The Messenger (Kurier)- Poland, UK, Germany I 2019 I trailer

[pieter]

The Messenger (Kurier)



The Messenger tells the incredible true story of a real-life superhero – the legendary Courier from Warsaw, a Polish spy whose lonely mission was to decide the fate of Poland and World War II.

The new film by Władysław Pasikowski, director of hit movies Jack Strong and Pitbull. The Last Dog, is an action spy thriller inspired by secret missions of the famous Courier from Warsaw, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański. Pursued by hostile intelligence agencies, he became the Courier of the Chief Commander of Poland’s AK Home Army resistance and the Polish Government in Exile in London. As a messenger, he carried top secret information between Warsaw and London. He travelled through German occupied Europe a number of times, narrowly escaping capture. In England he met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, providing reports on the situation in occupied Poland. During one of his missions in July 1944, he returned to Warsaw only a few days before the Warsaw Uprising broke out. During the Uprising he took an active part in fighting the Germans and also set up a radio station that maintained contact with Allied countries through daily broadcasts in Polish and English. After the Warsaw Uprising he managed to return to England while carrying microfilms documenting the 63 day struggle. His life is marked by courage and integrity and reflects the dramatic history of Poland.

In the last days of July 1944 Home Army commanders in Warsaw are secretly deliberating whether to start a military uprising against the Germans. The key information is still missing - will Great Britain support an uprising with air drops and by sending a highly trained unit composed of Polish troops who had taken refuge in the UK and wanted to help the Poles at home in their struggle. The dangerous mission to travel from London to German-occupied Warsaw to deliver the crucial news to the Home Army is entrusted to the underground messenger, Jan Nowak (Philippe Tłokiński). Delayed by a series of unforeseen events and with the Gestapo trying to intercept him at all costs, Nowak must get back to Warsaw and inform Polish Commanders about Winston Churchill's refusal to assist its ally before the irreversible decision on uprising is made.

WARSAW UPRISING



The year 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, the most significant World War II resistance operation against Germany.

Initially intended to last a few days, it continued for over two months before it was brutally suppressed. Commanded by the Home Army’s General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the uprising was intended to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It started on 1 August and within three days Polish resistance gained control of most of the city. The Germans sent in reinforcements and forced the Poles into defensive positions, bombarding them for the next 63 days.

With Great Britain refusing to assist its first ally and with no support from US or the Soviet Army, the latter concerned that Polish Resistance may lay the foundations for an independent post-war Poland, Bór-Komorowski was eventually forced to surrender. Warsaw could have been one of the first European capitals to be liberated, but military miscalculations and global superpower politics turned the dice against it.

The Warsaw Uprising claimed the lives of about 18,000 insurgents and around 200,000 civilians. After the Uprising collapsed the remaining 500,000 residents were expelled from the city and Warsaw was razed to the ground, house by house. By January 1945, about 90 percent of the city was destroyed, as was the leadership of the Home Army that supported the Polish government-in-exile in London. Consequently, when Soviet army occupied Poland, there was little organised resistance to oppose the establishment of Soviet political domination over the country and imposition of the communist-led Provisional Government of Poland.

[pieter]

Folks,

I have watched the movie and liked it and ad it to my list of seen European World War II movies. I have seen a lot of European and American World War II movies. It is an accurate description of the Polish, British and German sides during the Second World War in the United Kingdom and Poland and also the different interests of the Polish and British allies. It shows the fact that Poland was crushed between the Nazi's and the Sovjets. The Nazi's were the first and genocidal arch enemies, the Sovjets the second long term enemy because they wanted to enforce their ideology and world view on the Poles and eliminate all non-Bolsjewist (non Marxist-Leninist, Non-Stalinist, non Communist) democratic elements in Poland. Both the Nazi's and the Sovjets fought against and murdered Polish Democrats, liberals, conservatives, Polish jews, Roman-Catholics, Polish Protestant christians, Social democrats, humanists and libertarians and Polish Patriots. It is true that many Polish jews and Polish communist fled to the Sovjet occupied part of Poland to escape the Nazi's but Menachem Begin, and the Jewish Polish Bund leaders Wiktor Alter and Henryk Erlich had a terrible fate in the SovjetUnion under the vicious NKVD.

The most eminent Bund leaders, Wiktor Alter and Henryk Erlich were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin's orders under accusations of being agents of Nazi Germany.

