Of all rights Between neighbors should have been a run-of-the-mill documentary event.
Yoav Potash’s film – which explores a dark chapter of the Second World War – is normally part of a reckoning that has taken place across Eastern Europe in recent years. The film uses both animation and talking heads to examine the well-documented murder of hundreds of liberated Jews by local Poles at the end of the Holocaust, focusing on a few particular stories.
But Poland remains under the influence of the far-right Law and Justice party and its allies. So when TVP broadcast the film and made it available for streaming last month, these politicians were quick to spring into action, with a senior official in President Karol Nawrocki’s office declaring that “a TV channel that has ‘Polish’ in its name should not have it on the air” while others vowed to strip TVP of its license.
The controversy highlights how critical even rigorous historical investigation has become in a world of right-wing populism and also gives many echoes of Donald Trump’s pursuit of non-right-wing media in the name of patriotism in the United States. The Polish equivalent of the FCC even joined the fight to take on the broadcaster.
And the incident highlights how, for all the supposed saturation of Holocaust narratives, even historically necessary accounts of this period can now become controversial events.
“It’s unfortunately predictable,” says Potash The Hollywood Reporter. “My film is part of an ongoing campaign that the Polish far right has launched over the past decade to whitewash aspects of World War II. Any narrative in which Poles are portrayed as anything other than victims or heroes is anathema, a third rail and they are losing their minds.”
While Poland’s government has been center-left for two years under Prime Minister and former European Council President Donald Tusk, the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party still enjoys significant support, winning more seats than any other party in the 2023 parliamentary elections; This summer, Nawrocki, a right-wing candidate blessed by Law and Justice and fierce opponent of Tusk, also won the majority of votes to become the country’s president and the second most powerful politician after Tusk.
Potash spent years developing and shooting his film, with a focus on the city of Gniewoszow, and two survivors in particular who have an unlikely connection, Pelagia Radecka and Yaakov Goldstein, both of whom are seen on screen in modern interviews with Potash. To put the viewer into the minds of the protagonists (and recreate scenes he didn’t have footage for), the SF-based filmmaker used a dreamlike animation technique that stands up to modern documentary classics such as Waltz with Bashir.
The film garnered public love from the start, including a word-of-mouth screening hosted a year ago by Nancy Spielberg. It will premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival several months later and will be released theatrically in New York and Los Angeles this fall with additional financial assistance from the Shoah Foundation of USC as well as the Jewish Story Council; it also qualified for the Oscars. The film will be screened in several cities on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27.
The film was also well received in the regions of the country where it was set, with a strong showing at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival last year and a subsequent revival by TVP.
However, Agnieszka Jedrzak, who is Nawrocki’s undersecretary, posted on X after the premiere that the film was “an anti-Polish historical manipulation”, also offering commentary from a channel with a Polish name. Some 4,000 people liked the post, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times.
Meanwhile, the Polish National Broadcasting Council, a group close to the FCC, is launching an investigation into TVP’s license. The agency’s president, Agnieszka Glapiak, a right-wing leader with close ties to law and justice, launched an “explanatory procedure” regarding the film and sent a letter to TVP asking it to provide documents defending this choice.
A TVP spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The channel previously told Polish site Wirtual Media that it would continue to broadcast the film. The aim of the film “is to familiarize viewers with the complexity of relations between Poland and the Jews, the positive and heroic episodes as well as the tragic episodes,” the text states.
The 73-year-old public body is Poland’s largest and oldest broadcaster, but it faced widespread criticism during the Law and Justice campaign, which restructured it, for becoming a far-right mouthpiece. It was remodeled again in a more moderate direction under the Tusk government.
While some of the response in Poland focused on and distorted minute details – Jędrzak, the right-wing president’s deputy, also posted on
“A dark side, that six months after the Holocaust so many Jews were murdered on their way back from the camps, is at the forefront because that’s the story we were telling,” says Potash, who previously directed the popular criminal justice documentary. Crime after crime. “What happened in our city was unfortunately not an isolated incident. But we are also careful not to put all Poles in the same basket; this does not mean that all Poles wanted the Jews to die. There were also heroes. There were people sympathetic to the Jews. And the film would not have been possible without the participation and cooperation of so many Poles.”
In the modern era, Poland is grappling with rising anti-Semitism, with far-right MP and notorious anti-Semite Grzegorz Braun giving a speech last month outside the gates of Auschwitz, saying that “Poland is for the Poles; other nations have their own countries, including the Jews” and comparing Jews to Hannibal Lecter. He made his comments on the anniversary of the day 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in 1941 in an event known as the Jedwabne massacre. (Braun’s remarks were condemned by more moderate politicians.) A report last month also found a 67% increase in anti-Semitism in Poland in 2024, while the country also has a law that imposes prison sentences for Poland’s involvement in the Holocaust.
TVP’s willingness to stand up and keep the film on the platform, Potash says, was a commendable act in the face of these winds.
“Poland is a very divided society,” he says. “It may seem hard to understand until you look at the United States and the way we are divided over Trump and so many different policies, and then it becomes a little easier to understand.”
The filmmaker didn’t specifically mention the media administration’s targeting of late-night personalities and the varied, often capitulative, reactions of media companies to these efforts, but it was hard to miss the parallels. Reviewing the film, San Francisco Independent critic Dennis Harvey noted that “it is a strong piece, particularly relevant at a time when our own leaders seem very interested in burying any unflattering aspect of American history.”
While grateful for the support of Jewish organizations, Potash also says he remains a little baffled by the general American public’s neglect of his film – major film festivals, he says, would not accept it, the New York Times And LA Times hasn’t reviewed it and no streamer or distributor has purchased it yet – despite the warm reception from those who have seen it and Potash’s strong position in the doc world. (THR’the examination of Crime after crime called it “a powerful and moving story of prolonged injustice, underpinned by a potentially even more compelling account of the entrenched corruption in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.” “)
Among the criticisms of his new film, however, there are some conundrums. In assessing the Holocaust picture, Film Threat, for example, wrote that “Israel as a state is not exactly viewed sympathetically, given the flattening of Gaza. Despite Potash’s sincere accomplishments, now is simply not the time.” [to examine Jewish victims].”
For some time now, Poland has had a cinematic interest in its post-war history. In 2015, Pawel Pawlikowski Ida won the Academy Award for best foreign language for its understated and powerful account of how the Holocaust was – and was not – discussed in the communist-led country in the 1960s. The country has experienced a slower process of reconciliation with the past than neighboring Germany, in part because of the way it was occupied and victimized, even as it also produced Nazi collaborators and discordant acts of violence, making binaries difficult.
And information about the country’s wartime past has been difficult to access for long periods over the past 80 years, due to heavy government control of the media, including throughout the Cold War until 1989 and again this century with the eight-year reign of law and justice that ended in 2023.
“I understand why many in the country cling to the fantasy that Poland has done nothing wrong and don’t want to accept anything that doesn’t make them patriotic,” Potash says when asked about the right-wing reaction to his film. “I’d like to think it’s the growing pain of a dying debate. We’ll see if that proves too optimistic.”
