Certainly its Polish viewers know how it will end, long before they enter the cinema. Katyn, as its title suggests, tells the story of the near-simultaneous Soviet and German invasions of Poland in September 1939, and the Red Army’s subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the forests near the Russian village of Katyn and elsewhere, among them Andrzej Wajda’s father.
The justification for the murder was straightforward. These were Poland’s best-educated and most patriotic soldiers. Many were reservists who as civilians worked as doctors, lawyers, university lecturers, and merchants. They were the intellectual elite who could obstruct the Soviet Union’s plans to absorb and “Sovietize” Poland’s eastern territories. On the advice of his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, Stalin ordered them executed.
But the film is about more than the mass murder itself. For decades after it took place, the Katyn massacre was an absolutely forbidden topic in Poland, and therefore the source of a profound, enduring mistrust between the Poles and their Soviet conquerors. Officially, the Soviet Union blamed the murder on the Germans, who discovered one of the mass graves (there were at least three) following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Soviet prosecutors even repeated this blatant falsehood during the Nuremberg trials and it was echoed by, among others, the British government.
Unofficially, the mass execution was widely assumed to have been committed by the Soviet Union. In Poland, the very word “Katyn” thus evokes not just the murder but the many Soviet falsehoods surrounding the history of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Katyn wasn’t a single wartime event, but a series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland’s loss of sovereignty.
Wajda’s movie, as his Polish audiences will immediately understand, is very much the story of “Katyn” in this broader sense. Its opening scene, which Wajda has said he has had in his head for many years, shows a group of refugees heading east, crossing a bridge, fleeing the Wehrmacht. On the bridge, they encounter another group of refugees heading west, fleeing the Red Army. “People, where are you going, turn back!” the two groups shout at one another. Soon afterward, Wajda shows Nazi and Soviet officers conversing in a comradely manner along the new German/Soviet borders as surely they did between 1939, the year they agreed to divide Central Europe between them, and 1941, when Hitler changed his mind about his alliance with Stalin and invaded the USSR. On the bridge, Poland’s existential dilemma – trapped between two totalitarian states – is thus given dramatic form.
Within the notion of “Katyn,” Wajda also includes the story of the father of one of the officers, a professor at the Jagellonian University in Kraków. Asked to attend a meeting by the city’s Nazi leadership, he joins other senior faculty in one of the university’s medieval lecture halls. Instead of holding a discussion, Nazi troops enter, slam the doors, and arrest everyone in the room. The men, many elderly, are forced onto trucks, the officer’s father among them. Later, his widow will learn that he died, along with many of his colleagues, in Sachsenhausen. Some have cited this scene, which is not directly related to the Katyn massacre, as an example of how Wajda tried to put too many themes into a single film. Wajda himself explains elsewhere that he sees it as part of the same story, since this Sonderaktion in Kraków was the German equivalent of the Katyn massacre: an open attack on the Polish intelligentsia, an attempt to destroy the nation’s present and future leadership.
Other stories follow, at a rapid clip. Stories of the wives left behind, many of whom, like Wajda’s mother, didn’t know the fate of their husbands for decades; stories of the men who survived Soviet deportation, and were consumed by guilt; stories of those who tried to accept and adjust to the lie and move on. The film ends with a stunningly brutal, almost unwatchable depiction of the massacre itself. Wajda increases the horror by focusing on the terrible logistics of the murder, which took several weeks and required dozens of people to carry out: the black trucks carrying men from the prison camps to the forest, the enormous ditches, the rounds of ammunition, the bulldozers that pushed dirt onto the mass graves.
Along the way, Wajda also tells stories that echo episodes in his earlier films and in his own life as, once again, he knows, his Polish audience will understand. At one point, one of his characters, Tadeusz, the son of a Katyn victim and a former partisan who has spent the war in the forests files an application to return to his studies. Like Wajda himself at that age, he wants to attend the School of Fine Arts. Told he will have to erase the phrase “father murdered by the Soviets in Katyn” from his biography, Tadeusz refuses, runs out, and tears a pro-Soviet poster down in the street outside. Minutes later, he is discovered and shot in the street by Communist soldiers. Like the hero of Wajda’s 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds, he dies a pointless, postwar death, fighting for a failed cause. But unlike that earlier hero – created for a more cautious and more heavily censored time – he feels no ambivalence about that cause. Unlike Wajda himself, Tadeusz prefers death and truth to a life lived in the shadow of historical falsehood.
To anyone unacquainted with Polish history, some of these stories will seem incomplete, even confusing. Characters appear, disappear, and then appear again, sometimes so briefly that they are hardly more than caricatures. Some of them, most notably the sister who plays the part of a modern Antigone, determined to erect a gravestone to her lost brother, are so laden with symbolism that they don’t feel very realistic. Dialogues are brief, uninformative. Scenes shift from Kraków to Katyn, from the Russian- to the German-occupied zone of Poland. References are made to people and places that are significant to Poles but that will be obscure to everybody else, a phenomenon that helps explain why the film has not, to date, found an English-language distributor. But then, English-language distribution wasn’t one of Wajda’s concerns. This film wasn’t made for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with Polish history.
Since the late 1980s, it has been possible to talk openly about the Katyn massacres in Poland and Russia. Since 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev first acknowledged Soviet responsibility for Katyn, and 1991, when Boris Yeltsin made public the documents ordering the massacre, it has even been possible to research them in Russian archives. Academic and popular history books on the massacre have now been published in several languages, including Russian. Yale University Press has now translated the most important documents into English, and published them with extensive annotation, background information, and rare photographs, including one taken from a German airplane in 1943. The Polish government has constructed multiple memorial sites, in Warsaw as well as in the Katyn forest itself. When his film came out last fall – on September 17, the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland – Wajda was asked several times to explain himself. Why Katyn? Why now? One interviewer put it rather brutally: “I didn’t feel a deep need to watch a film about Katyn – why would I? It seems that everything on that subject has already been said.”
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