Poland's partisan ghosts

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

For some in Poland the Cursed Soldiers are national heroes; for others they are murderers. A march in celebration of a group of Polish partisans fighting the Soviets has become the focus of tension in a small community in one of Europe’s oldest forests. Those taking part believe the partisans – known as the Cursed Soldiers – were national heroes, but others remember atrocities committed by them 70 years ago. Some partisans were responsible for the burning of villages and the murder of men, women and children in and around Poland’s Bialowieza forest. The people living the forest are Orthodox and Catholic, Belorussian and Polish; this march threatens to revive past divisions between them. Many believe that far-right groups have hijacked this piece of history to further their nationalist agenda. For Assignment, Maria Margaronis visits the forest to find out why this is causing tensions now; why the locals feel the march is making them feel threatened; and how this reflects wider political rifts in Poland today.

Produced by Charlotte McDonald.

(Image: March through the town of Hajnowka to celebrate the Polish partisans known as the Cursed Soldiers. Copyright: BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service.
0:02.8	I'm Maria Margaronis in eastern Poland. The march has lined up at the top of the main road in Hainupka and Basha Polachuk, who's the main
0:28.0	organizer who's a young woman from here.
0:31.0	Basha Polachuk is making a speech to local people and to what she describes as the left-wing media
0:36.0	that they can't stop this march. It's going to happen anyway. It's going to go ahead. Oh, we honor the heroes.
0:50.0	Those heroes are the so-called cursed soldiers, Polish resistance fighters who carried on a doomed guerrilla struggle against Poland's new communist rulers after the Soviets took over from the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. You're from Heinofka?
1:10.0	What do the curse soldiers mean to you? You're young. I think that we have to remember about them, about their sacrifice to our country, to our history, because they were suffering so many years the history was flying about them.
1:26.7	What that young woman means is that under communism the cursed soldier's story was suppressed.
1:32.4	For the last eight years though they've been honored with a national day of remembrance,
1:36.0	and now Poland's right-wing government venerates them as martyred heroes.
1:41.0	The Law and Justice Party in power is strongly nationalist and anti-immigrant, pro-family,
1:46.7	Catholic Church and home. It's been in trouble with the EU for undermining democracy and the
1:51.7	rule of law, and it's framing Poland's traumatic
1:54.6	history to serve its own purposes. President Andre Duda gave this sermon
2:00.0	the state funeral for one of the cursed soldiers reburied in 2016.
2:04.0	Today their heiressen stands as an example for the next generations to be like them.
2:15.0	Faithful to the homeland to the end.
2:18.0	Faithful to the soldier's oath until the end.
2:21.0	Faithful to everything that was implanted in their souls faithful to
2:26.9	the independent and free Poland so it's not just the memory of the past, it's all about building the future.
2:36.0	But for many people in this part of Poland, the cursed soldiers were anything but heroes.
2:41.0	They're remembered instead for atrocities they committed against local
	...

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