Latter Day Goebbels

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels the Nazi propaganda guru once said, "Tell a lie often enough and people will start to believe it." German film director Volker Schloendorff must have graduated from the Goebbels school of cinema.

Heroes of the 1980 strikes which gave birth to Poland's legendary anti-communist Solidarity trade union on Monday slammed a film by the Oscar-winning German director Volker Schloendorff dramatising the rise of the Soviet bloc's only trade union.

Due to premiere Monday in Gdansk, the Baltic Sea port and cradle of the historic Solidarity union, the film - Strike - the Hero from Gdansk (Strajk -Die Heldin von Danzig), was slammed as "offensive" by several of the real-life heroes who founded the trade union. Schloendorff loosely based the script on key Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator whose firing in August 1980 sparked the famous strike at the Gdansk shipyard which gave birth to Solidarity.

"This film does not present the true facts of Anna Walentynowicz' s life," Solidarity activist Joanna Gwiazda said Monday in Gdansk, quoted by the Polish PAP news agency. Gwiazda said Schloendorff misrepresented Walentynowicz as being illiterate and skewed facts about her personal life. Joanna's husband and fellow activist Andrzej Gwiazda also accused Schloendorff of misrepresenting Poles and falling victim to national stereotypes. "The film shows poorly-educated and hard-drinking shipyard workers - it fits perfectly with the (false) vision of Poles as drunks and thieves," he said.

A spokesperson for Walentynowicz said the pensioner was threatening a lawsuit should Schloendorff refuse to cut several scenes she finds slanderous. Schloendorff was awarded a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1980 for The Tin Drum, also made in Gdansk.