Our Mothers, Our Fathers on Polish TV?

Anybody see the first part of 'Our Mothers, our Fathers' shown on Polish TV last night? The first part at least showed mainly the extreme cruelty of many Germans as well as the general horror of war. Personally I think it should be shown. The head of the World AK Association Baranowski agrees. What about you?

I watched that. I'll be watching part 2 today and 3 tomorrow. Good watch.

Can anybody go into detail about those supposed lies?

I'd be willing to bet that 99% of people claiming there to be lies haven't watched the programme.

Nice to see TVP showing a bit more balance these days.

Precisely the case of most TV Trwam and Radio Maryja bashers. If you're a 'modern' godless leftist or other self-styled 'progressive' you're supposed to bash it, because the ethnically correct gurus tell you to.

Who needs to watch TV Trwam/Radio Maryja when there are comprehensive sources available that detail exactly what and when was said?

Back to the topic gentelmen?

So, no chance that you can go into any detail about the supposed lies in the program?

No lies as such. But in the trailer shown earlier the actors playing Polish freedom-fighters were somehow not done up quite right. I've seen oodles of documentary footage and there was just something wrong, but I only got a glimspe of it. Maybe it'll be in part 2 or 3.

So when head of PiS' parliamentary party said that the program contained lies about Polish history, he was in fact lying, correct?

Maybe he's seen the whole thing. As I understand it, there are some anti-AK sequences. When AK blokes capture a German train an throw upen the doors, they find it's only Jews so they relock the door and leave them to their fate. There was also a scene where some lads want to join an AK unit and the first quesiton asked is: You're not Jewish are you? But that's just the trailer. I don't jump to hasty conclusions the way Rydzyk-bashers do. Pooglądamy, zobaczymy!

No lies, but two bigger distortions. The German protagonists are mostly passive bystanders, although in reality especially the youth who grew in the 30s was quite the opposite. And in the episodes with the Armia Krajowa their members are shown as anti-Semitic, while in reality this was most probably only a minority and not representative.

Are those men clearly identified as AK? There was Polish resistance which was very much characterised by anti-semitism, e.g. NSZ. As for the AK, they very certainly had more than the odd anti-semite, so portraying some AK as being anti-semitic would be just as accurate as portraying some German soldiers as being the type of scum who murdered civilians (given that it was the minority of German soldiers who did that).

Any comments on Part 2 of 'Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter'?

I saw 30 minutes of part 3.

Boring.

What is worse, it falsifies history.
E.g., a German soldier is killed in a partisan ambush. Germans retaliate by executing only one family from a nearby village. Two guys are shot on the spot, 3 others hanged in the town. That is obvious bulshyt, because such assassinations were punished with burning whole villages in the provincial Poland or by executing 100 or 200 hostages in Warsaw and other cities.

Nice whitening. I understand it was cheaper for German producers to show the death of 5 people instead of 200 but what message an average German viewer receives?

And in the first 10 minutes we learn that Polish partisans and peasants were antisemitic.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_operations_in_German-occupied_Poland

Unfortunately, I forgot those series were to be shown on Polish TV and I really wanted to watch it to see for myself :/ But I've watched today's episode so at least partly I've seen what the problem is with those series.


Was anything shown in first two episodes about what was going on in Poland?


Yes.


Yup.

There was a really very interesting debate on Polish TV after today's episode! There was a German historian, a Polish historian, a survivor and former ambassador of Israel to Poland, Shevah Weiss, there was also an AK member, a German journalist and some Polish journalists.

In general I agree with everything what Shevah Weiss said. But it was interesting to listen to other participants too.

Harry, have you watched the debate?

The discussion afterwards was very interesting. The film's German consultant said the Polish episodes were secondary in importance, the focus being the five German friends and how they fared during the war. But a Polish prof, Szarota, objected saying that if the only Polish theme was that the AK was anti-Semitic, that would entrench that distorted stereotype amongst coming German generations.

Szewach Weiss, former Israeli ambassador to Poland, pointed out there indeed was anti-Semitism in prewar Poland but where didn't it exist? He noted that Poland had produced Żegota (to save Jews), but never spawned a Vichy, Tiso or Quisling regime.

In a political correct world the German protagonists would have been either Nazis or passive, and the episodes in WW2 would have shown mass killings, war crimes, death and horror everywhere, traumatized soldiers etc.. A political correct movie also would have shown the expulsions from Eastern Germany or the mass rapes by the Red Army. Everything on Sunday prime time, where usually cheesy love stories between rich, beautiful people in romantic Ireland are shown. You expect a bit too much from a TV movie and from a producer who made gems like "Dresden", a TV movie about the love between a German nurse and a British(!) bomber pilot(!!) when the city gets leveled in the background.

And how self-critical are Polish TV productions btw.? How are the Jewish Poles in the Polish society depicted? Ever seen a movie about the systematic destruction of the German culture in the "Ziemie Odzyskane"?

Some of those things were indeed shown. The point is that the focus were this German fivesome and what they saw and experienced. And they couldn't have seen and experienced everything.