escape was attempted by any one of us (in this case it was all arranged by the SS troopers).
They pulled all eleven corpses by ropes attached to just one leg. Dogs baited the blood soaked bodies.
All of it was done with laughter and jeering.
We were closing to the gate, an opening in the line of fences made of wire.
There was a sign at the top: “Arbeit macht frei†(Through Work To Freedom).
Only later we could fully appreciate its real meaning.
Pilecki survived his first days in Auschwitz and later established the first cell of his secret organization.
Fragment of Pilecki’s diary (2) translated from Polish:
From the darkness, from above the camp’s kitchen, Seidler the butcher spoke to us: †Do not even dream that any one of you will get out of here alive.
Your daily food ratio is intended to keep you alive for 6 weeks; whoever lives longer it’s because he steals and those who steal will be placed in SK, where nobody lives for too long.â€
Wladyslaw Baworowski - the camp’s interpreter translated it to us into Polish.
SK (Straf-Kompanie - Penal Company).
This unit was designated for all Jews, Catholic priests and those Poles whose “offencesâ€
were proven. Ernst Krankemann, the Block Commander, had a duty of finishing off as many prisoners of the unit as he possibly could to make room for new, daily “arrivalsâ€.
This duty suited Krankemann’s character very well.
If someone accidentally moved just little bit too much from the row of prisoners, Krankemann stabbed him with his knife, which he always carried in his right sleeve.
If someone, afraid of making this mistake, positioned himself slightly too far behind, he would be stabbed by the butcher in the kidney.
The sight of a falling human being, kicking his legs and moaning aggravated Krankemann.
He would jump straight away on the victim’s rib cage, kicked his kidneys and genitals, and finished him off as quickly as possible.
In ‘The Polish Underground Movement in Auschwitz’ Garlinski says:.
Pilecki’s secret organization, which he called the ‘Union of Military Organization’, was composed of cells of five prisoners who were unknown to one another with one man designated to be their commander.
These cells were to be found mainly in the camp hospital and camp work allocation office.
Once the first cells were established, contact with Warsaw became essential.
It so happened that at the time, by exceptionally fortuitous circumstances, a prisoner was released from the camp who was able to take Pilecki’s first report. Later reports were smuggled out by civilian workers employed in the camp. Another means was through prisoners who had decided to escape.
From the very start Pilecki’s principal aim was to take over Auschwitz concentration camp and free all the prisoners. He envisaged achieving this by having Home Army detachments attacking from the outside while cadre members of his Union of Military Organization, numbering around a thousand prisoners, would start a revolt from within. All his reports primarily concerned this matter. However, the Home Army High Command was less optimistic and did not believe such an operation to be viable while the Eastern Front was still far away.
In his diary Pilecki didn’t give the SS troopers much credit, and was certain that his organization could have taken control of the camp.
He waited for orders from the headquarters but at the same time the Germans started arresting members of Pilecki’s secret organization and he knew his time was up.
He also believed that if he could present “his case†in person some action would be taken.
Pilecki therefore felt it necessary to present his plans personally. This meant that he would have to escape from the camp, which he succeeded in doing with two other prisoners on 27th April 1943. Before the breakout Pilecki passed on his position within the camp organization to fellow inmate Henryk Bartoszewicz. However, neither his subsequent report nor the fact that he presented it in person altered the high command’s decision.
Fearing the reprisals on the entire Polish population was one of the reasons why such action was not allowed by the high command in London.
Another one was that there was no way to hide or to move such enormous number of people anywhere and with the Eastern Front still far away the whole project was considered unrealistic.
Witold Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz on the Easter Monday 1943, he also survived the Warsaw Uprising an the German POW camp in Germany.
He returned to Poland after the war and started organizing resistance
against the communists.
When he learnt that the Allies would not help to liberate Poland from the Soviets he started demobilizing the military underground organization.
It was then, that the communists arrested him.
Â
Pilecki - communist jail mug shots
Â
He was interrogated and tortured for many months. His finger nails were pulled out and his collarbones broken and he could hardly walk.
He never “talkedâ€.
After his process, which was a simple farce, he was sentenced to death by a firing squad.
There was no firing squad though.
The executioners dragged him the basement of the Security Headquarters building, into the boiler room.
He was gagged and could not walk.
They shot him with a single slug into the back of his head. He was buried somewhere on the rubbish tip next to the Powazki Cemetery.
His body was never found.
A real hero - Witold Pilecki - A Volunteer for Auschwitz
Pilecki i Anders
Ochotnik do Auschwitz/Volunteer for Auschwitz - W. Pilecki
("Let's Reminisce About Witold Pilecki")
Witold Pilecki was born in Poland in 1901. When the German Army invaded the country in September, 1939, Pilecki joined the Tajna Armia Polska, the Secret Polish Army.
When Pilecki discovered the existence of Auschwitz, he suggested a plan to his senior officers. Pilecki argued he should get himself arrested and sent to the concentration camp. He would then send out reports of what was happening in the camp. Pilecki would also explore the possibility of organizing a mass break-out.
Pilecki's colonel eventually agreed and after securing a false identity as Tomasz Serafinski, he arranged to be arrested in September, 1940. As expected he was sent to Auschwitz where he became prisoner 4,859. His work consisted of building more huts to hold the increased numbers of prisoners.
Pilecki soon discovered the brutality of the Schutz Staffeinel (SS) guards. When one man managed to escape on 28th October 1940, all the prisoners were forced to stand at attention on the parade-ground from noon till nine in the evening. Anyone who moved was shot and over 200 prisoners died of exposure. Pilecki was able to send reports back to the Tajna Armia Polska explaining how the Germans were treating their prisoners. This information was then sent to the foreign office in London.
In 1942 Pilecki discovered that new windowless concrete huts were being built with nozzles in their ceilings. Soon afterwards he heard that that prisoners were being herded into these huts and that the nozzles were being used to feed cyanide gas into the building. Afterwards the bodies were taken to the building next door where they were cremated.
Pilecki got this information to the Tajna Armia Polska who passed it onto the British foreign office. This information was then passed on to the governments of other Allied countries. However, most people who saw the reports refused to believe them and dismissed the stories as attempts by the Poles to manipulate the military strategy of the Allies.
In the autumn of 1942, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a member of the Polish Communist Party, was sent to Auschwitz. Pilecki and Cyrankiewicz worked closely together in organizing a mass breakout. By the end of 1942 they had a group of 500 ready to try and overthrow their guards.
Four of the inmates escaped on their own on 29th December, 1942. One of these men, a dentist called Kuczbara, was caught and interrogated by the Gestapo. Kuczbara was one of the leaders of Pilecki's group and so when he heard the news he realized that it would be only a matter of time before the SS realized that he had been organizing these escape attempts.
Pilecki had already arranged his escape route and after feigning typhus, he escaped from the hospital on 24th April, 1943. After hiding in the local forest, Pilecki reached his unit of the Tajna Armia Polska on 2nd May. He returned to normal duties and fought during the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. Although captured by the German Army he was eventually released by Allied troops in April, 1945.
After the Second World War Pilecki went to live in Poland.The Polish Secret Police had him executed in 1948. It is believed that this was a result of his anti-communist activities.
Only Ghosts And Echoes -
Posted by Felis in Heroes, History (Sunday February 12, 2006 at 5:03 pm)
I learnt about Witold Pilecki only by accident, when my maternal grandfather dropped his name while talking about his former associate and the then Polish Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz.
