“The Day After” | FILM AND DEBATE - Instytut Pileckiego

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15.10.2021 (Fri)

“The Day After” | FILM AND DEBATE

On 15 of October, a screening of the movie “The Day After”, directed by Grzegorz Czerniak and Wojciech Saramonowicz, took place at the Iskra Cinema.

Participants in the post-screening discussion panel included: Teresa Kaczorowska, PhD – writer, author of reportage about the Augustów Roundup; Prof. Grzegorz Motyka from the Institute of Political Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences; and Marcin Zwolski, PhD – head of Scientific Department at the Research Institute of the Siberia Memorial Museum.

“The Day After” is a documentary produced film by the Pilecki Institute, which tells the story of the end of the Second World War. The documentary combines eyewitness accounts of those events with unique archival footage from the collection of the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, the co-producer of the film.

The film gives a voice to Poles who found themselves in various places and situations at the end of the Second World War. Soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, who were not able to reach Poland, asked themselves the question: to return or not to return? For concentration camp prisoners and forced laborers, liberation was only the first stage on the long road to normality. From the perspective of Poles who had spent the war in their home country, the end of the German occupation marked the end of German crimes. However, the Communist regime, which came to Poland with the Red Army, restarted the machinery of terror and violence. This stoked public resistance against Sovietization, to which the Communists responded by increasing the scale of repression.

The screening of the film led to a discussion about the place and significance of the specific historical experiences of Augustów and the Suwałki region from the perspective of the processes that shaped post-war Poland and Europe. During the discussion, the participants evaluated the perspectives of further research on the history of the Augustów Roundup in the context of challenges related to access to Russian and Belorussian archives, and activities aimed at commemorating the victims of this Soviet crime of July 1945.

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