While red-blooded students of history may be fascinated by the story of Bletchley Park and the Enigma code-breaking machine in world war two, it is important to remember that Enigma the film is fiction (Beauty and the boffin, Review, September 28).

There is little credit given to the Polish mathematicians who worked to crack the code from 1932 until 1939 when they were the first to hand over a copy of the Enigma machine to British intelligence. Nor is there any mention of the substantial contribution made by Polish intelligence to the work of Bletchley, without which it would have been far less successful. But no Pole ever worked at Bletchley.

This film has greatly upset many in the Polish community, whose efforts in resisting the Nazi onslaught were second to none - for example at Monte Cassino, in the Battle of Britain and in the Warsaw uprising, in which 250,000 were slaughtered while the Soviet army looked on. As it rightly pointed out, Enigma is indeed a simplistic film.

Nicola Pazdzierska

London

nvpaz1@yahoo.com

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