- Cyrankiewicz, he said, could have saved Pilecki but of course his own heroic tale could have been ruined.
I started asking my grandfather additional questions and learnt a few things about this man, Witold Pilecki, who according to my grandfather’s patchy story, volunteered to go to Auschwitz to gather intelligence for the Home Army (Polish Military Underground Organization) operating during the German occupation.
It was, I think, 1967 and Witold Pilecki as far as the communist authorities were concerned, officially never existed.
My grandfather knew Jozef Cyrankiewicz because both of them were members of PPS -Polish Socialist Party before WWII (PPS was a social-democratic party). Cyrankiewicz was captured and sent by the Germans to Auschwitz in 1942 but my grandfather was saved from being captured by his new identity supported by false documents. After the war, most of the members of PPS accepted the communists’ offer to join the Soviet bandwagon in exchange for good positions within the new administration and sometimes because they weren’t sure what might happen to them if they refused.
This move gave the communists more legitimacy among Western countries as well as the desperate Polish nation.
Or so they thought.
The communist party members were mostly imported from the Soviet Union.
These people, officially Polish, very often could not speak the language and like the first President Boleslaw Bierut were full time NKVG (Soviet Security) employees (the real Polish communist who ended up in Russia after 1939 were mostly executed by Stalin in the 40’s).
And so PPS and PPR (Polish Worker’s Party) were amalgamated into PZPR (Polish United Worker’s Party).
My grandpa was one of those scoundrels, who joined the new organization and for the rest of his life tried to convince himself that his decision was morally justified. He never really made it to the “top†and that is probably why he felt resentment towards Cyrankiewicz for not assisting his old comrades a little bit harder.This is how I learnt about Witold Pilecki for the first time. My grandfather made bitter comments about Cyrankiewicz’s duplicity.
I digress.
I started searching for some more information about Pilecki and slowly a picture emerged, which as much as it was depressing, gave me the feeling of faith in certain moral values, which I thought were long time dead.
Witold Pilecki was rehabilitated only in 1991 and so as I was searching a few days ago for some extra materials about him, I discovered this Wikipedia entry.
There are more sources available on line but because most of them are in Polish, I decided to quote and to translate some additional and interesting aspects of Pilecki’s life story to pay a tribute to the man, who I think, deserves much more recognition.
It was 1940 the Secret Polish Army received conflicting reports about this “new facility†being built and expanded by the Germans in Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish) near Kraków.The commanders of the underground, secret army were also receiving requests from the Polish Government, in exile in London; to investigate and to report about German activities around Auschwitz as the unconfirmed rumors about atrocities taking place there reached the allied forces. Witold Pilecki, a lieutenant in the underground army, was the man who volunteered to Auschwitz.
Witold Pilecki was born in 1901 in Oluniec in Russia, where his family was exiled for taking part in the 1863 uprising against Russian occupation of Poland. In 1910 his family moved back into the remains of their property (Pilecki family were small gentry-landowners) near Wilno (today Vilnius). In 1918, he volunteered for the Polish Army that was being formed at that time, and then fought in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920.
Witold Pilecki in his cavalry uniform
In 1921 Pilecki took leave from the army to pass his High School Certificate exams (Matura). He attempted studying fine arts at the Stefan Batory University for a while.
Finally, he finishes Military school of Cavalry Reserve in Grudziadz and after being transferred to the Army Reserve as a second lieutenant, he takes over the farm management in his family property in Sukurcze in 1926. He lived and worked in Sukurcze until the outbreak of WWII. These were the happiest years of his life.
Witold Pilecki in before WWII
In 1931 Pilecki married Marianna Ostrowska, a teacher from Masovia. They had two children, a son Andrew and daughter Zofia. In the September campaign of 1939, Pilecki fought as a member of the “Prusy†army group. In November after the collapse of Polish defenses, he helped to found the Secret Polish Army, where he served as the Chief of Staff. In August 1940 Pilecki volunteered to infiltrate Germany’s Auschwitz Concentration Camp at Oswiecim
with the following objectives in mind:
Setting up of a secret organization within the camp to:
Provide extra food and distribute clothing among organization members.
Keep up the morale among fellow inmates and supply them with news from the
outside.
Preparing a task force to take over the camp in the eventuality of the
dropping of arms or of a live force (e.g. paratroops).
Report all of the above to the Secret Army headquarters
On September 19, 1940, with the permission of his commanding officers, he intentionally allowed himself to be captured by the Germans during a round-up in Warsaw’s suburb Zoliborz.
He arrived at Auschwitz at 10 P.M. on September 21, 1940, in the “second†Warsaw transport, under the name Tomasz Serafinski. He was registered as number 4859.
Â
Oswiecim - Pilecki’s mug shot
Â
Fragment of Pilecki’s diary (1) translated from Polish:
They made us run straight ahead towards the thicker concentration of lights. Further towards the destination (the SS troopers) ordered one of us to run to the pole on the side of the road and immediately a series from a submachine gun was sent after him.
Dead.
Ten other inmates were pulled out at random from the marching column and shot with pistols while still running to demonstrate to us the idea of “collective reprisal†if an escape was attempted by any one of us (in this case it was all arranged by the SS troopers).
They pulled all eleven corpses by ropes attached to just one leg. Dogs baited the blood soaked bodies.
All of it was done with laughter and jeering.
We were closing to the gate, an opening in the line of fences made of wire.
There was a sign at the top: “Arbeit macht frei†(Through Work To Freedom).
Only later we could fully appreciate its real meaning.
Pilecki survived his first days in Auschwitz and later established the first cell of his secret organization.
Fragment of Pilecki’s diary (2) translated from Polish:
From the darkness, from above the camp’s kitchen, Seidler the butcher spoke to us: †Do not even dream that any one of you will get out of here alive.
Your daily food ratio is intended to keep you alive for 6 weeks; whoever lives longer it’s because he steals and those who steal will be placed in SK, where nobody lives for too long.â€
Wladyslaw Baworowski - the camp’s interpreter translated it to us into Polish.
SK (Straf-Kompanie - Penal Company).
This unit was designated for all Jews, Catholic priests and those Poles whose “offencesâ€
were proven. Ernst Krankemann, the Block Commander, had a duty of finishing off as many prisoners of the unit as he possibly could to make room for new, daily “arrivalsâ€.
This duty suited Krankemann’s character very well.
If someone accidentally moved just little bit too much from the row of prisoners, Krankemann stabbed him with his knife, which he always carried in his right sleeve.
If someone, afraid of making this mistake, positioned himself slightly too far behind, he would be stabbed by the butcher in the kidney.
The sight of a falling human being, kicking his legs and moaning aggravated Krankemann.
He would jump straight away on the victim’s rib cage, kicked his kidneys and genitals, and finished him off as quickly as possible.
In ‘The Polish Underground Movement in Auschwitz’ Garlinski says:.
Pilecki’s secret organization, which he called the ‘Union of Military Organization’, was composed of cells of five prisoners who were unknown to one another with one man designated to be their commander.
These cells were to be found mainly in the camp hospital and camp work allocation office.
Once the first cells were established, contact with Warsaw became essential.
