Australian Peter Weir, made the film “The Way Back” (Polish title “Niepokonani”) about the escape of seven men from a Soviet gulag in Siberia. Their leader was a Pole—Janusz. The screenplay was based on Sławomir Rawicz’s book “The Long Walk,” in which the author described his own escape from Siberia to India. The Pole’s story, published in the 1950s, became a bestseller in the West and was a banned publication in communist countries.
BBC reporters conducted a kind of investigation and found information that Rawicz was not the hero of the events he described. However, the reporters confirmed that several Polish prisoners had escaped from a Siberian gulag. The results of this search for historical truth are important. They lend credibility to the extraordinary story and confirm the nationality of the heroes who, in the film, led by a Pole, traveled more than 6,500 km through the Siberian taiga, the steppes of Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas, all the way to India.
Each of them is portrayed in the film as having a specific trait. There is the ruthless and clever urka (a repeat offender from the gulag played by Colin Farrel), the philosophical American (Ed Harris), another hero draws beautifully, and yet another is witty. Janusz’s defining trait is kindness. The American describes him this way: “You possess something extraordinary that gives our escape its greatest chance. It is kindness. I’m counting on you to carry me when I can no longer go on escaping.”
The director considered kindness our national trait. It did not occur to him that Poles see it in a distorted mirror. The Australian made our kindness into a virtue—a force that binds people together in the most difficult situations. In an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, Weir described us as an indomitable nation, though one afflicted by a harsh fate. He said that difficult historical experiences had not broken the Polish spirit and that we are optimistic, courageous and hardworking people. We rarely think so well of ourselves. We are more inclined to regard kindness as a trait of suckers and add, “Those with a soft heart have a hard ass.” It is as if some fog in our country obscures our own positive image. And we look with distrust at a film about an indomitable Polish hero. We do not believe this image because we do not reinforce it within ourselves. That is why it is worth going to see the film—to test our love for our own nation. And for ourselves.
The film “Niepokonani” will be shown at Forum cinema from Friday, May 13, through Thursday, May 19.
(information: Grażyna Hanaf)