War rape seals the status of women as passive victims and excludes them from heroic narratives. Despite women's suffering and their active resistance against the invaders, film representations reduce their subjectivity through a narrative of shame based on silence, exclusion, or the removal of women from the real course of events, all of which dominate in Polish cinema. Phenomena that are highlighted in the text-talking about rape on one's own terms, using it as self-defence, bearing resulting offspring, active resistance or creating an approving community-may become a way to the empowerment of heroines and reformulation of the traditional symbolic field.