A film about the romantic and tragic history of the country whose invasion thirty years ago this week marked the beginning of the Second World War.
Think, think of us, O Poland of mine, when we shall be already gone! Have we not made of your name a prayer that weeps and a thunder that lightens?
Commentary by Patrick O'Donovan
Spoken by John Westbrook

The programme's title is taken from the motto traditionally displayed on the banners of the Polish Legion; but the national tragedy of the Poles as a people is that they seldom in their history have been free. And whenever they have wrested liberty from one or other of their overlords they've been unable to keep it for long.
Tonight's documentary deals with the worst tragedy in the nation's history; the Poles call it 'the September catastrophe,' and the world knows it as the first act in the Second World War. Courage and cavalry met tanks; the tanks won.

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