It so happened that at the time, by exceptionally fortuitous circumstances, a prisoner was released from the camp who was able to take Pilecki’s first report. Later reports were smuggled out by civilian workers employed in the camp. Another means was through prisoners who had decided to escape.
From the very start Pilecki’s principal aim was to take over Auschwitz concentration camp and free all the prisoners. He envisaged achieving this by having Home Army detachments attacking from the outside while cadre members of his Union of Military Organization, numbering around a thousand prisoners, would start a revolt from within. All his reports primarily concerned this matter. However, the Home Army High Command was less optimistic and did not believe such an operation to be viable while the Eastern Front was still far away.
In his diary Pilecki didn’t give the SS troopers much credit, and was certain that his organization could have taken control of the camp.
He waited for orders from the headquarters but at the same time the Germans started arresting members of Pilecki’s secret organization and he knew his time was up.
He also believed that if he could present “his case†in person some action would be taken.
Pilecki therefore felt it necessary to present his plans personally. This meant that he would have to escape from the camp, which he succeeded in doing with two other prisoners on 27th April 1943. Before the breakout Pilecki passed on his position within the camp organization to fellow inmate Henryk Bartoszewicz. However, neither his subsequent report nor the fact that he presented it in person altered the high command’s decision.
Fearing the reprisals on the entire Polish population was one of the reasons why such action was not allowed by the high command in London.
Another one was that there was no way to hide or to move such enormous number of people anywhere and with the Eastern Front still far away the whole project was considered unrealistic.
Witold Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz on the Easter Monday 1943, he also survived the Warsaw Uprising an the German POW camp in Germany.
He returned to Poland after the war and started organizing resistance
against the communists.
When he learnt that the Allies would not help to liberate Poland from the Soviets he started demobilizing the military underground organization.
It was then, that the communists arrested him.
Â
Pilecki - communist jail mug shots
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He was interrogated and tortured for many months. His finger nails were pulled out and his collarbones broken and he could hardly walk.
He never “talkedâ€.
After his process, which was a simple farce, he was sentenced to death by a firing squad.
There was no firing squad though.
The executioners dragged him the basement of the Security Headquarters building, into the boiler room.
He was gagged and could not walk.
They shot him with a single slug into the back of his head. He was buried somewhere on the rubbish tip next to the Powazki Cemetery.
His body was never found.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Są zbrodnie bez kary! Wielka Brytania niepotrzebnie kompromituje się.
Są zbrodnie bez kary! Wielka Brytania niepotrzebnie kompromituje się.
ZBRODNIE KOMUNISTÓW- "Gen. August Emil Fieldorf 'Nil' " 1/2
ZBRODNIE KOMUNISTÓW- "Gen. August Emil Fieldorf 'Nil' " 2/2
Są zbrodnie bez kary
Nasz Dziennik, 2008-02-24
Sprawa generała "Nila" Dnia 16 kwietnia 1952 r., po kilkugodzinnym "procesie", komunistyczny Sąd Wojewódzki w Warszawie, pod przewodnictwem Marii Gurowskiej, "postanowił Fieldorfa Augusta Emila uznać winnym czynów zarzucanych mu aktem oskarżenia i za to na zasadzie art. 1 pkt. 1 dekretu PKWN z 31 sierpnia 1944 r. o wymiarze kary dla faszystowsko-hitlerowskich zbrodniarzy skazać go na karę śmierci". Tak potraktowano legendę Podziemnego Państwa Polskiego czasu wojny, szefa Kedywu Armii Krajowej, w młodości legionistę, który 6 sierpnia 1914 r. wyruszał z krakowskich Oleandrów z Pierwszą Kompanią Kadrową, śniąc sen o wolnej Polsce. Według "sądu", generał August Emil Fieldorf "Nil" występował przeciwko "bojownikom o wolność i wyzwolenie społeczne" [!]. "Udowodniono" mu "morderstwa około 1000 antyfaszystów" [!], dodając, że to tylko "w części obrazuje faktyczne zbrodnie, które obciążają skazanego". Zdaniem "sądu", wyrażonym w opinii dla Sądu Najwyższego PRL, "skazany Fieldorf na łaskę nie zasługuje. Wykazał wielkie natężenie woli przestępczej [...]. Nie istnieje możliwość resocjalizacji skazanego". 24 lutego 1953 r., około godziny 15.00-15.25 zamordowano generała. Aby go jeszcze bardziej upokorzyć i pohańbić, wykonano "wyrok" nie przez rozstrzelanie - na co jako żołnierz, organizator zamachu na Franza Kutscherę zasłużył - lecz przez powieszenie. Według niepotwierdzonych, anonimowych, ale bardzo prawdopodobnych relacji, przed zadaniem śmierci oprawcy kazali "Nilowi" uklęknąć i ukorzyć się. Gdy odmówił, zakatowano go. Powieszono martwe już ciało. Tak mogło być. Oprawcy pod ochroną Kiedy się mówi o ludziach, którzy przyłożyli rękę do śmierci "Nila", najczęściej wymienia się Helenę Wolińską, po pierwszym mężu Jóźwiak, potem Brus. Była komunistycznym prokuratorem wojskowym w stopniu pułkownika. Prywatnie żona komunistycznego generała, przed wojną członka agenturalnej KPP, w czasie wojny szefa sztabu zaprojektowanych przez Stalina formacji GL i AL, po wojnie członka Politbiura PZPR i komendanta MO, także wiceministra bezpieki (1945-1949), wreszcie wicepremiera (1955-1956). To ona nakazała aresztowanie "Nila". Od roku 1971 żyje w Wielkiej Brytanii. Musiała tam wyjechać ze względu na "polski antysemityzm"... Od roku 1998 trwają starania zmierzające do jej ekstradycji i postawienia przed sądem, których końca nie widać. Europa jest "humanitarna", a Wolińska dobiega dziś dziewięćdziesiątki. Brytyjczycy muszą ją chronić, bo przecież polscy "antysemici" i "ksenofobi" mogliby jej wyrządzić krzywdę. Nie ma obawy. My też mamy swoich "humanistów", którzy zadbają o to, by Wolińską przekonywająco usprawiedliwić ("działała zgodnie z prawem"). Wielka Brytania niepotrzebnie kompromituje się, chroniąc zbrodniarkę i uniemożliwiając jej ekstradycję. Niewiele żądamy. Tylko tyle, by ta kobieta została uznana za winną