Still from the series "Polish War Heroes", photo: ©AETN
The socialist regime followed a policy of discrediting Polish war heroes. Information about the exploits and fate of Witold Pilecki, founder of the Secret Polish Army resistance group and a member of the underground Home Army who had been executed by the Stalinist secret police, was suppressed. Others, like the elite special-operations paratroopers of the Polish Home Army (Cichociemni or the Silent Dark Ones) were accused of cooperating with foreign intelligence services. Members of the secret organization Żegota - the Polish Council to Aid Jews - were called enemies of "new communist Poland". So for years, their heroic stories were kept outside of the official circuit of information.
Days of Honour
Doing justice to the heroes of the past, the creators of the series Polish War Heroes skillfully merge staged scenes with statements from historians, witnesses and scholars. Among the revived heroes are the aforementioned Witold Pilecki, who revealed the truth about the Nazi death camps by going undercover to Auschwitz, and the brilliant team of cryptologists and mathematicians who broke the code of the German secret message enciphering machine Enigma in the 1930s. Years later their work would help the Allies in their victory against the Nazis.
Still from the series "Polish War Heroes", photo: ©AETN
The series shows the various facets of heroism. Among its protagonists are soldiers and aristocrats, scholars and civilians - people for whom decency and humanistic values overpowered fear for their lives. One of them, Krystyna Skarbek, was an aristocrat from a Jewish-Catholic family who worked as a British spy during the war. She served as inspiration for one of the characters of Ian Fleming's James Bond series.
The series is based on recently declassified British archives and was produced in cooperation with experts and witnesses of the reconstructed events as well as a number of institutions: the Polish Military Museum, Central Military Archives, Jewish Historical Institute, the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw Uprising Museum, Filmoteka Narodowa, Home Army Museum, World War II Museum, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and the General Sikorski Museum in London.
Polish War Heroes will air in over 40 countries. So far, its rights have been purchased by television stations in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia. It has already premiered in Australia and New Zealand.
Author: Bartosz Staszczyszyn, translated and edited by Mai Jones 27.02.2014