Ghost Town

In the last decade over 400,000 people moved out of cities, such as Lodz, Poznan or Katowice. It is estimated that in 25 years the urban population in Poland will have shrunk by two million.

Young and ambitious Poles prefer to live in metropolises, mainly Warsaw and Krakow, or abroad. According to the Central Statistical Office, in the last decade the population of the capital of Poland increased by over 40,000. The main reason why cities get depopulated is the lack of job perspectives. “It is also a global trend in developing countries to move out of city centre to the suburbs, where properties are cheaper,” Professor Zygmunt Ziobrowski from the Urban Development Institute told the daily. The drop in the number of city residents is also related to the decrease of the country’s population, writes DZIENNIK GAZETA PRAWNA.

“Russians to make anti-Polish film,” headlines the RZECZPOSPOLITA daily.

The Russian State Film Fund has organized a contest for the best script for a documentary titled “The death of Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity.” The winner will receive 2,500 euro and will be able to make the doc. The daily, however, is concerned about its historical value because the Russian historian who is going to check whether the scripts are true to life is not an expert on Russian captives. About 85,000 Red Army soldiers were held captive in the Polish POW camps between 1919 and 1922. As many as 17,000 of them died, mainly of typhoid. Recently the Russian television broadcast a short documentary which presented a one-sided view on the matter. “The question of Russian soldiers in Polish captivity is raised every now and then so it is high time to make a decent film on it. I’m afraid, however, that a script written for the contest will just be a response to the Polish film about the Katyn massacre,” Aleksander Gurianow, member of Memorial, organization which investigates the crimes of the Stalin times, told RZECZPOSPOLITA.

The GAZETA WYBORCZA daily writes about a row over a monument commemorating American soldiers which is to be erected in the southern town of Kedzierzyn-Kozle. The 5-metre monument will resemble a wing of a plane and have 135 names of the US pilots who bombed German factories in town in 1944 engraved on it. “By bombing factories which produced fuel for the Third Reich the pilots contributed to our freedom,” say supporters of the monument. The opponents argue that American bombs killed also civilians as 70 percent of them missed the target, writes GAZETA WYBORCZA.

As many as ten Polish items have been included in the UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme, which aims at preserving highly valuable documents and archives which belong to the world heritage, writes DZIENNIK POLSKI. The programme started in 1992 after the National Library in Sarajevo was burnt. The UNESCO’s list contains Frederic Chopin’s manuscripts, 21 demands issued in 1980 by the Solidarity strike committee, as well as the Gutenberg Bible, the Declaration of Human Rights and the films by the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. (mg)