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Moorhouse points in particular to Thames TV’s 1970s documentary The
World at War, which, throughout 26 hour-long episodes, did not feature
one interview with a Pole.“It’s absurd: the producers were willing to fly to Moscow to interview
[Soviet General Georgy] Zhukov or to Heidelberg to meet [Hitler’s ally
Albert] Speer, but they didn’t get the train up to Edinburgh to speak
to Polish General [Stanisław] Maczek, who settled in Britain after
liberating Belgium and the Netherlands.”
spindrift-
relcima
I know it's only in the URL, but even by the Grauniad's standards this is bad.
On a more substantive point, I haven't seen 'The World at War' and didn't realise that there was this omission. I was personally very surprised when soon after the referendum there were hate crimes committed against Poles, e.g. the murder of Arkadiusz Jóźwik in Harlow or the attack on the Polish community centre in Hammersmith. Both Poles who came to the UK during wartime and those who came in the 00s clearly made a great contribution, as immigrants will, so perhaps the sort of disregard that is manifested in the documentary is a historical debt to British Poles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Arkadiusz_J%C3%B3%C5%BAwik
Oliver Schick
I think they tried to address it but may not have had access to still living participants (edit) of the invasion of Poland after both German and Russian massacres (like Katyn).
The producer touches on that in the second episode (A distant war).
"Tells it very much from a British point of view, the title gives it away. There was nothing distant about the war in the Autumn of 1939 if you lived in Warsaw".
At 18 minutes into the program they have a Conservative MP (Lord Boothby) who states "We'd gone to war for the defense of Poland. In the event we did nothing to help Poland at all. We never lifted a finger."
Needing film stock from Russia may also have played a part.
If anybody wants a copy of the series PM me. I have kept it on the harddrive for years (20GB).
-edited.