udziału w zbrodni. Bez żalu Maria Górowska vel Gurowska (sama dokonała zmiany w nazwisku) już nie żyje. W czasie wojny była w komunistycznej AL, po wojnie kierowała "szkołą prawniczą", której zadaniem było dostarczenie ludziom od czarnej roboty świadectwa na piśmie, że są "sędziami", "prokuratorami". Uczyli się szybko. Po kilku miesiącach półanalfabeci stawali się "sędziami", gotowymi do zabijania tych, których wskaże partia. To Gurowska skazała "Nila" na śmierć. Nie dożyła wyroku, zmarła w roku 1998. Proces Gurowskiej tak relacjonował tygodnik "Solidarność" w 1. numerze z roku 1998: "W poniedziałek 22 grudnia br. o godz. 9.30 w sali 233 gmachu Sądów przy alei Solidarności w Warszawie rozpoczęła się bezprecedensowa rozprawa. Przed sądem staje dawna sędzina z sekcji tajnej stalinowskiego Sądu Wojewódzkiego w Warszawie, tow. Maria Gurowska, która przed laty skazała na śmierć człowieka ewidentnie niewinnego. Był nim bohaterski komendant Kedywu Komendy Głównej AK, gen. August Emil Fieldorf 'Nil', powieszony w wyniku decyzji Gurowskiej w więzieniu mokotowskim 24 lutego 1953 r. [...]. Na pierwszą rozprawę oskarżona nie stawiła się, przedstawiając za pośrednictwem swego obrońcy zaświadczenie lekarskie z maja br. o złym stanie zdrowia. Pełnomocnik oskarżyciela posiłkowego mec. Izabela Skorupkowa tak to skomentowała: 'Gdy staje sprawa odpowiedzialności sądowej, zaczyna się istna epidemia. Kolejno Jaruzelski, Kiszczak, Gurowska nie mogą odpowiadać przed sądem ze względu na chorobę'. Mimo protestu [mec. Skorupkowej] sąd odroczył rozprawę, nakazując badanie lekarskie oskarżonej". Dziewięć lat to dla III RP było za mało, by osądzić zbrodniarkę. Zatwardziałą zbrodniarkę, bo do końca życia twierdziła, że wyrok śmierci na generała był słuszny [!], a ona działała "na podstawie obowiązującego wówczas prawa". Trzeba przyznać, że jest w tym żelazna logika. Prawo było "sowieckie", "rewolucyjne". "Nil" nie nadawał się do "resocjalizacji", ponieważ już w młodości "walczył z młodym państwem radzieckim", jak napisano w uzasadnieniu wyroku. Gurowska powinna być sądzona w wolnej Polsce nie za to, że nie przestrzegała obowiązującego w roku 1952 prawa, lecz za to, że dopuściła się zbrodni na człowieku walczącym o niepodległy byt Polski! Paradoks Hemara Tylko że polski wymiar sprawiedliwości nie posługuje się dziś takimi kategoriami, ponieważ traktuje powojenne dominium sowieckie w Polsce jako suwerenne państwo! Jakżeby inaczej, skoro obecna Polska jest tego dominium następcą prawnym?! Skoro w wydawanej w roku 2005 Wielkiej Encyklopedii Powszechnej PWN z całą powagą twierdzi się, że Bierut był prezydentem Polski! Skoro twierdzi się, że Polska sowiecka miała "sejm" i że odbywały się "wybory" do tego "sejmu"! To zawsze bardzo dziwiło, wręcz zdumiewało Mariana Hemara, który z dalekiego, nieosiągalnego dla rodaków z kraju Londynu pisał w roku 1953: "Nie mogę się domyśleć, po co im ta zabawa, w jakieś 'wybory do sejmu', w jakieś 'wyborcze prawa' [...]. Pełnoletni bandyci, oprawcy i złodzieje bawią się w demokrację, w prawa i przywileje [...]. Cały kraj mają w garści, ukradli i dzierżą w łapie, jak się żywnie spodoba bolszewickiemu satrapie [...]. Już twoją duszą zgubioną diabły z bezpieki kupczą. Już oni ciebie zgomułczą! Już oni ciebie zosubczą! [...] I naraz te diabelskie syny, kuzyny i szwagry, po zabawach w procesy, w rewizje, czystki, łagry, w egzekucje i zsyłki, w śmierć ludzką i ludzki lament, bawią się. W co? W demokrację, w narodowy parlament!". Marian Hemar już dawno nie żyje. Wydawało się, że paradoks, który tak trafnie przedstawił w swoim wierszu, należy do przeszłości. Jest jednak inaczej. Komunizmu już podobno w Polsce nie ma, a my dalej uprawiamy zabawę polegającą na traktowaniu sowieckiego dominium jako suwerennego państwa i dzieląc włos na dwoje, roztrząsamy, czy zbrodniarze mordujący najlepszych ludzi, jakich miała Polska, działali "zgodnie z obowiązującym wówczas prawem"! Kazali... W grudnia 1950 r. "Nil" został osadzony w więzieniu przy ulicy Rakowieckiej w Warszawie. Śledztwo prowadził, a raczej preparował, ppor. Kazimierz Górski, który sporządził zakłamany akt oskarżenia, pełen zmyślonych zarzutów. Jego też nie dosięgnęła nierychliwa ręka sprawiedliwości III RP. Twierdził, że tylko zapisywał zeznania generała. "Charakter śledztwa nie zależał ode mnie, wykonywałem tylko rozkazy przełożonych". Ile razy słyszeliśmy to wcześniej z ust zbrodniarzy niemieckich. Befehl ist Befehl! Ilu peerelowskich i postpeerelowskich pisarczyków snuło na ten temat swoje refleksje. O "Nilu" nie napisał żaden, nawet wtedy, gdy już było wolno. Kazimierz Górski nigdy nie stanął przed sądem, choć w jego przypadku nie było problemu z ekstradycją. Mieszka w Warszawie. Towarzysz prokurator Przygotowany przez Górskiego akt oskarżenia podpisał prokurator Benjamin Wajsblech. To on oskarżał "Nila" przed sądem. Jeszcze za Peerelu zarzucano Wajsblechowi przetrzymywanie ludzi w areszcie bez uzasadnionej przyczyny, preparowanie akt śledztwa poprzez usuwanie zeznań korzystnych dla oskarżonych, psychiczne i fizyczne znęcanie się nad przesłuchiwanymi. Zwolniono go z prokuratury po 1956 r., dożywał na wysokiej emeryturze dla "zasłużonych". Zmarł już w czasach III RP, ale jakoś wszyscy o nim zapomnieli. "Autorytet" Sędziowie Sądu Najwyższego Emil Merz, Igor Andrejew i Gustaw Auscaler podtrzymali 20 października 1952 r. wyrok śmierci na generała. Andrejew to człek wielce zasłużony. Współautor kodeksu karnego z roku 1969. Jego podręczniki do dziś polecane są studentom prawa! W roku 1988 Uniwersytet Warszawski opublikował kolejny tom prawniczych "Studia Iuridica" specjalnie dla "uczczenia pracy naukowej Igora Andrejewa" [!]