Generally, both war and post-war period were rarely mentioned on either side of my family. They went through so much pain and loss that they wanted to forget.
When I found out about my uncle, I wanted to know more but wouldn't dare to disturb his peace of mind. When the post-stalinist government was rehabilitating AK fighters and some officials showed up with a medal for bravery at my uncle's door, he threw them out and told them that he didn't want their medals; he just wanted to be left alone.
I only heard my uncle tell one story from his war times. For me, it was traumatic enough to hear that my beloved, teddy-bear like uncle, who spent most of his time gardening, killed other human beings. With a disbelief and naivete of a 8 year old, I asked him: "Uncle, you killed people??!!". He looked at me and said: "There was war, a horrible time when people had to do horrible things. Come to my garden to help me pick up strawberries and collect snails."
I found out the rest from my mom: his life in hiding and capture, one year in a cell filled with water and torture in Wronki- the most cruel stalinist investigative prison, death sentence at 23, another trial where his sentence was changed into life in prison, hard labor in a quarry, moving to yet another prison, telling the love of his life(a comrade in-arms) to forget him and settle her life to stay safe, her arrest(she refused to accept his wish relayed to her by my grandma and came to visit him in the prison with my little mom as a prop who was abandoned in front of the prison when they took the woman in), 7 years later another sentence change - 25 years in prison, release in 1956 at 33 - 15 years of his youth erased by the war and prison. After this I couldn't bring myself to open his wounds out of selfish curiosity. And then he suddenly died at 66. I was waiting for the right moment that never came.
Oddly, last year, the old Gestapo/stalinist prison in my city where my uncle was kept all those years was demolished and replaced with a shopping mall. I was upset but my mom was relieved and so was her best friend's husband who as a child stood in front of that prison calling his dad, hoping to see his face in the window for the last time. His young father was picked up in a roundup and was waiting to be publicly executed by the Germans together with dozens of other completely innocent unfortunates.
So, when I watched "Interrogation" for the first time, to me it was the most important film about that era that indirectly also spoke about people like my uncle who were willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the enemy but found themselves on the wrong side of history.
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