“So We’re At War!” – in 2019, on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, the Pilecki Institute in cooperation with the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute (FINA) created a documentary in which witnesses of these events talk about their personal experiences from August and September 1939, i.e. the end of the time of peace and the outbreak of World War II in Poland. The film features archival footage which had not been presented to wider audiences before. This previously unseen film material has been juxtaposed with images recorded by German film crews in 1939, unused fragments of Fritz Hippler’s propaganda film “Feldzug in Polen” [“The Campaign in Poland”], and fragments of the Soviet film “Osvobozhdeniye” [“Liberation”] by Alexander Dovzhenko. The narrative is told by Witnesses to the Age, people who share the history remembered from their childhood nearly 80 years ago. The film includes the stories of directors Jerzy Hoffman and Janusz Majewski, composer Romuald Twardowski, screenwriter Andrzej Mularczyk, Izabella Galicka, Janusz Kent and many others.


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The Pilecki Institute commemorates, documents and researches the 20th-century Polish experiences and the fate of Polish citizens in that period.