. Podobno profesorowie nie wiedzieli o jego haniebnej roli w skazaniu "Nila". Nie wiedzieli?! Wiedzieli, ale myśleli, że sprawa już przyschła! Kiedy rok później zrobiło się o niej głośno, usunięto Andrejewa z Rady Naukowej Instytutu Prawa Karnego UW. Wszystko, tylko nie skandal. "Azylant" Sędzia Emil Merz już nie żyje, a sędzia Gustaw Auscaler wyjechał w 1968 r. do Izraela, gdzie go powitano z otwartymi rękami jako niewinną ofiarę "polskiego antysemityzmu". Był poszukiwany listem gończym, ale wśród swoich nic mu nie groziło. Zresztą, on nawet nie był sędzią, nie skończył żadnych studiów, tylko partyjne kursa. W razie czego też mógłby powiedzieć, że mu kazali. Wybrała wolność... Tak samo jak Wolińska, w Wielkiej Brytanii znalazła azyl prokurator Paulina Kern, która oskarżała "Nila" przed Sądem Najwyższym. Jeszcze za Peerelu stawiano jej zarzuty łamania prawa. Jeśli świadek obrony był niewygodny, to go po prostu nie wzywała. Kwestionowała wszelkie skargi na fizyczne znęcanie się podczas śledztwa. Kwitowała je krótko: "władze śledcze Polski Ludowej nie biją". Dobrana para Wykonanie wyroku na "Nilu" nadzorowała wicedyrektor Departamentu III Generalnej Prokuratury Alicja Graff. Jej mąż, Kazimierz Graff, oskarżał m.in. kpt. Stanisława Sojczyńskiego "Warszyca", dowódcę Konspiracyjnego Wojska Polskiego, zamordowanego w lutym 1947 roku. Graffowie spokojnie mieszkają w Warszawie, na "zasłużonej", wysokiej emeryturze. Kombinat zbrodni, jakim był "wymiar sprawiedliwości" Polski Sowieckiej, łączył ludzi. Czy dlatego że czuli się "elitą", czy może dlatego że przynajmniej przed sobą nie musieli się wstydzić? Wykonywali wszak tę samą, brudną robotę. "Nie masz zbrodni bez kary"? Licealiści polscy zapisują w swoich zeszytach słynne słowa z ballady "Lilie" Adama Mickiewicza: "Nie masz zbrodni bez kary". To kwintesencja romantycznego idealizmu. Tylko że młody Mickiewicz nie słyszał jeszcze wtedy o komunizmie i nie miał pojęcia o perfidii jego pogrobowców... Grób "Nila" Nie wiemy, gdzie złożono śmiertelne szczątki generała. Oprawcy zadbali, byśmy nigdy nie mieli co do tego pewności. W końcu ze wszystkich zamordowanych po wojnie żołnierzy niepodległej Rzeczypospolitej ten był najwyższy rangą! Innymi, równie znaczącymi, zajęli się sami Sowieci, na przykład dowódcą Armii Krajowej gen. Leopoldem Okulickim. Nawet nie wiemy, kiedy został zamordowany, bo przecież protokołu z wykonania wyroku śmierci nie ma. Został skazany "tylko" na 10 lat więzienia... Generał "Nil" może spoczywać na Służewcu. Na pewno nie w alei zasłużonych jakiegokolwiek warszawskiego cmentarza, bo tam miejsca zarezerwowano dla sowieckich kolaborantów: aparatczyków, bezpieczniaków, Sowietów "pełniących obowiązki Polaków", sędziów nie wahających się zabijać bohaterów walczących o nasz niepodległy byt, posłusznych prokuratorów, pisarzy z "frontu walki ideologicznej" i innych, na swój sposób "zasłużonych". Wśród nich znajdziemy pułkownika NKWD, powojennego "obywatela prezydenta", zbrodniarza odrzucającego wnioski o ułaskawienie, chętnie pokazującego się wśród dzieci... Badania z użyciem georadaru prowadzone były w lecie zeszłego roku na parkingu koło cmentarza przy ulicy Wałbrzyskiej w Warszawie. To miejsce, które służyło komunistycznemu ministerstwu bezpieczeństwa do skrytych pochówków jego ofiar: "dół kryjomy", jak w pamiętnym wierszu Mickiewicza o matce Polce, wapno, udeptana ziemia jak w bajce Antoniego Goreckiego o diable, który chciał ukryć przed człowiekiem rozsypane na jego drodze ziarno. Ziarno niepodległości, która nigdy nie jest dana raz na zawsze. Jeśli nie wiadomo, gdzie jest grób "Nila", to może być wszędzie - w postaci tablicy z napisem, symbolicznej mogiły. Przede wszystkim w naszych sercach.
Piotr Szubarczyk IPN Gdańsk
Nasz Dziennik, 2008-02-24
Sprawa generała "Nila" Dnia 16 kwietnia 1952 r., po kilkugodzinnym "procesie", komunistyczny Sąd Wojewódzki w Warszawie, pod przewodnictwem Marii Gurowskiej, "postanowił Fieldorfa Augusta Emila uznać winnym czynów zarzucanych mu aktem oskarżenia i za to na zasadzie art. 1 pkt. 1 dekretu PKWN z 31 sierpnia 1944 r. o wymiarze kary dla faszystowsko-hitlerowskich zbrodniarzy skazać go na karę śmierci". Tak potraktowano legendę Podziemnego Państwa Polskiego czasu wojny, szefa Kedywu Armii Krajowej, w młodości legionistę, który 6 sierpnia 1914 r. wyruszał z krakowskich Oleandrów z Pierwszą Kompanią Kadrową, śniąc sen o wolnej Polsce. Według "sądu", generał August Emil Fieldorf "Nil" występował przeciwko "bojownikom o wolność i wyzwolenie społeczne" [!]. "Udowodniono" mu "morderstwa około 1000 antyfaszystów" [!], dodając, że to tylko "w części obrazuje faktyczne zbrodnie, które obciążają skazanego". Zdaniem "sądu", wyrażonym w opinii dla Sądu Najwyższego PRL, "skazany Fieldorf na łaskę nie zasługuje. Wykazał wielkie natężenie woli przestępczej [...]. Nie istnieje możliwość resocjalizacji skazanego". 24 lutego 1953 r., około godziny 15.00-15.25 zamordowano generała. Aby go jeszcze bardziej upokorzyć i pohańbić, wykonano "wyrok" nie przez rozstrzelanie - na co jako żołnierz, organizator zamachu na Franza Kutscherę zasłużył - lecz przez powieszenie. Według niepotwierdzonych, anonimowych, ale bardzo prawdopodobnych relacji, przed zadaniem śmierci oprawcy kazali "Nilowi" uklęknąć i ukorzyć się. Gdy odmówił, zakatowano go. Powieszono martwe już ciało. Tak mogło być. Oprawcy pod ochroną Kiedy się mówi o ludziach, którzy przyłożyli rękę do śmierci "Nila", najczęściej wymienia się Helenę Wolińską, po pierwszym mężu Jóźwiak, potem Brus. Była komunistycznym prokuratorem wojskowym w stopniu pułkownika. Prywatnie żona komunistycznego generała, przed wojną członka agenturalnej KPP, w czasie wojny szefa sztabu zaprojektowanych przez Stalina formacji GL i AL, po wojnie członka Politbiura PZPR i komendanta MO, także wiceministra bezpieki (1945-1949), wreszcie wicepremiera (1955-1956). To ona nakazała aresztowanie "Nila". Od roku 1971 żyje w Wielkiej Brytanii. Musiała tam wyjechać ze względu na "polski antysemityzm"... Od roku 1998 trwają starania zmierzające do jej ekstradycji i postawienia przed sądem, których końca nie widać. Europa jest "humanitarna", a Wolińska dobiega dziś dziewięćdziesiątki. Brytyjczycy muszą ją chronić, bo przecież polscy "antysemici" i "ksenofobi" mogliby jej wyrządzić krzywdę. Nie ma obawy. My też mamy swoich "humanistów", którzy zadbają o to, by Wolińską przekonywająco usprawiedliwić ("działała zgodnie z prawem"). Wielka Brytania niepotrzebnie kompromituje się, chroniąc zbrodniarkę i uniemożliwiając jej ekstradycję. Niewiele żądamy. Tylko tyle, by ta kobieta została uznana za winną udziału w zbrodni. Bez żalu Maria Górowska vel Gurowska (sama dokonała zmiany w nazwisku) już nie żyje. W czasie wojny była w komunistycznej AL, po wojnie kierowała "szkołą prawniczą", której zadaniem było dostarczenie ludziom od czarnej roboty świadectwa na piśmie, że są "sędziami", "prokuratorami". Uczyli się szybko. Po kilku miesiącach półanalfabeci stawali się "sędziami", gotowymi do zabijania tych, których wskaże partia. To Gurowska skazała "Nila" na śmierć. Nie dożyła wyroku, zmarła w roku 1998. Proces Gurowskiej tak relacjonował tygodnik "Solidarność" w 1. numerze z roku 1998: "W poniedziałek 22 grudnia br. o godz. 9.30 w sali 233 gmachu Sądów przy alei Solidarności w Warszawie rozpoczęła się bezprecedensowa rozprawa. Przed sądem staje dawna sędzina z sekcji tajnej stalinowskiego Sądu Wojewódzkiego w Warszawie, tow. Maria Gurowska, która przed laty skazała na śmierć człowieka ewidentnie niewinnego. Był nim bohaterski komendant Kedywu Komendy Głównej AK, gen. August Emil Fieldorf 'Nil', powieszony w wyniku decyzji Gurowskiej w więzieniu mokotowskim 24 lutego 1953 r. [...]