The great Andrzej Wajda has produced definitive films about the French Revolution (Danton), the German destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto (Korczak), the Polish Resistance in WWII (Kanal), post-war anti-communist youth (Ashes and Diamonds), and the beginnings of the Solidarity Movement (Man of Iron). Now at the age of 81, he tackles one of the greatest tragedies in Polish history, the 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre, in which the Soviets killed about 25,000 Polish prisoners of war, many of them officers, on Stalin's orders. Wajda's accounting is non-linear with flashbacks and flash-forwards, and the portentous music leaves no doubt as to what will happen, but its impact is crushing and unforgettable nonetheless.
I once heard a speech by Lech Walesa in which he introduced himself as being from Poland--"a place where the Russians used to meet the Germans quite often." In this "meeting" in 1939, a week after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, the Germans and the Soviets both invaded and wreaked havoc on Poland. There is no need to recount the history of the Katyn Forest Massacre here; there is an excellent account in Wikipedia. The key point is that after the dissolution of the pact in 1941, the USSR was able to mount a disinformation campaign that for a long time managed to pin the blame for the massacre on the Germans.
Wajda deftly shows how that happened and how this cover-up persisted in Poland as the USSR took control of Poland after the war. Those who tried to tell the truth (including a young artist very similar to the young Wajda) were dealt with summarily.
What helped make the cover-up believable is that the Nazis were, of course, culpable for other horrible acts. This is depicted when Wajda first shows the Gestapo roughly rounding up and arresting an assembly of unsuspecting distinguished university professors. By comparison the Soviet Army at first seems more honorable as they detain a large group of Polish military officers, who had surrendered and were expecting the usual prisoner-of-war treatment accorded to officers. As one suspicious Polish officer worriedly notes, however, the Soviets had not ratified the Geneva Convention. Stalin and the NKVD evidently felt the need to liquidate the Polish officer corps (along with police officers, etc.) to smooth its eventual takeover of the country. Not till after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 did Moscow admit to these murders.
A few years before that, in 1986, I took an Intourist tour of the Soviet Union. One of the stops was Minsk (now Belarus). We couldn't figure out why the tour sent us there until we were taken on a short bus trip to a war memorial in a nearby village that had been wiped out by the Nazis. It was a very well-done memorial with a dramatic sculpture of a survivor and an eternal flame for the many nearby towns that had been destroyed. (This particular genocidal technique--forcing townspeople into barns and then setting the barns on fire--was revealed in the equally great 1985 Russian film "Come and See" by Elem Klimov.) It was a very moving visit. But the impact was undercut to some degree by something I read in my guidebook: that this town, named "Khatyn," might have been chosen for this memorial because it had a name similar to the Katyn Forest, 160 miles away in Russia, where the Soviets themselves had been accused of doing the same kind of thing. I had long wondered about that, and now I understand.
Other reviewers mentioned some of the many powerful images in the film, but I'll close by mentioning one that nobody has singled out--the closing scene. A young lieutenant we have gotten to know has been executed while clutching a rosary, and his body, along with many others, has been thrown into a pit while a Soviet checks to make sure they are dead. At the same time a bulldozer begins to covering them with dirt. As the dirt covers the lieutenant's, his arm with the rosary in hand makes a last fleeting movement. The symbolism is unmistakable. One cover-up is complete, and the next one has begun.
I once heard a speech by Lech Walesa in which he introduced himself as being from Poland--"a place where the Russians used to meet the Germans quite often." In this "meeting" in 1939, a week after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, the Germans and the Soviets both invaded and wreaked havoc on Poland. There is no need to recount the history of the Katyn Forest Massacre here; there is an excellent account in Wikipedia. The key point is that after the dissolution of the pact in 1941, the USSR was able to mount a disinformation campaign that for a long time managed to pin the blame for the massacre on the Germans.
Wajda deftly shows how that happened and how this cover-up persisted in Poland as the USSR took control of Poland after the war. Those who tried to tell the truth (including a young artist very similar to the young Wajda) were dealt with summarily.
What helped make the cover-up believable is that the Nazis were, of course, culpable for other horrible acts. This is depicted when Wajda first shows the Gestapo roughly rounding up and arresting an assembly of unsuspecting distinguished university professors. By comparison the Soviet Army at first seems more honorable as they detain a large group of Polish military officers, who had surrendered and were expecting the usual prisoner-of-war treatment accorded to officers. As one suspicious Polish officer worriedly notes, however, the Soviets had not ratified the Geneva Convention. Stalin and the NKVD evidently felt the need to liquidate the Polish officer corps (along with police officers, etc.) to smooth its eventual takeover of the country. Not till after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 did Moscow admit to these murders.
A few years before that, in 1986, I took an Intourist tour of the Soviet Union. One of the stops was Minsk (now Belarus). We couldn't figure out why the tour sent us there until we were taken on a short bus trip to a war memorial in a nearby village that had been wiped out by the Nazis. It was a very well-done memorial with a dramatic sculpture of a survivor and an eternal flame for the many nearby towns that had been destroyed. (This particular genocidal technique--forcing townspeople into barns and then setting the barns on fire--was revealed in the equally great 1985 Russian film "Come and See" by Elem Klimov.) It was a very moving visit. But the impact was undercut to some degree by something I read in my guidebook: that this town, named "Khatyn," might have been chosen for this memorial because it had a name similar to the Katyn Forest, 160 miles away in Russia, where the Soviets themselves had been accused of doing the same kind of thing. I had long wondered about that, and now I understand.
Other reviewers mentioned some of the many powerful images in the film, but I'll close by mentioning one that nobody has singled out--the closing scene. A young lieutenant we have gotten to know has been executed while clutching a rosary, and his body, along with many others, has been thrown into a pit while a Soviet checks to make sure they are dead. At the same time a bulldozer begins to covering them with dirt. As the dirt covers the lieutenant's, his arm with the rosary in hand makes a last fleeting movement. The symbolism is unmistakable. One cover-up is complete, and the next one has begun.