Having left by force, choice, or because of the redrawing of borders, Poland’s history of violence and upheaval has led to the scattering of the Polish diaspora across the world. Some of the stories of Polish migration are well-documented. They are taught in schools, or they’re the subjects of major motion-picture films, such as Agnieszka Holland’s depictions of the Holocaust in Europa, Europa and In Darkness, or Pawel Pawlikowski’s recent film Cold War, where the titular event drags its main characters all over Europe. Other diasporas are far more obscure, unrecorded by mainstream culture, and are remembered only by the distinctly Polish names that appear on graves in various foreign lands. The story of the Polish refugees who arrived in Iran in the early 1940s is one such obscure history, and the documentary filmmaker Khosrow Sinai (1941-2020) did a phenomenal job uncovering it in his documentary The Lost Requiem (1983).