. Na pierwszą rozprawę oskarżona nie stawiła się, przedstawiając za pośrednictwem swego obrońcy zaświadczenie lekarskie z maja br. o złym stanie zdrowia. Pełnomocnik oskarżyciela posiłkowego mec. Izabela Skorupkowa tak to skomentowała: 'Gdy staje sprawa odpowiedzialności sądowej, zaczyna się istna epidemia. Kolejno Jaruzelski, Kiszczak, Gurowska nie mogą odpowiadać przed sądem ze względu na chorobę'. Mimo protestu [mec. Skorupkowej] sąd odroczył rozprawę, nakazując badanie lekarskie oskarżonej". Dziewięć lat to dla III RP było za mało, by osądzić zbrodniarkę. Zatwardziałą zbrodniarkę, bo do końca życia twierdziła, że wyrok śmierci na generała był słuszny [!], a ona działała "na podstawie obowiązującego wówczas prawa". Trzeba przyznać, że jest w tym żelazna logika. Prawo było "sowieckie", "rewolucyjne". "Nil" nie nadawał się do "resocjalizacji", ponieważ już w młodości "walczył z młodym państwem radzieckim", jak napisano w uzasadnieniu wyroku. Gurowska powinna być sądzona w wolnej Polsce nie za to, że nie przestrzegała obowiązującego w roku 1952 prawa, lecz za to, że dopuściła się zbrodni na człowieku walczącym o niepodległy byt Polski! Paradoks Hemara Tylko że polski wymiar sprawiedliwości nie posługuje się dziś takimi kategoriami, ponieważ traktuje powojenne dominium sowieckie w Polsce jako suwerenne państwo! Jakżeby inaczej, skoro obecna Polska jest tego dominium następcą prawnym?! Skoro w wydawanej w roku 2005 Wielkiej Encyklopedii Powszechnej PWN z całą powagą twierdzi się, że Bierut był prezydentem Polski! Skoro twierdzi się, że Polska sowiecka miała "sejm" i że odbywały się "wybory" do tego "sejmu"! To zawsze bardzo dziwiło, wręcz zdumiewało Mariana Hemara, który z dalekiego, nieosiągalnego dla rodaków z kraju Londynu pisał w roku 1953: "Nie mogę się domyśleć, po co im ta zabawa, w jakieś 'wybory do sejmu', w jakieś 'wyborcze prawa' [...]. Pełnoletni bandyci, oprawcy i złodzieje bawią się w demokrację, w prawa i przywileje [...]. Cały kraj mają w garści, ukradli i dzierżą w łapie, jak się żywnie spodoba bolszewickiemu satrapie [...]. Już twoją duszą zgubioną diabły z bezpieki kupczą. Już oni ciebie zgomułczą! Już oni ciebie zosubczą! [...] I naraz te diabelskie syny, kuzyny i szwagry, po zabawach w procesy, w rewizje, czystki, łagry, w egzekucje i zsyłki, w śmierć ludzką i ludzki lament, bawią się. W co? W demokrację, w narodowy parlament!". Marian Hemar już dawno nie żyje. Wydawało się, że paradoks, który tak trafnie przedstawił w swoim wierszu, należy do przeszłości. Jest jednak inaczej. Komunizmu już podobno w Polsce nie ma, a my dalej uprawiamy zabawę polegającą na traktowaniu sowieckiego dominium jako suwerennego państwa i dzieląc włos na dwoje, roztrząsamy, czy zbrodniarze mordujący najlepszych ludzi, jakich miała Polska, działali "zgodnie z obowiązującym wówczas prawem"! Kazali... W grudnia 1950 r. "Nil" został osadzony w więzieniu przy ulicy Rakowieckiej w Warszawie. Śledztwo prowadził, a raczej preparował, ppor. Kazimierz Górski, który sporządził zakłamany akt oskarżenia, pełen zmyślonych zarzutów. Jego też nie dosięgnęła nierychliwa ręka sprawiedliwości III RP. Twierdził, że tylko zapisywał zeznania generała. "Charakter śledztwa nie zależał ode mnie, wykonywałem tylko rozkazy przełożonych". Ile razy słyszeliśmy to wcześniej z ust zbrodniarzy niemieckich. Befehl ist Befehl! Ilu peerelowskich i postpeerelowskich pisarczyków snuło na ten temat swoje refleksje. O "Nilu" nie napisał żaden, nawet wtedy, gdy już było wolno. Kazimierz Górski nigdy nie stanął przed sądem, choć w jego przypadku nie było problemu z ekstradycją. Mieszka w Warszawie. Towarzysz prokurator Przygotowany przez Górskiego akt oskarżenia podpisał prokurator Benjamin Wajsblech. To on oskarżał "Nila" przed sądem. Jeszcze za Peerelu zarzucano Wajsblechowi przetrzymywanie ludzi w areszcie bez uzasadnionej przyczyny, preparowanie akt śledztwa poprzez usuwanie zeznań korzystnych dla oskarżonych, psychiczne i fizyczne znęcanie się nad przesłuchiwanymi. Zwolniono go z prokuratury po 1956 r., dożywał na wysokiej emeryturze dla "zasłużonych". Zmarł już w czasach III RP, ale jakoś wszyscy o nim zapomnieli. "Autorytet" Sędziowie Sądu Najwyższego Emil Merz, Igor Andrejew i Gustaw Auscaler podtrzymali 20 października 1952 r. wyrok śmierci na generała. Andrejew to człek wielce zasłużony. Współautor kodeksu karnego z roku 1969. Jego podręczniki do dziś polecane są studentom prawa! W roku 1988 Uniwersytet Warszawski opublikował kolejny tom prawniczych "Studia Iuridica" specjalnie dla "uczczenia pracy naukowej Igora Andrejewa" [!]. Podobno profesorowie nie wiedzieli o jego haniebnej roli w skazaniu "Nila". Nie wiedzieli?! Wiedzieli, ale myśleli, że sprawa już przyschła! Kiedy rok później zrobiło się o niej głośno, usunięto Andrejewa z Rady Naukowej Instytutu Prawa Karnego UW. Wszystko, tylko nie skandal. "Azylant" Sędzia Emil Merz już nie żyje, a sędzia Gustaw Auscaler wyjechał w 1968 r. do Izraela, gdzie go powitano z otwartymi rękami jako niewinną ofiarę "polskiego antysemityzmu". Był poszukiwany listem gończym, ale wśród swoich nic mu nie groziło. Zresztą, on nawet nie był sędzią, nie skończył żadnych studiów, tylko partyjne kursa. W razie czego też mógłby powiedzieć, że mu kazali. Wybrała wolność... Tak samo jak Wolińska, w Wielkiej Brytanii znalazła azyl prokurator Paulina Kern, która oskarżała "Nila" przed Sądem Najwyższym. Jeszcze za Peerelu stawiano jej zarzuty łamania prawa. Jeśli świadek obrony był niewygodny, to go po prostu nie wzywała. Kwestionowała