Movie about Polish wartime hero premiered in Warsaw
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
10.10.2017 13:37
Two Crowns, a film about the life of Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Polish Catholic martyr who died at Auschwitz concentration camp, had its Polish premiere in Warsaw on Monday night.
Maximilian Kolbe. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The director of the feature-length docudrama, Michał Kondrat, has said he was happy to be able to present a film about the Polish missionary who volunteered to give his life for a fellow prisoner at the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp.
Two Crowns was shot in Poland, Italy and Japan.
The cast includes prominent Polish actors Adam Woronowicz, Cezary Pazura, Artur Barciś and Dominika Figurska.
The film has already been screened in France and the US.
Kolbe became an Auschwitz prisoner on 28 May, 1941.
The priest, who had German roots but refused an offer to be added to a list of "ethnic-Germans", helped shelter some 2,000 Jews in a Polish monastery which German occupiers eventually shut down.
At Auschwitz, Kolbe offered to take the place of a man randomly selected to receive the death penalty with nine others in retribution for the escape of three prisoners.
He spent two weeks without bread and water in the camp’s starvation bunker, before being given a lethal injection.
He was canonised in 1982 by Pope John Paul II.
The man he saved survived the war and died in Poland in 1995. (vb)