"Katyn" May Be Veteran Director's Last Production

By Robert Strybel

WARSAW–“Katyn” is the title of the latest movie directed by Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s veteran film-maker. Some are saying this is Wajda’s greatest film or last major production. The 81-year-old film director himself has said that for him this was the last moment to undertake a project of this magnitude, requiring immense effort and energy. He had mulled over the venture for years. Until Poland dumped communism in 1989, any public mention of the Soviet atrocity had been out of the question. In the years that followed, he felt it would not be easy to do justice to such a national tragedy and agonized over different approaches. He rejected one screenplay after another before settling on “Post Mortem – The Katyn Story” by Andrzej Mularczyk.

To understand the implications of this challenge, we must travel 68 years into the past to September 1939 when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia split Poland down the middle between them. The 22,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the Russian were viewed by the Kremlin as a potential threat. Stalin’s right-hand-man Lavrentiy Beria described them as incorrigibly anti-Soviet and drafted their death warrant which, in March 1940, was signed by Stalin and his closest associates. This act of genocide, meant to deprive the Polish nation of its strategic future leadership, claimed the lives of army officers, policemen, judges and other officials, intellectuals and clergy others.

The Germans discovered the mass graves during their march on Moscow in the fall of 1943, but Soviet propaganda blamed the deaths on the Nazis. Stalin broke off relations with the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile after it demanded a Red Cross investigation of the massacre. For half a century, the “Katyn lie" blaming the Germans for the crime, was the only version officially promoted by the Kremlin and its East European puppet regimes. captive nations. It was not until 1990, that Moscow under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that Stalin’s NKVD (secret police) had been responsible.

Wajda had a highly personal reason for creating this film, for he was among the young Poles who grew up in the shadow of Katyn. His own father, Lieutenant Jakub Wajda, was 43, when he disappeared in Stalin’s killing machine, never to be heard from or accounted for again. The latest Wajda production therefore is more than a film about a historical event involving victims and victimizers. It goes beyond the Polish officers and other leaders who were dispatched with a shot to the back of the head and buried in mass graves as well as beyond those who ordered and carried out the massacre.

The film largely focuses on the Polish families nurturing the hope their missing fathers, husbands, sweethearts and brothers would eventually come home or at least be conclusively listed as killed or missing. “Till her dying day, my mother never gave up hope,” Wajda told reporters. The approach of the postman, a knock on the door or the ring of the telephone all inspired a tinge of expectation. In their mind’s eye, all those families could envisage their loved one suddenly appearing in the doorway at any time. But that never really happened.

To Poles, Katyn has become a code-word symbolizing Stalin’s anti-Polish atrocities carried out in Katyn Forest at several other sites. Of the 22,000 victims some 7,200 remain unaccounted for. Some of them are believed to be among the estimated 120,000 victims of Stalinism buried at Bykovnia outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Researchers have uncovered 43 graves containing the remains of some of them. A Polish World War II army dog-tag found of a Sergeant Jozef Naglin unearthed at Bykovnia recently was the latest piece of evidence linking the site to the Katyn atrocity. Other victims are believed to have been buried at Kuropaty, the largest mass grave of Stalin victims in neighboring Belarus.

The “Katyn” movie and accompanying printed materials are now part of a study program to be used in Poland’s educational system in much the way Holocaust Studies are pursued in many American school districts. Whether the film receives the acclaim it richly deserves on the international fill-festival circuit (Hollywood, Cannes, Venice, Berlin, etc.) remains to be seen.

Much of the world’s Western elites still seem to be under the influence of “good old Uncle Joe” (Stalin) legend. They eagerly demonize only Hitler’s Nazis but are strangely soft on communism and things Soviet. Will the latest Wajda creation help open their eyes to why Poles have long espoused the “theory of two enemies?” Or, since their countries never experienced the “benevolence” of the NKVD, will it merely entrench their belief that Poles are obsessively anti-Russian?