One Day in People’s Poland, on OVID.tv

September 27, 1962 was a day like any other in Communist Poland. It was typically oppressive and typically well documented. Listening to excerpts of secret police reports selected by Polish documentarian Maciej Drygas might make viewers wonder if everyone in Poland was under constant surveillance during the Communist era. For all practical purposes, everyone had to assume they were. While it does not seem like a hugely significant day from our historical vantage point, it was pretty awful for many average Polish citizens, as primary sources attest in Drygas’s short documentary, One Day in People’s Poland, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

Every word in this film was in some way recorded in 1962. It starts with an early morning police report regarding anti-Communist graffiti defacing the wall of the Chinese embassy. It was a rather punky but amusing act of defiance. The mystery offenders also did a thorough job of it, because the authorities literally had to chisel sections out of the stone wall.

More ominously, there are multiple reports from the Security Service, regarding their surveillance targets. One poor woman went to three different stores in hopes of finding salt for sale. She never got her salt before the Party arrested her.

Considering this day was chosen for its averageness, Drygas’s film should dispel several misconceptions. First, it demonstrates widespread discontent with Communism, well before the Solidarity movement rose to prominence. There are several cases of anti-Communist graffiti, also including a few choice words left on the wall of a train station bathroom.

It also proves just how desperately poor the country was under Marxist economics. The lack of basic necessities was even a national security concern for one military inspector, who reported “25% of soldiers have no shoes whatsoever.” We can only imagine what happened to a truth-teller like him.

Violated Letters, on OVID.tv

Handwritten letters still feel like a much more personal statement than e-mails or texts. Therefore, the interception and censorship of a private letter feels like a much more personal intrusion than snooping on e-mails. The Polish Communist regime did so, by the tens of millions. In fact, internal Communist Party reports boasted of the volume of their internal surveillance and argued for increasingly draconian punitive applications. Viewers can hear (and read subtitles of) those reports along with dramatic examples of the censored correspondence in Marciej Drygas’s short-ish documentary, Violated Letters, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

Every word in Violated Letters could be considered a historical document. Essentially, it shares stylistic and compositional similarities with Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, The Ordinary Thing, and other previous documentaries, in which off-screen voices read letters accompanied by archival video from the period under consideration. There is not a strict narrative as such, but the selected texts illustrate the sweep of Twentieth Century Polish history.

Drygas starts with poor Polish peasants complaining about the brutality of the occupying Soviet Red Army, and ends with the censorship office’s 1989 instructions regarding how to hide or dispose of evidence of their crimes. Sometimes, Drygas incorporates eye-witness accounts of traumatic historical events, like a Polish soldier mobilized for the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet, there are small-scale disasters, like the woman unable to obtain a passport to visit her sick mother abroad, who asks a friend to send her a bereavement notice as a ruse.

By far, the most heartbreaking correspondence must be the letter sent by a young boy to the figurehead president, begging for clemency for his father, Karol Chmielowski, who had been sentenced to death. More than any other letter, young Chmilowski’s illuminates the regime’s petty cruelty.