wszelkie skargi na fizyczne znęcanie się podczas śledztwa. Kwitowała je krótko: "władze śledcze Polski Ludowej nie biją". Dobrana para Wykonanie wyroku na "Nilu" nadzorowała wicedyrektor Departamentu III Generalnej Prokuratury Alicja Graff. Jej mąż, Kazimierz Graff, oskarżał m.in. kpt. Stanisława Sojczyńskiego "Warszyca", dowódcę Konspiracyjnego Wojska Polskiego, zamordowanego w lutym 1947 roku. Graffowie spokojnie mieszkają w Warszawie, na "zasłużonej", wysokiej emeryturze. Kombinat zbrodni, jakim był "wymiar sprawiedliwości" Polski Sowieckiej, łączył ludzi. Czy dlatego że czuli się "elitą", czy może dlatego że przynajmniej przed sobą nie musieli się wstydzić? Wykonywali wszak tę samą, brudną robotę. "Nie masz zbrodni bez kary"? Licealiści polscy zapisują w swoich zeszytach słynne słowa z ballady "Lilie" Adama Mickiewicza: "Nie masz zbrodni bez kary". To kwintesencja romantycznego idealizmu. Tylko że młody Mickiewicz nie słyszał jeszcze wtedy o komunizmie i nie miał pojęcia o perfidii jego pogrobowców... Grób "Nila" Nie wiemy, gdzie złożono śmiertelne szczątki generała. Oprawcy zadbali, byśmy nigdy nie mieli co do tego pewności. W końcu ze wszystkich zamordowanych po wojnie żołnierzy niepodległej Rzeczypospolitej ten był najwyższy rangą! Innymi, równie znaczącymi, zajęli się sami Sowieci, na przykład dowódcą Armii Krajowej gen. Leopoldem Okulickim. Nawet nie wiemy, kiedy został zamordowany, bo przecież protokołu z wykonania wyroku śmierci nie ma. Został skazany "tylko" na 10 lat więzienia... Generał "Nil" może spoczywać na Służewcu. Na pewno nie w alei zasłużonych jakiegokolwiek warszawskiego cmentarza, bo tam miejsca zarezerwowano dla sowieckich kolaborantów: aparatczyków, bezpieczniaków, Sowietów "pełniących obowiązki Polaków", sędziów nie wahających się zabijać bohaterów walczących o nasz niepodległy byt, posłusznych prokuratorów, pisarzy z "frontu walki ideologicznej" i innych, na swój sposób "zasłużonych". Wśród nich znajdziemy pułkownika NKWD, powojennego "obywatela prezydenta", zbrodniarza odrzucającego wnioski o ułaskawienie, chętnie pokazującego się wśród dzieci... Badania z użyciem georadaru prowadzone były w lecie zeszłego roku na parkingu koło cmentarza przy ulicy Wałbrzyskiej w Warszawie. To miejsce, które służyło komunistycznemu ministerstwu bezpieczeństwa do skrytych pochówków jego ofiar: "dół kryjomy", jak w pamiętnym wierszu Mickiewicza o matce Polce, wapno, udeptana ziemia jak w bajce Antoniego Goreckiego o diable, który chciał ukryć przed człowiekiem rozsypane na jego drodze ziarno. Ziarno niepodległości, która nigdy nie jest dana raz na zawsze. Jeśli nie wiadomo, gdzie jest grób "Nila", to może być wszędzie - w postaci tablicy z napisem, symbolicznej mogiły. Przede wszystkim w naszych sercach.
Piotr Szubarczyk IPN Gdańsk
ZBRODNIE KOMUNISTÓW- "Gen. August Emil Fieldorf 'Nil' " 1/2
ZBRODNIE KOMUNISTÓW- "Gen. August Emil Fieldorf 'Nil' " 2/2
Warsaw premiere of Andrzej Wajda's "Katyn".
Warsaw premiere of Andrzej Wajda's "Katyn".Even though my Polish is minimal, there was no need to be fluent in order to understand the film's terribly powerful and poignant depictions of fear, frustration, love, anger, despair, revulsion, and propaganda lies .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.And go here to see photos of the premiere.Katyn USSR Stalin World War II Wajda Germany Nazi Poland
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Poland's "Katyn" revisits WW2 massacre
Poland's "Katyn" revisits WW2 massacre
Poland's "Katyn" revisits WW2 massacre
Sun Feb 17, 2008 8:23pm EST Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page|
Polish director Wajda bids farewell to war films
15 Feb 2008
BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - In "Katyn," Poland's master filmmaker Andrzej Wajda vividly and movingly dramatizes one of the last major crimes of World War II to be acknowledged.
This was the mass execution of 15,000-20,000 Polish officers -- the intellectual elite of that society, among them Wajda's father -- by Joseph Stalin's secret police in spring 1940. The Soviet Union long maintained the mass murder was perpetrated by the Nazis and punished anyone who said otherwise in Poland, which it occupied until the fall of communism in Europe. In 1990, the Kremlin officially accepted Russian responsibility.
The film, which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, will compete for the foreign-language Oscar at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
This is a very Polish story with deep resonance for Wajda's countrymen, but it might have trouble attracting a wide audience elsewhere. There are perhaps too many characters and references that might confuse those unfamiliar with Polish history. Unlike Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," no single protagonist takes us through the war years. Rather, the point of view shifts from this character to that as children grow up, women cling to hope and men await their fate.
Working from a novel by Andrzej Mularczyk, letters and diaries by many of the victims and reportedly details from his own family's struggle, Wajda -- who co-wrote the script with Mularczyk -- works on a wide canvas as he weaves the fictional stories of four families, forever separated from one another in late 1939, through the Soviet occupation in 1945, when the truth gets suppressed. It is more the story of the women and children left behind than of the men, but Wajda has cagily constructed his film so that it ends with a chilling flashback to the crime itself, a sequence lasting more than 20 minutes that brings all the story lines to a horrific conclusion.
Some sequences sear the mind: A group of refugees heading east, crosses a bridge, fleeing the Wehrmacht. On the bridge, they encounter another group of refugees heading west, fleeing the Red Army. The wife of a Polish army officer pleads with her husband to flee with her and their child before the train arrives to transport the officers to the Soviet Union. But his army vows trump his marriage vows.
The Nazis close Cracow University and mass arrest every professor, including the father of the army officer. Months later, his wife receives a package containing his things and a letter saying the aging man died of an untreated disease.