In September 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Begin, in common with a large part of Warsaw's Jewish leadership, escaped to Wilno (today Vilnius), then eastern Poland, to avoid inevitable arrest. The town was soon occupied by the Soviet Union, but from 28 October 1939, it was the capital of the Republic of Lithuania. Wilno was a predominately Polish and Jewish town; an estimated 40 percent of the population was Jewish, with the YIVO institute located there. As a prominent pre-war Zionist and reserve status officer-cadet, on 20 September 1940, Begin was arrested by the NKVD and detained in the Lukiškės Prison. In later years he wrote about his experience of being tortured. He was accused of being an "agent of British imperialism" and sentenced to eight years in the Soviet gulag camps. On 1 June 1941 he was sent to the Pechora labor camps in Komi Republic, the northern part of European Russia, where he stayed until May 1942. Much later in life, Begin recorded and reflected upon his experiences in the interrogations and life in the camp in his memoir White Nights.

White Nights: the Story of a Prisoner in Russia is an autobiographical memoir by Menachem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel, describing his imprisonment in the Soviet gulag labour camps during 1940-1942. The book was first published in Hebrew in 1957 and has been available in English translation since 1977.

Along with a description of the author's own harrowing experiences in the camps, the book contains various observations on the real-life operation of the Soviet system and the psychology of some of its minions.

When the book first came out, serious doubts were expressed over whether Begin really could have dared to so boldly express his Zionist worldview to the interrogators under the pressure of the "interrogation" he underwent in the Soviet prison. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Begin's NKVD investigation file was declassified, and was found to corroborate the account he gave the book. The book was subsequently re-published in 1995 together with the investigation documents from Begin's file.

In the Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.

The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Polish Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Polish Jews including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg. It is estimated about 8% of the Katyn massacre victims were Polish Jews.

The Poles were crushed between the invading German & Austrian Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine on one side and the invading Sovjet Red army on the other side.

The Gestapo–NKVD conferences were a series of security police meetings organised in late 1939 and early 1940 by Germany and the Soviet Union, following the invasion of Poland in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The meetings enabled both parties to pursue specific goals and aims as outlined independently by Hitler and Stalin, with regard to the acquired, formerly Polish territories.[3] The conferences were held by the Gestapo and the NKVD officials in several Polish cities. In spite of their differences on other issues, both Heinrich Himmler and Lavrentiy Beria had similar objectives as far as the fate of the prewar Poland was concerned.

The Gestapo–NKVD conferences took place in the following locations and dates:

27 September 1939 in Brześć
October 1939 in Lwów
November 1939 in Przemyśl
6–7 December 1939 in Kraków
8–9 December 1939 in Zakopane
20 February 1940 in Zakopane
March 1940 in Kraków

Both Gestapo and NKVD expected the emergence of Polish resistance and discussed ways of dealing with the clandestine activities of the Poles. In the immediate aftermath of the meeting, the Soviet NKVD began the collection of data leading to the Katyn massacre committed in the spring of 1940. In his 1991 book Stalin: Breaker of Nations, British historian Robert Conquest stated: "Terminal horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jewish, Slavic, and other European peoples as a result of this meeting of evil minds is an indelible stain on the history and integrity of Western civilization, with all of its humanitarian pretensions".

The fourth and last meeting took place in March 1940 in Krakow. According to some historians, it was part of the Zakopane Conference. This event was described by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, commander of Armia Krajowa in his book Armia Podziemna (The Secret Army). In it, he describes how a special delegation of NKVD came to Krakow, which was going to discuss with Gestapo how to act against the Polish resistance. The talks lasted for several weeks.

Russian historian Alexandr Nekrich describes formal military cooperation agreement signed on 20 September 1939 where both sides committed to "cleansing of hostile population" and "liquidation" of Polish resistance.

