The first film essay of this series revolves around Bronislaw Hellwig, one of the young resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
Daring use of sharp-edged impressionistic monochrome animation to dramatise personal memoirs and stunning archive of surviving film and photographs to bring home to us a haunting shadow-play of the incredible courage and sacrifice of the young people of the Polish Resistance during WW2, achieves real nobility without any false heroics.
This was a shattering experience, an utterly terrible disaster, unimaginable even to those in London who suffered the Blitz - which was still in their own, free country after all. The agony of Poland's capital city, systematically smashed and depopulated by the Germans, became a monumental ruin within which the tortured heart of Poland beat on, bleeding, so that their nation could have some pride in the death and defeat of a country systematically ravaged and crushed..
Really, this short essay is beyond criticism, in showing how humanity was crucified by an evil beyond comprehension: The viewer's stunned sensibility reels at this appalling, inescapable, unforgettable spectacle.of youth haunted by the certainty of agonising death and a future of unborn children - yet still so full of life and dreams that they dared to love - - -
Modern Poland owes its lost youth everything. This painful memorial is beautifully evocative of their pain and the outrage of their end, fighting unequally against overwhelmingly powerful evil.
I have no doubt the other films in this Polish TV series - made available in Britain thanks to Netflix, and that I will certainly be viewing - are equally powerful testaments to the martyrdom of Poland under a degenerate German onslaught.
Five unsung heroes emerge from the shadows in these five short films, leaving us with an indelible impression of the human spirit prevailing over impossible odds. Perhaps only Andrez Wajda, in his 'Ashes and Diamonds' Trilogy, or in the terrifying portrait of Poland's Hellish fate in his film 'Katyn,' has ever shown this horrific agony of his country as effectively.
Essential viewing for all of us so fortunate as to live in peace: We must bear in mind that such horrors do not invariably occur in other times. or in distant places. Civilisation is a fragile creation..