Within the overall context of Polish-Jewish relations, the subject of those Poles called by the Jews the Righteous among the Nations for having saved the lives of Jews in World War II has been abundantly presented by the Polish film industry. More than 90 films, including feature films, documentaries and reported testimonies, go to create a considerable source of visual memory, with the result that Polish cinematography plays no small part in reconstructing the nation’s memory of the Holocaust. Opinion surveys have proved that in terms of public reception, film is a medium of far greater importance than literature or historiography. This permits one to ask such questions as: to what degree have the films seen by many millions of the Polish public influenced and shaped social awareness concerning Polish-Jewish relations, particularly in the creation of an image of the Holocaust’s witnesses and its perpetrators – the chief categories in our memory of those events?

In artistic terms and the broadly understood ideological message that was behind their being made, screenplays have certainly not been equal. An example of inappropriate ideologising of the aid-to-Jews discussion (this category includes not only films about  the "Righteous among the Nations”, but also the broader context of Polish-Jewish relations, in which the aid question is present) are the propagandist documents that came into being at the time of the so-called March arrogance of 1968 or the showing by Poland’s state television of a sanitized version of Lanzmann’s "Shoah”, where the intention of its censors was to put an end to the image of an anti-Semitic Poland unsympathetic to the plight of the Jews. The unheard-of heroism of the "Righteous” was treated instrumentally and written into the wild fantasies of the propaganda pumped out by the Polish People’s Republic.

However there do exist some exceptional works, not only in artistic terms, but also in their courage to go against the current of political correctness and pose serious questions. These film scripts have been identified from among others as being "well worth watching”.

The principle governing selection of movie material has been the presence of motifs or plots concerning the Holocaust in the context of their being saved, hidden or given institutional assistance. The brief descriptions included beneath the films’ titles are only a start, an imperfect summary, which does not determine the value of these films. I hope they will inspire the reader.

I also had to consider a division and categorization of the film collection. The most logical solution seemed to be their chronological order – a division into films made before 1989 and those that came later, devoid of any censorship. This division however turned out to be of dubious value. Despite the limitations that were once imposed by state censorship, some of the earlier films were very authentic in that they proved painfully true and historically credible. A genealogical division between feature film and documentary also seems the wrong approach. This is because the final criterion should be that of authenticity, not only in historical terms, but in the showing of the psychological relations between those hiding people and those being hidden. Each of these stories constitutes a separate entity, none of them seem similar or subjected to categorized simplification. Each of the films should be considered separately and deserves to be the subject of a separate assessment. Just as none of the "Righteous” should be lumped together with the others. The reason behind this is not only out of respect for the choices these people made, but also the imperative of historical truth – the motivations, acts and fates of the "Righteous” were so very varied that the inclusion of their stories into a single narrative would only vulgarize and trivialize their efforts to save Jews. Any single story would thus become just one of many in the discourse, when in fact each of them deserves distinction.

The author of the above text is Dr. Bartosz Kwieciński- Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University’s Holocaust Research Centre. He is the author of articles concerning the shaping and deformation of the collective remembrance of the Annihilation of the Jews as portrayed in film, with particular regard to Polish historical narration.

Translation by Richard J. Bialy.