ZACMA: BLINDNESS Trailer | Festival 2016

[pieter]

[pieter]

ZACMA: BLINDNESS: Julia Brystiger



The film shows an obscure episode from the life of a Stalinist criminal - Colonel of the Office of Public Security, Julia Brystiger. Her nickname was "Bloody Luna" because during interrogations she tortured prisoners with extreme cruelty. At the beginning of 1960s she appeared in Laski near Warsaw, in the Institute for the Blind, where the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, was also a frequent visitor. His imprisonment in the years 1953-1956 was supervised by none other than Julia Brystiger herself. During the difficult and tempestuous conversation with the Primate, Julia Brystiger rejects the communist ideology, asks for her crimes to be forgiven and for help in finding God...

Julia Brystiger



Julia Brystiger (née Prajs, born November 25, 1902, in Stryj – died November 9, 1975, in Warsaw) was a Polish-Jewish communist activist and member of the security apparatus in Stalinist Poland (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, commonly known as UB; Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (1945–1954)). She was also known as Julia Brystygier, Bristiger, Brustiger, Briestiger, Brystygierowa, Bristigierowa, and by her nicknames – given by the victims of torture: Luna, Bloody Luna, Daria, Ksenia, and Maria. The nickname Bloody Luna was a direct reference of her Gestapo-like methods during interrogations. Her pen name was Julia Preiss. Author of several books.

Life

Brystiger was the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Stryj (now Ukraine). In 1920 she graduated from high school in Lwów (new Second Polish Republic) and married a Zionist activist Natan (Nathan) Brystiger. She studied history at the Lwów University while pregnant and a year later gave birth to a son, Michał Bristiger.

After graduating from University, Brystiger went to Paris where she continued her education, receiving a PhD in philosophy. Upon their return, in 1928–1929, she got a job at a high school in Vilnius (Wilno) and in a Jewish Teacher's College Tarbuch. Since 1927, she was an active participant in the communist movement, and in 1929 was fired because of her communist agitation. Working for the Communist Party of Poland, she was arrested several times, and in 1937 was sentenced to 2 years in prison.

After the German and Soviet attack on Poland, Brystiger escaped to Samarkand, accepted Soviet citizenship and became an active member of the Soviet political administration. She created the so-called Committee of Political Prisoners, which helped the NKVD to imprison several members of the prewar Polish opposition movements. She was "denouncing people on such scale, that she antagonized even Communist party members". Ironically, at one point Brystiger oversaw the interrogation and persecution of Bela and Józef Goldberg – her future colleague, the UB interrogator known as Józef Różański. Różańskis had committed "a crime" of accepting Western food-aid in the form of two kilograms of rice and a bag of flour from the Polish Government in Exile's embassy, in order to save their daughter from starvation. A few years later, Józef Różański joined the NKVD and eventually, became a high ranking functionary in the Polish secret police. He ended up working alongside Brystiger – his former interrogator – in the Ministry of Public Security of Poland under Stalinism.

Following German Operation Barbarossa Brystiger fled to Kharkov, then to Samarkand deep in the USSR. In 1943-44, she worked for the Union of Polish Patriots, and in October 1944, joined the new Polish Workers' Party. In December 1944, after returning behind the Soviet front, Brystygier began working for the infamous Ministry of Public Security of Poland, where she soon got promoted to the rank of Director of the Fifth Department created in July 1946 specifically for the purpose of persecution and torture of Polish religious personalities. Her career is believed to have been so rapid also because she was intimate with such high functionaries as Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc. In the Polish official archives, there is an instruction written by Brystygier to her subordinates, about the purpose of torture:

In fact, the Polish intelligentsia as such is against the Communist system and basically, it is impossible to re-educate it. All that remains is to liquidate it. However, since we must not repeat the mistake of the Russians after the 1917 revolution, when all intelligentsia members were exterminated, and the country did not develop correctly afterwards, we have to create such a system of terror and pressure that the members of the intelligentsia would not dare to be politically active

Brystiger personally oversaw the first stages of each UB investigation at her place of employment. She would torture the captured persons using her own methods such as whipping male victims' genitals. One of her victims was a man named Szafarzynski – from the Olsztyn office of the Polish People's Party – who died as a result of interrogation carried out by Brystygier. One of the victims of her interrogation methods testified later: "She is a murderous monster, worse than German female guards - SS-Aufseherinnen of the concentration camps". Anna Roszkiewicz–Litwiniwiczowa, a former soldier of the Home Army, said about Brystygier: "She was famous for her sadistic tortures; she seemed to have been obsessed with sadistic treatment of genitalia and was fulfilling her libido in that way.".

Brystiger became the head of the 5th Department of UB (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa) sometime in the late 1940s. It specialized in the persecution of Polish religious leaders. Brystygier – a dogmatic Marxist – yearned to destroy all religion as an "opiate of the masses". She directed the operation to arrest and detain the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. The decision to arrest him had been made earlier in Moscow. Brystygier took an active part in the "war against religion" in the 1950s, during which 123 Roman Catholic priests were imprisoned in 1950 alone.


Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski

She also persecuted other congregations, such as the 2,000 jailed Jehovah's Witnesses. Julia Brystygier left the Ministry of Public Security (UB) in 1956 and tried to become a writer, authoring a novel "Crooked Letters". She worked in a publishing house under Jewish communist Jerzy Borejsza (Różański's brother), and was a frequent visitor to a boarding school for the vision impaired, in a village near Warsaw.

[pieter]

Jaga,

ZACMA: BLINDNESS is an incredible in-depth and sombre movie about sin, atonement, questioning the Stalinist past and the persecution of the Roman Catholic church and priests in Communist Poland, and personal repentance with good film work, the atmosphere of the Polish peoples republic, a Polish church and monastry, faith in God vs atheism (antithesis), the war against faith during communism and repentance of an Old Communist Stalinist interrogator and torturer of the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (1945–1954). A very good and very Polish movie. Also a very Roman Catholic movie, with some Jewish elements in it. But it's atmosphere and content are mainly Polish. These UB (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa) people and Milicja Obywatelska police officers are terrible, but the landscape, monastery, church, country life and some idyllic scenes are wonderful.

I watched 2 Polish movies Sunday afternoon and evening. Kurier (the Messenger) and ZACMA: BLINDNESS.

Cheers,
Pieter