Historian Wojciech Materski points out that there is evidence of clandestine murder operations conducted by both Soviet and German forces in 1939–1940 across occupied Poland, however, there is no evidence of direct connection between the NKVD prisoner massacres and the German AB-Aktion in Poland leading to massacre of several thousand prominent Poles in the same time-frame.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

Jan Nowak-Jeziorański



Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (Polish pronunciation: [ˈjan ˈnɔvak jɛʑɔˈraɲskʲi]; 2 October 1914 – 20 January 2005) was a Polish journalist, writer, politician, social worker and patriot. He served during the Second World War as one of the most notable resistance fighters of the Home Army. He is best remembered for his work as an emissary shuttling between the commanders of the Home Army and the Polish Government in Exile in London and other Allied governments which gained him the nickname "Courier from Warsaw", and for his participation in the Warsaw uprising. After the war he worked as the head of the Polish section of Radio Free Europe, and later as a security advisor to the US presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded him with America's highest civilian award the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He was born Zdzisław Antoni Jeziorański, (Jeziora Coat of Arms) in Berlin, but used a number of noms de guerre during the war, the best known of which was Jan Nowak which he later added to his original surname.


Jan Nowak-Jeziorański's family belonged to the Jeziora Coat of Arms

Biography



Zdzisław Jeziorański was born in Berlin. He attended the Stefan Batory Gymnasium and Lyceum in Warsaw. After finishing his studies in economics in 1936, he worked as a teaching assistant at Poznań University. Mobilized in 1939, he fought in the Polish Army as an artillery NCO. He was taken prisoner of war by the Germans in Volhynia, but managed to escape and returned to Warsaw. Most of his colleagues were taken prisoners of war by the Soviets and later killed in the Katyn massacre.

He quickly joined the Polish resistance. After 1940 he became the main organiser of the Akcja N, a secret organisation preparing German-language newspapers and other propaganda material pretending to be official German publications, to wage psychological warfare against German troops.



He also served as an envoy between the commanders of the Home Army and the Polish Government in Exile and other allied governments. During his first trips to Sweden and Great Britain he informed the Western governments of the fate of Poland under German and Soviet occupation. He was also the first to report of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. During one of such missions, in July 1944, he returned to Warsaw only a few days before the Warsaw uprising broke out.

During the Uprising he took an active part in the fights against the Germans and also organised the Polish radio that maintained the contact with the Allied countries through daily broadcasts in Polish and English. Shortly before the capitulation of the Polish capital, he was ordered by Home Army's commander-in-chief Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski to leave the city and find his way to London. He managed to evade being captured and reached Great Britain, bringing with him large quantities of documents and photos. For his bravery and his travels through the German-occupied Europe he was awarded with the Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military medal.



After the war Jan Nowak-Jeziorański stayed in the West, initially in London and then in Munich and Washington. Between 1948 and 1976 he was one of the most notable personalities of the BBC Polish Section. In 1952 he also became head of the Polish section of the Munich-based Radio Free Europe. Through his daily radio broadcasts he remained one of the most popular radio personalities, both in communist-held Poland and among the Polish diaspora in the West. After giving up his posts in 1976 he became one of the most prominent members of the Polish American Congress. He was also working as an advisor to the American National Security Agency and the presidents of the USA Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Through his contacts with many notable politicians in the USA, he was one of the proponents of Poland's membership in NATO (achieved in 1999).

In the 1990s he started his cooperation with the Polish Radio and wrote a series of broadcasts titled Polska z oddali (Poland from a Distance). Since 1990 he was also present on Polish television as writer/presenter of monthly programs. In July 2002 he returned to Warsaw for the final time. He was an active supporter of Poland's entry into the European Union. Most of his books, published abroad as well as those published in Poland after 1989, were best-sellers and gained him even more popularity.

For his writings he was awarded some of the most prestigious Polish literary awards, including the Kisiel Award (1999), Ksawery Pruszyński Memorial Prize of the Polish Pen Club (2001) and the Superwiktor award for television personalities. In 2003 he was also awarded the Człowiek Pojednania prize by the Polish Council of Christians and Jews for his part in the Polish-Jewish dialogue. Finally, he was made the doctor honoris causa of many Polish universities, including the Warsaw University, Jagiellonian University and his alma mater, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.[8]

He died in Warsaw on 20 January 2005. He donated all his archives to the Ossolineum Institute.


Jan Nowak-Jeziorański on Radio Free Europe, 3 May 1952

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

It was 1953 when twenty-five-year-old Zbigniew Brzeziński, future advisor to American presidents Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, visited the headquarters of the Polish section of Radio Free Europe in Munich and its director Jan Nowak-Jeziorański. They started cooperation, which turned into a friendship that lasted for many years.

Paulina Gawrońska tells the story of the account of the protagonist of the permanent exhibition "Mission: Poland" at the Pan Tadeusz Museum, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański and Zbigniew Brzeziński.