In 1940 the Soviet occupiers of eastern Poland methodically massacred over 20,000 Polish officers and buried them in a mass grave at Katyn Forest. After the Nazi Germans turned on their Soviet allies and seized eastern Poland at the start of their invasion of Russia, they discovered the bodies. Even as the Nazis set the machinery of the Holocaust in motion, they saw the Katyn massacre as a propaganda coup against the Communists and launched a hypocritical campaign against the Bolshevik murderers. When the Soviets finally defeated the Nazis in 1945 and installed a puppet regime in Poland, the party line became the lie that the Germans did it.
Only in 1990, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev admitted his nation’s guilt, was the historical record of the Katyn killings made clear.
The Oscar-nominated Katyn (out now on DVD) dramatizes the Polish predicament in its opening scene. A ragged column of refugees fleeing the advancing Germans collides with refugees streaming from the opposite direction ahead of the Soviet advance. Wedged between brutal armies at the onset of World War II, Poland was crushed from both sides.
Directed by the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (Man of Iron), Katyn is somber-hued appraisal of war’s calamity, not only for the living and the dead but on the principle of truth. The characters, mostly family of the officers who disappeared into the forest, are left to negotiate with the consequences of the massacre. Although Katyn doesn’t investigate the motives for the mass murder, it seems as if Stalin hoped to slaughter Poland’s best and brightest. Along with military professionals, the victims included engineers, pilots, physicians and artists called up from the reserves to defend their nation. Perhaps the moral of Wajda’s story is that Poland—or any nation—can survive despite the worst efforts of its enemies.
