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MOVIES

DOCUMENTARIES

Selected Polish and foreign documentary films have as their theme a story of rescue during the War....

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FEATURED FILMS

Historical, biographical and propaganda films, European and American cinema – in all of them, the Holocaust experience is portrayed in different artistic ways....

THE IMPERATIVE OF HISTORICAL TRUTH. RIGHTEOUS IN POLISH FILM

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...