The director shared that he filmed this film, with a largely Polish (from Poland) cast IN SIBERIA in and around Krasnoyarsk, the Russian-Siberian city that later became famous for its role in Soviet technological development and its space program) using at times Siberian extras and that the _premiere_ was held in Krasnoyarsk as well, to an audience which turned out to be largely composed of descendants of those hundreds of thousands to several million Polish deportees. All this is to say that this is a remarkably important film, again the first of its kind to tell this story of enormous suffering, betrayal and ultimately resilience on the part of the Poles who suddenly found themselves part of the Soviet Union. Perhaps millions of Poles deported in this manner. Honor family members who had been among the hundreds of thousands to Director Zaorski * shared after the screening that he made the movie in good part to And I was friends a number years ago over Facebook with a young ethnic Lithuanian from Siberia whose family had been deported there when the same fate came to hundreds of thousands of citizens from the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia following their occupation by Soviet Union (also as part of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).įurther, present at the screening of the film, held at Facets Multimedia in Chicago as part 25th Annual Polish Film Festival in America, were not only the film's director Janusz Zaorski * but also members of several local Chicago families whose Polish parents and grandparents had been part of these deportations as well. I personally buried a 95-year-old parishioner here at Annunciata Parish in Chicago, IL a couple of years ago who along with her family had been among those Poles who were deported.

Poland between them, and finally allowed Nazi Germany to safely begin World War II with the invasion of Poland without fear of creating a two front war). Soviet Union, allowed Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to divide (The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact created a very temporary peace between Nazi Germany and the The film, the first feature film of its kind, tells the story of the Poles ( according to the Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum as many as 2,000,000) who had been living in the part of pre-WW II Poland that was occupied by the Soviet Union (as part of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany) who were then deported by the Soviets East to Kazakhstan and Siberia beginning in February, 1940. Syberiada Polska) *(directed by Janusz Zaorski *, screenplay by Michał Komar * and Maciej Dutkiewicz *, based on the novel (PL-orig) (FR-trans) by Zbigniew Domino *) played recently at the 25th Polish Film Festival in America held in Chicago between Nov 8-24, 2013.

Syberiada polska