Preview
Forgotten Odyssey
Directed by Jagna Wright
Tuesday, August 24
W.R. Castell Central Library
Calgarian Witold Mazur has been waiting his entire life for the world to acknowledge the suffering of Poles from Eastern Europe in the Second World War who, he says, were betrayed not only by Germany and Russia, but also by England and the U.S.
Mazur was one of the 1.7 million people from eastern Poland who were deported to Siberia by the Russian government after Russia invaded and occupied half of Poland in 1939. He was only four years old, but he still remembers being packed into a railcar with dozens of people like cattle. They were dropped off at a work camp in the middle of nowhere, and his parents were forced to work as slave labourers.
But that was only the beginning of the Polish people’s ordeal. Their sad fate is movingly chronicled in a documentary film called Forgotten Odyssey, which will be shown at the central library on Tuesday, August 24 at 7 p.m. It’s a story that hasn’t just been neglected or forgotten, but has been actively covered up, argues filmmaker Jagna Wright.
After Germany invaded Russia in 1942, Russia, due to pressure from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, released the Poles from their slave labour at work camps, collective farms and mines. Thousands of Polish men formed an army in the south of Russia. They went on to fight under British command in the Middle East and in Western Europe. The soldiers’ families were taken to refugee camps throughout the British colonies in Africa, as well as Australia, New Zealand and Mexico. By that time only one-third of the 1.7-million people from eastern Poland who were deported to Siberia had survived.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that thousands of Poles bravely fought on behalf of the Allied side, in November of 1943 Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt gave in to Stalin’s demand that a huge chunk of Poland, which Russia invaded in 1939, become a part of Russia. They made this agreement without the knowledge or participation of the Polish government.
A Forgotten Odyssey also delves into the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which over 20,000 Polish military officers were murdered by Soviet troops. The German army came across the bodies of 5,000 Polish officers who had been shot in the back of the head and reported what they saw. The Allies dismissed it as German propaganda.
Wright, who had relatives who were deported to Siberia, says it became an obsession for her to make a documentary on the subject. Although she had no prior experience as a documentary filmmaker, she began interviewing Polish survivors of the deportation in the early 1990s with a second-hand camera her husband bought her. She completed the documentary with the help of filmeditor Aneta Naszynska. Wright says no one was interested in the film until 2001, when the British history channel decided to broadcast it. Since then it has been broadcast all over the world.
"It’s a horrendous story. It needs to be in the history books and in the consciousness of the world," says Wright.
Meanwhile, Mazur says he and many other Poles still feel a lot of bitterness about what happened.
"We were betrayed by our allies and mistreated by just about everybody," he says. "(Britain and the U.S.) gave away half of our country." |
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