Drama of the Polish Outsider

Summary

“Pretty. Shame it's not ours.” This sentence is uttered by one of the characters of Zimna wojna (Cold War) a film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. An audience unfamiliar with the intricacies of Polish culture will find it hard to recognize the drama lurking behind these seemingly innocent words. Ours, in this context, is Polish, not ours—part of the Lemko people's cultural heritage. The Lemkos are an ethnic group, the majority of whom live in Poland, some who live in Ukraine, and some in Slovakia. Some consider themselves Ukrainians who speak their own dialect, others consider themselves a separate nation. A considerable number live in the diaspora, as portrayed in the opening scene of the film The Deer Hunter, which shows a Lemko wedding that takes place somewhere in Pennsylvania. Yet, in the scene people are singing a Soviet military song, “Katyusha,” which presents a disconnect from reality and the tragic plight of Lemko people, who were in fact fiercely persecuted under the Communist regime. Still, Lemko culture is known for beautiful, polyphonic songs. It is one of those songs that is regarded as “pretty.”

Paweł Pawlikowski's film opens not long after the end of the Second World War. The audience follows Irena and Wiktor, a couple of distinguished choreographers and composers whose task is to create a song and dance folk ensemble from scratch. To build a compelling repertoire, they embark on ethnographic expeditions to various regions in Poland. They are captivated by Lemko songs recorded on tape: in one of the scenes, while driving in a military car, they play one of them and relish the polyphony of voices, virtually absent from Polish songs. “Pretty. Shame it's not ours,” interjects their driver, someone by the name of Kaczmarek.

This scene is set against the historical backdrop of fighting “Ukrainian nationalists.” Before long the Communist authorities would announce Operation Vistula, the forced resettlement of Ukrainian and Lemko populations, driven from southeastern Poland to the so-called Recovered Territories [Ziemie Odzyskane —ed.], a large swath of land in the north and west which, following the Potsdam Conference, was incorporated into Poland. The film does not depict these historical events; the story goes in a different direction.