Wanda Wasilewska

In the middle of the 17th century, Ukrainian peasants and Cossacks rose up to fight against the Polish gentry rule. About the events of the National Liberation War in Ukraine under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, who with a firm hand led the insurgent masses to an alliance with Russia.

A story about a life of a small village in Western Ukraine during 30-ies.

The hero saw among his colleagues a man whom he had met during the war in the dungeons of the Gestapo. This man reported that a thief from the same cell was trying to escape. The “thief” was shot, and later it turned out that he was the leader of the underground...

The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olena, a Soviet partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruelest of arbitrary tortures at the hands of the Nazis.

This is a two-in-one flashback film in which the flashback ends up teaching a group of kids a heroic lesson that they take to heart when war comes to their doorstep.

One of the few surviving documentaries about Jewish life in Poland before World War II, this film was produced to raise funds for the Vladimir Medem Sanitarium, an institution that stood as the embodiment of health and enlightenment, in striking contrast to the grim images of urban Polish-Jewish poverty.