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Katyń: shameful to speak of

RELATED STORIES

Stalin is dead!
Jan Józef Lipski Social activist
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Proszę sobie wyobrazić, że mnie wypadł termin na prasówkę natychmiast po śmierci Stalina. Po pierwsze zachorować z dnia na dzień było bardzo niezręcznie i trochę się obawiałem tego, że nikt mi nie uwierzy w to zachorowanie. Wymówić jakoś nie było sposobu, powiedzieć tak jak należy – no nie miałem ochoty, ale jednocześnie miałem to poczucie, że co ja mogę zrobić, no nie mogę udać, że nie zauważyłem, że Stalin umarł. W rezultacie wyszedł z tego taki referat, nad którym całą noc pracowałem, który wygłosiłem tak jak na takich szkolnych akademiach się recytuje Wyspiańskiego, ten rapsod o Kazimierzu Wielkim: „a idą posępni” i tak dalej. To w ten sposób to wygłosiłem. I... a pisząc, myślałem sobie w ten sposób: „Zaraz, co tam jeszcze było, acha, Katyń był – Katyń, gdzie Stalin, no wymordował, czy ludzie na jego rozkaz, te tysiące polskich oficerów”. I sobie pomyślałem, że właściwie może napiszemy tutaj w tym miejscu tę żałobną prasówkę w ten sposób: „Szczególną opieką… szczególną opieką otoczył towarzysz Stalin żołnierza polskiego, który po klęsce kampanii wrześniowej znalazł schronienie na gościnnej ziemi radzieckiej”. I to było mniej więcej w tym stylu napisane. Czułem się bardzo dwuznacznie w tym i trochę się bałem tego, czy nie przesadziłem tego, a trochę mi było głupio, że jednak... a ktoś może to dosłownie potraktuje, jak ja będę... jak ja wyglądam i że w ogóle coś nie tak jak trzeba. No i wtedy pani Zatorska, która tam była obecna, podeszła do mnie i powiedziała – pierwszy i jedyny raz w życiu do mnie się zwróciła „towarzyszu” – powiedziała: „Towarzyszu Lipski, przechowajcie ten referat, on nie powinien zginąć”. I teraz przy okazji przeprowadzki w tym wielkim bałaganie tych teczek i tak dalej, na... w którejś teczce natknąłem się na ten swój referat. Nie wiem – drukować go gdzie w drugim obiegu?

Imagine, I had to prepare a press release immediately after Stalin's death. It was a bit awkward to fall sick from one day to the next and I was a little afraid that no one would believe that I was ill. There wasn't any way I could excuse myself, I didn't feel like saying what I was expected to say but at the same time, I felt what can I do, I can't pretend that I haven't noticed that Stalin is dead. In the end, it turned into a presentation which I spent the whole night preparing, and which I delivered the way children recite Wyspiański's rhapsody on Kazimierz the Great at their school performances: ‘here they come, bowed down by sorrow’ and so on. That's how I presented the press release. While I was writing it, I was thinking, what else was there? Katyń, there was Katyń where Stalin murdered – or people following his orders – murdered thousands of Polish officers. And I thought, perhaps this is what we could write here in this memorial press release. ‘Comrade Stalin showed particular... was especially concerned for the welfare of the Polish soldier who was able to find shelter on the welcoming Soviet soil following defeat in the September campaign.’ This was more or less the style in which it was written. I felt very ambivalent about this and was a bit afraid that I might have exaggerated, yet I was embarrassed in case someone might take this literally and then how would I look, and things wouldn't seem quite right. At that point, Mrs Zatorska who was there then, came up to me and said – it was the first and last time that she ever addressed me as Comrade – she said, ‘Comrade Lipski, hold on to this presentation, it mustn't get lost’. When I was moving house just recently, in all that jumble of files and so on, I came across this presentation in one of the files. I don't know, should I publish it in one of the samizdat publications?

Jan Józef Lipski (1926-1991) was one of Poland's best known political activists. He was also a writer and a literary critic. As a soldier in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), he fought in the Warsaw Uprising. In 1976, following worker protests, he co-founded the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). His active opposition to Poland's communist authorities led to his arrest and imprisonment on several occasions. In 1987, he re-established and headed the Polish Socialist Party. Two years later, he was elected to the Polish Senate. He died in 1991 while still in office. For his significant work, Lipski was honoured with the Cross of the Valorous (Krzyż Walecznych), posthumously with the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1991) and with the highest Polish decoration, the Order of the White Eagle (2006).

Listeners: Marcel Łoziński Jacek Petrycki

Film director Marcel Łoziński was born in Paris in 1940. He graduated from the Film Directing Department of the National School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź in 1971. In 1994, he was nominated for an American Academy Award and a European Film Academy Award for the documentary, 89 mm from Europe. Since 1995, he has been a member of the American Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science awarding Oscars. He lectured at the FEMIS film school and the School of Polish Culture of Warsaw University. He ran documentary film workshops in Marseilles. Marcel Łoziński currently lectures at Andrzej Wajda’s Master School for Film Directors. He also runs the Dragon Forum, a European documentary film workshop.

Cinematographer Jacek Petrycki was born in Poznań, Poland in 1948. He has worked extensively in Poland and throughout the world. His credits include, for Agniezka Holland, Provincial Actors (1979), Europe, Europe (1990), Shot in the Heart (2001) and Julie Walking Home (2002), for Krysztof Kieslowski numerous short films including Camera Buff (1980) and No End (1985). Other credits include Journey to the Sun (1998), directed by Jesim Ustaoglu, which won the Golden Camera 300 award at the International Film Camera Festival, Shooters (2000) and The Valley (1999), both directed by Dan Reed, Unforgiving (1993) and Betrayed (1995) by Clive Gordon both of which won the BAFTA for best factual photography. Jacek Petrycki is also a teacher and a filmmaker.

Tags: Katyń, Joseph Stalin

Duration: 2 minutes, 42 seconds

Date story recorded: October 1989

Date story went live: 09 March 2011