Polish massacre
KATYN Director: Andrzej Wajda Cert. 15
This film was made in 2007 and is the work of the 81-year-old Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Its story is based on one of the murkiest episodes of World War II: the cold-blooded murder of over 20,000 Polish army officers and high-ranking civilians in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, and in various other Russian locations. The director has a deeply personal interest in this, as his own father Jakup was one of the victims.
The film’s dialogue is conducted in Polish, German and Russian, with not a word of English! It opens with a crowd of panicking Polish civilians caught on a bridge over the River Bug. It is September 1939. Hitler’s troops have invaded western Poland and Stalin’s Red Army forces are attacking the east of the country. Poland is thus caught in a giant pincer, and is quickly crushed by the two ruthless totalitarian regimes. The elite of the Polish armed forces and society are rounded up and herded into PoW camps. The film concentrates on the human drama: wives and children are forcefully separated from their menfolk and the main focus is upon them, in their agony of suspense as they wait, in vain, for the husbands’ and fathers’ return.
Nazi / Russian pact
The unspoken, unseen background to these traumatic events is the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact forged between Russia and Germany in 1939, with its secret protocols dividing up Poland between the two powers. Soviet forces were thus able to seize the Poles with impunity and carry out the Katyn massacres in spring 1940. However, Hitler turned against his erstwhile Soviet allies with Operation Barbarossa starting in summer 1941. In April 1943 his troops uncovered the mass graves at Katyn and revealed the ghastly truth, which was used by the Nazis to discredit the Soviets. The film contains actual German documentary footage of the forensic examination of the victims in situ at the time.