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M. B. B. Biskupski. Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945. University Press of Kentucky, 2010. 362 pages; $60.00.
Ever wonder why Victor László is not a Pole? The underground leader who cannot get out of Casablanca is identified in the film as Czechoslovakian, even though his name is thoroughly Hungarian and the Czech resistance to Hitler was but a shadow of its Polish counterpart. Indeed, while Rick's Café is a veritable watering hole of Norwegians, French, and other Allied conspirators no Pole - amazingly, given the country's underground and its people's immigration proclivities - ever managed to make his way to Casablanca!
The Polish absence from one of Hollywood's most known World War II movies about the underground is symptomatic of the issues Professor Biskupski addresses in this book. Poland was the first victim of Nazi aggression to stand up to Hitler: the September 1939 invasion was the casus belli of World War II. Poles fought in East and West and ran the largest underground resistance. Poland lost 20% of its population and was the scene of the most brutal Nazi repression, including the Holocaust. Yet Poland is curiously invisible from almost all the war films made in Hollywood in the period 1939-45 and, when Poles appeared,...