Lead Children

Netflix got a Polish number 1. The families got a rewritten professor.

Lead Children landed on 11 February 2026 as a six-episode Netflix miniseries and, within a day, sat at number 1 in Poland. latestnetflix.com's read is that That would be a clean victory lap if the show had not also walked into a fight about who actually saved the children of Szopienice.

The name they changed.

Joanna Kulig plays Dr. Jolanta Wadowska-Krol, the pediatrician who, in 1974, started testing kids living next to the Szopienice zinc works and found lead poisoning at industrial scale. Kinga Preis plays nurse Wieslawa Wilczek, her ally on the ground. Agata Kulesza plays a clinic boss named Krystyna Berger. That last name is the tell. Berger is a renamed Bozena Hager-Malecka, the Zabrze professor who, local historians and Slazag report, was the one who first confirmed the diagnosis and pushed the case up the party ladder. She is the only major historical figure whose surname the series swapped.

Dziennik Zachodni walked the plot against the record. The series invents a pregnancy for Wadowska-Krol. It invents an SB officer, Hubert Niedziela, who hunts her. It times the scandal to a Brezhnev visit that, on the calendar, happened before her first tests. IMDb's trivia line is blunt. Many details have been changed, and some families of the people portrayed are unhappy.

The director's defense.

Maciej Pieprzyca, talking to Polskie Radio, did not pretend otherwise. Filmmakers use fiction so a fifty-year-old truth can be understood. Without that fiction, which we often use, this story could not be told. Netflix's own Polish press note already called the show inspired by true events and by Michal Jedryka's book, and listed Katowice, Ruda Slaska, Zabrze, Gliwice, Bytom, and Warsaw as locations.

Kulig, in that same Netflix note, talked about honesty, stubbornness, and whether she would have stood up to the system. The doctor's granddaughter, Agnieszka Cygan, told Fakt that Kulig's determination felt right, then added the line families always add after a biopic. Grandma would have had many comments, because she was precise.

What the record still holds.

The epidemic was real. Jedryka has described lab notebooks marked with crosses beside children's names, and dust falling almost straight from the chimneys onto the workers' housing. Wadowska-Krol later became "Matka Boska Szopienicka," a nickname that started as a sneer from sanitary inspectors. Orient-Film produced. Jakub Korolczuk wrote. Rotten Tomatoes listed every counted critic as positive. The English trailer still sells courage in Silesia.

The gossip is not a leaked salary. It is whether a global streamer can honor a Silesian whistleblower by sanding down the colleague who got the diagnosis on paper. Viewers in Poland binge it anyway. The families keep the footnotes.