Agnieszka Holland is a renowned Polish filmmaker and director known for her work in both film and television.
She is the daughter of Irena and Henryk Holland. Her mother Irena was a journalist and her father Henryk Holland was a sociologist, journalist, writer, captain in the Polish People’s Army.
Henryk Holland, her father, lost his parents in a ghetto during the Holocaust and spent the majority of his adult life hiding his Jewishness.
Her father was an avid Communist writer whose publications led to the firing of several notable professors by the Communist state.
Holland’s mother was a member of the Polish resistance movement during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Her mother aided several Jews during the Holocaust and was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations medal by Israel’s Yad Vashem Institute.
She describes her father’s influence on her as strong but distant. She recounts being showed off to her father’s friends late at night, only to be ignored the next morning when he was no longer amusing. Holland’s father died by suicide while under house arrest in Warsaw when she was thirteen.
