By Anna Magdalena Lubowicka
GDANSK, Poland (Reuters) -Set in the years leading up to World War Two, Disney+’s first original Polish series “The Breslau Murders” draws striking parallels with the present as fears of conflict again unsettle Central Europe, according to its director.
The series tells the story of Franz Podolsky, a police commissioner of Polish origin investigating a murder that threatens to disrupt the Nazi German propaganda campaign around the approaching 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
It is set in the German city of Breslau, now called Wroclaw and located in Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned that Central Europeans must prepare for potential conflict with Russia following its 2022 invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.
This week, Tusk said the country had come “the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two” after Poland shot down suspected Russian drones.
Director Leszek Dawid said the new series was a reminder of the past that brought present threats into sharp focus.
“Going back almost a hundred years, we’re making a full circle in history and finding ourselves at a moment where we’re once again shaken by similar historical events and similar threats, which somehow loom over us from various directions,” he told reporters.
Adolf Hitler launched an invasion on Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 17, Soviet forces moved into eastern Poland after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Germany in August 1939.
Actor Agata Kulesza, who plays Gerda Holtz, the wife of Johann Holtz, the leading SS officer in Breslau, said World War Two still haunted the Polish psyche.
“These times are still with us … it’s a kind of Polish trauma,” she said, adding that playing a woman who supports the Nazi German regime had been an uncomfortable experience.
However, she said the series remained primarily a crime story despite the significance of its historical setting.
(Reporting by Anna Lubowicka;Writing by Alan Charlish;Editing by Helen Popper)
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