Official opening of the exhibition presenting the achievements of the Foundation
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Congress, the Poland the Great Project Foundation is organizing traveling exhibitions with accompanying events in twenty Polish cities in 2020. As part of the international conference Carpathian Europe, Professor Zdzislaw Krasnodębski opened the exhibition on 21 February at the National Museum of the Przemysl Region. The project aims to introduce the local community to the idea of the Congress as a "great project" for Poland. Each exhibition will be enriched by a speech given by people who have been supporting the Congress for years, including panellists, members of the Programme Council and winners of the Lech Kaczyński Presidential Award.
During the meetings accompanying the exhibition interesting documentaries will be shown or topics important to the local community will be discussed.
The opening of the exhibition was accompanied by film screenings "Passports of Paraguay" i "Hiranmoy Ghoshal. The current of two rivers".
"Passports Paraguayu ", dir. by Robert Kaczmarek, 2018
The film tells a story about the activities of a group of Aleksander Ładoś, an illegal Polish-Jewish structure involved in mass forgery of documents to save Jews during World War II. This mainly concerns the period of the so-called Operation Reinhardt, which aimed to exterminate the Jewish population. "It was the Poles who helped the most, the Polish state could not have done more. Above all, the Polish state had no territory, it was occupied, so the diplomats and the Polish government-in-exile did what they could," said one of the characters in the film, Markus Blechner, honorary consul of the Polish Republic in Switzerland. The group consisted of diplomats of Jewish and Polish origin, including the Polish consul in Bern from 1939 to 1945 Konstanty Rokicki, Ambassador Aleksander Ładoś, his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz and diplomat Juliusz Kuehl. Other members of the group included Abraham Silberschein, a member of the Second Polish Sejm, and Chaim Eiss, a representative of Jewish organizations. Passports from Latin American countries, mainly Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru and Haiti, protected their holders in the ghettos from deportation to German death camps. Their owners were sent to internment camps, where some of them lived to see the end of the war. [TVP]
"Hiranmoy Ghoshal. The current of two riversk", dir. by Tadeusz Śmiarowski, 2019
The film tells the story of Hiranmoy Ghoshal, an Indian writer from West Bengal, diplomat, translator and linguist born in Calcutta in 1908, and his daughter Mira Ghoshal, a musicologist and expert in Indian music. Their lives were torn between Poland and India, and at some stages between England and the United States. After living in London for a few years, Goshal finds herself
in 1934 to Warsaw, where he became a lecturer of Indian languages at the University of Warsaw. In March 1940, he managed to get out of Poland and reach India. There he immediately started a radio campaign to make his countrymen aware of the barbarity of the German invasion of Poland.