Loudspeakers in town announce lists of the dead found in mass graves by the German army in 1943. No mention of a loved one ignites false hope. After the fall of the Nazis, surviving wives and sisters confront Soviet lies to their own peril. A young man loses his life by tearing down a Soviet propaganda poster.
A surviving Polish officer can't stand his collaboration with this lie any longer and blows out his brains. A Red Army officer saves his neighbors (an officer's widow and child) from deportation. Finally comes the intense sequence in the Katyn forest where officers are one by one shot in the back of the head and tumble into a mass grave ready for bulldozing.
The treatment of this story is not novelistic, with a care for intense plot and character development, but rather a selective presentation of highly emotional scenes. The time jumps, and multiple characters at different ages cause confusion occasionally. But Wadja penetrates the lives of these family members just enough so that their collective hopes, frustrations and fears are palpable.
An opening onscreen statement informs viewers of the historical tragedy, so Wajda makes no attempt to create any suspense over the officers' fate. The forces of history rule this film as the gods do Greek tragedy. Nothing will save these men, and many survivors go to their own graves without the truth coming out. What must have been in the director's mind then when he at last came to the climactic sequence, when he in essence staged his own father's demise?
The period sets, costumes and cinematography all superbly re-create the brutal era, grand illusions and everyday suffering of the Poles under both the Nazis and the Soviets.
Cast:
Anna: Maja Ostaszewska
Andrzej: Artur Zmijewski
Jerzy: Andrzej Chyra
General: Jan Englert
General's wife: Danuta Stenka
Director: Andrzej Wajda; Screenwriters: Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Mularczyk, Wladyslaw Pasikowski; Based on the novel by: Andrzej Mularczyk; Producer: Michal Kwiecinski; Executive producer: Katarzyna Fukacz-Cebula; Director of photography: Pawel Edelman; Production designer: Magdalena Dipont; Music: Krzysztof Penderecki; Costume designer: Magdalena Biedrzycka; Editor: Milenia Fiedler, Rafal Listopad.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
Poland's "Katyn" revisits WW2 massacre
Sun Feb 17, 2008 8:23pm EST Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page|
Polish director Wajda bids farewell to war films
15 Feb 2008
BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - In "Katyn," Poland's master filmmaker Andrzej Wajda vividly and movingly dramatizes one of the last major crimes of World War II to be acknowledged.
This was the mass execution of 15,000-20,000 Polish officers -- the intellectual elite of that society, among them Wajda's father -- by Joseph Stalin's secret police in spring 1940. The Soviet Union long maintained the mass murder was perpetrated by the Nazis and punished anyone who said otherwise in Poland, which it occupied until the fall of communism in Europe. In 1990, the Kremlin officially accepted Russian responsibility.
The film, which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, will compete for the foreign-language Oscar at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
This is a very Polish story with deep resonance for Wajda's countrymen, but it might have trouble attracting a wide audience elsewhere. There are perhaps too many characters and references that might confuse those unfamiliar with Polish history. Unlike Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," no single protagonist takes us through the war years. Rather, the point of view shifts from this character to that as children grow up, women cling to hope and men await their fate.
Working from a novel by Andrzej Mularczyk, letters and diaries by many of the victims and reportedly details from his own family's struggle, Wajda -- who co-wrote the script with Mularczyk -- works on a wide canvas as he weaves the fictional stories of four families, forever separated from one another in late 1939, through the Soviet occupation in 1945, when the truth gets suppressed. It is more the story of the women and children left behind than of the men, but Wajda has cagily constructed his film so that it ends with a chilling flashback to the crime itself, a sequence lasting more than 20 minutes that brings all the story lines to a horrific conclusion.
Some sequences sear the mind: A group of refugees heading east, crosses a bridge, fleeing the Wehrmacht. On the bridge, they encounter another group of refugees heading west, fleeing the Red Army. The wife of a Polish army officer pleads with her husband to flee with her and their child before the train arrives to transport the officers to the Soviet Union. But his army vows trump his marriage vows.
The Nazis close Cracow University and mass arrest every professor, including the father of the army officer. Months later, his wife receives a package containing his things and a letter saying the aging man died of an untreated disease.
Loudspeakers in town announce lists of the dead found in mass graves by the German army in 1943. No mention of a loved one ignites false hope. After the fall of the Nazis, surviving wives and sisters confront Soviet lies to their own peril. A young man loses his life by tearing down a Soviet propaganda poster.
A surviving Polish officer can't stand his collaboration with this lie any longer and blows out his brains. A Red Army officer saves his neighbors (an officer's widow and child) from deportation. Finally comes the intense sequence in the Katyn forest where officers are one by one shot in the back of the head and tumble into a mass grave ready for bulldozing.
The treatment of this story is not novelistic, with a care for intense plot and character development, but rather a selective presentation of highly emotional scenes. The time jumps, and multiple characters at different ages cause confusion occasionally. But Wadja penetrates the lives of these family members just enough so that their collective hopes, frustrations and fears are palpable.
An opening onscreen statement informs viewers of the historical tragedy, so Wajda makes no attempt to create any suspense over the officers' fate. The forces of history rule this film as the gods do Greek tragedy. Nothing will save these men, and many survivors go to their own graves without the truth coming out. What must have been in the director's mind then when he at last came to the climactic sequence, when he in essence staged his own father's demise?
The period sets, costumes and cinematography all superbly re-create the brutal era, grand illusions and everyday suffering of the Poles under both the Nazis and the Soviets.
Cast:
Anna: Maja Ostaszewska
Andrzej: Artur Zmijewski
Jerzy: Andrzej Chyra
General: Jan Englert
General's wife: Danuta Stenka
Director: Andrzej Wajda; Screenwriters: Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Mularczyk, Wladyslaw Pasikowski; Based on the novel by: Andrzej Mularczyk; Producer: Michal Kwiecinski; Executive producer: Katarzyna Fukacz-Cebula; Director of photography: Pawel Edelman; Production designer: Magdalena Dipont; Music: Krzysztof Penderecki; Costume designer: Magdalena Biedrzycka; Editor: Milenia Fiedler, Rafal Listopad.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
WARSAW, Poland - In the chilling final scene of "Katyn," the new film from Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Nine movies are in contention for the foreign-language Academy Award.
Also Online
More Oscars coverage on The Screening Room
The films survived a first round of cuts by a group of Oscar voters, who whittled the 63 entries that had been submitted by their home countries down to nine, Oscar organizers said Tuesday.
In the running for the five nominations that will be announced Tuesday are Austria's The Counterfeiters, Brazil's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Canada's Days of Darkness, Israel's Beaufort, Italy's The Unknown Woman, Kazakhstan's Mongol, Poland's Katyn, Russia's 12 and Serbia's The Trap.
The films will be screened by a panel of Oscar voters, who will choose the final nominees for the Feb. 24 awards.
Also Online
More Oscars coverage on The Screening Room
The films survived a first round of cuts by a group of Oscar voters, who whittled the 63 entries that had been submitted by their home countries down to nine, Oscar organizers said Tuesday.
In the running for the five nominations that will be announced Tuesday are Austria's The Counterfeiters, Brazil's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Canada's Days of Darkness, Israel's Beaufort, Italy's The Unknown Woman, Kazakhstan's Mongol, Poland's Katyn, Russia's 12 and Serbia's The Trap.
The films will be screened by a panel of Oscar voters, who will choose the final nominees for the Feb. 24 awards.
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