AN EASILY GRANTED OSCAR REWARD
ALINA CZERNIAKOWSKA
A few years ago, I received a text from ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ under a significant title ‘Thank you for life’, in which Mrs. Renata Zajdman writes that for nearly half a century had been looking for the Czerniakowski family, in order to ‘thank for saving my life’. For my grandmother and my whole family, the help to others was something normal, even a duty. The fact that only Poland was endangered by death penalty for helping the Jews, did not have any significance. Now, when some people are bragging about the Oscar reward for the film ‘Ida’, I took out this text and was thinking about thousands of Poles murdered for helping the Jews. They were waiting for so many years in order to thank them for the Oscar reward…..Prof. Dora Kacnelson, a Jewish scholar when was being interviewed by me in front of a camera, asked nervously at the end: - And, do you know a Jew who would devote his life for saving a Pole?...Soon after the night of granting the Oscar reward, a journalist from New York, a daughter of an insurgent from Warsaw phoned me and, crying, said: - When I was a little girl, I often experienced a terrible humiliation in an American school. Nobody wanted to sit next to me and everyone used to say: ‘You are a Pole and you murdered the Jews and you were killing Jewish children’. None of my explanations were helpful….I thought that independent Poland would defend its good name, that Poles would be courageous and strong enough to fight with a lie, that here, in New York, there would also be time for change and respect for Poland. But this film destroyed all my hopes… I was trying to calm down the journalist but her arguments were unbeatable. She is a professional, a graduate from a movie school in London, she knows what she speaks about. Finally she said: - This film would be completely unnoticeable if it was not for the topic. Even the actress of the main role was surprised that ‘it is so easy to gain the Oscar reward’. I will also quote an email which I received from a known film operator: ‘Now, after the film ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Ida’ there is another anti-Polish film ‘A grain of the truth’, in which Steadfast Soldiers from a Conspiracy Polish Army ‘Warszyca’, deal mainly with torturing Jewish civilians – so they are the Excluded but, now, by the Security Officers. The war of grandchildren of heroes of the anti-communist uprising with subjects of the Soviet Security Officers is still going on’. On the wall of a torture chamber in Warsaw there were engraved surnames of criminals, murderers of Polish patriots: Humer, Fejgin, Światło, Goldberg/Różański, Graff, Brystygier, Borman… - they all had Jewish origin. Maybe one day a film about them will be made and will gain the Oscar reward?
AA
„Niedziela” 10/2015