The Choice of Poland

A young music student strolls through Warsaw’s Old Town as the city’s everyday sounds—children, traffic, machinery, music, and passing jets—shift from background noise into a spontaneous outdoor concert.

About Catholics exiled to Kazakhstan from Germany, Poland, and Ukraine during Soviet times.

At the turn of 1980/81, the peasants joined the workers' movement and they voiced their demands. As a result, they’ve registered the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union of Individual Farmers ‘Solidarity’.

In the summer of 1988, a wave of strikes broke out in the mines. Miners protested against unsafe working conditions and low wages. The government threatened with reprisals.

Łęczna is a town in eastern Poland in the lubelskie voivodship. Unfortunately, it is infamous for a legend of a former settlement that collapsed and was covered by the ground. The reason for that was the fact that the place had been inhabited by quarrelsome, envious, and malicious people. The modern legend predicts another catastrophe in 2000. In the 1970s, miners came to the town and tried to adapt to it. The unpleasant division between the old and the new inhabitants, between agricultural and industrial Łęczna, was felt by the newcomers.

Jewish children who survived Auschwitz, now adults, talk about growing up under the care of Polish families.

A documentary record of memories of Poles exiled to Kazakhstan. The description of harsh living conditions, terror, hunger and overwork is illustrated with archive photographs and contemporary shots of Kazakh wilderness and towns, where traces of the past regime are still visible.

We're treated to images of bisons. Bisons in the woods, bisons in the city. A school trip comes to visit the bisons. At first, the audio consists of a song (in Polish), then, there is some narration.