Wanda Kościa’s documentary is a story about the events that took place in south-east Poland (now Ukraine) in 1943 and 1944. The massacre in Volhynia, during which more than 50 thousand Polish citizens were killed by Ukrainian nationalists, is seen through the eyes of young victims who survived the war. Together with the descendants of those who were killed, the director goes with the camera to look at the places where their parents’ and grandparents’ houses stood. Together with those who survived the massacre as children, she visits the inhabitants of the place where their ancestors found death.
Kościa doesn’t judge who was historically right or wrong, nor does she labelled murderers and victims. She just fairly relates historical events. Through the mouth of their protagonists she explains what led to an outburst of violence from the Ukrainian nationalists – she speaks about the Poles who treated their Ukrainian neighbours as if they were sub-human and about revenge actions organized by the Poles in 1944 (historians claim that as a result more than two thousand Ukrainians were killed).
Bloody violence is not in the centre of My Friend The Enemy. The Polish director speaks mostly of those who were able to preserve their humanity in inhumane times, of honest Ukrainians who hid their Polish neighbours from the violence of their compatriots. In Volhynia more than 1,350 Ukrainian inhabitants risked their lives to give shelter to Poles. 400 of them were killed by their fellow countrymen for helping the “enemy”. Seventy years later, those who survived come back to thank those who saved them during the war.
They talk and walk around together. The camera watches them closely, follows their steps. My Friend The Enemy is not refined formally, but it is told through human stories and emotions. Wanda Kościa’s film has an impressive intellectual honesty to it, there’s no place for quick moral judgement. Instead of interpretations of history that rule themselves out, Kościa proposes reconciliation. The images of Polish and Ukrainian children who clean the victims’ graves together provide a counterpoint for the shocking memories of those who survived the massacre in Volhynia.
This was Polish ground. And then a war happened and Poles were thrown out, and since they couldn’t escape, they started killing them. And when someone tried to escape, was killed too, and is buried here.
– says one of the girls. But she's not looking for vengeance – there’s an openness in her.
In My Friend The Enemy Wanda Kościa once again returns to subjects connected to Polish history. Born in Great Britain as a daughter of Polish immigrants, the documentary filmmaker has been realizing documentaries for British television for 20 years. She collaborated on the production of series such as The Struggles for Poland (1985), The Other Europe (1988), and The Hand of Stalin (1989), and also a series about the breakup of Yugoslavia, Death of Yugoslavia (1995).
In 1990, together with Teresa Torańska, she produced an episode about Poland in a series produced for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Walls Came Tumbling down, as well as two programs in the series Tourists of the Revolution (1998) and documentaries in the series Dunkirk. For six years she has been working in the historical programs department of the BBC. She won the Grierson Award for the film Soldiers’ Story in 2004. She also collaborated on the series Why Intelligence Fails (2004), dedicated to the mistakes made by intelligence agencies, and in 2005 she made a film about the Warsaw Uprising entitled The Battle for Warsaw.
Sources: Jewish Motifs, IDFA.
Author: Bartosz Staszczyszyn, November 2014, translated by N. Mętrak-Ruda, November 2015.