Premiere of the documentary film “W jednej chwili…”
On 10 April 2025 at 6.00 p.m., IPNtv premiered the documentary film „W jednej chwili…” (in English: In an Instant…), featuring recorded recollections of Maria Czernek, the last surviving widow of a Polish police officer murdered by the NKVD in Tver in 1940. The interview was recorded in the form of an oral history testimony at the Katyn Museum on 10 February 2017.
During her visit to the Katyn Museum, Maria Czernek toured the exhibition accompanied by Sebastian Karwat, the Museum’s current Director.
In the documentary, Maria Czernek recounts her youth in pre-war Łódź, the outbreak of the war and her life under German occupation. She also recalls her husband, Jan Borkowski, a police officer and telegraph operator, whom she married in May 1939. In September of the same year, he was evacuated eastwards together with other police officers and taken to the camp at Ostashkov. For many years, she had no reliable information about his fate. One of the last messages she received came from a young man who had been released from Ostashkov and told her that he had shared a room there with Jan Borkowski. “My husband asked where I lived (…) and said: ‘Oh, that’s close to my wife’s place, so go there and tell her that I’m alive, that everything is fine, that we’re all right for now,’” Maria Czernek recalled. She spoke particularly movingly about how the war shattered her youthful plans and the dreams she and her husband had shared: “Everything was in my dreams. University was in my dreams, everything was (…). And then everything vanished. In an instant.”
She also spoke about her many years of searching for her husband and the longing she experienced: “The flat was darkened and I would stand at the window night after night – so many nights, because it seemed that someone had come, so perhaps he would come to me too?” She also recalled the activities of the Katyn Families Association and visits to Katyn and Mednoye, including the moment when, during the exhumations in 1991, she saw the site of the crime and the exhumed remains of the victims for the first time. “When we entered that forest, we all cried, because the forest was so strange, and the trees – so small, so thin, and they were all trembling like that. Those little leaves, God, it was as if they had grown on that blood, on those bodies, and they were crying,” she recalled.
