In what might normally be thought the twilight of his celebrated career, the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, now 82, has brought forth a movie about the central horror of his youth: the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, in which thousands of Polish military officers — the cream of the country's intellectual elite — were murdered and consigned to mass graves by the executioners of the Soviet secret police. Even by the hideous standards of World War II, the Katyn atrocity retains a ghastly distinction.
"Katyn" — nominated for a foreign-language Academy Award last year, but just now being released here — begins with a scene that perfectly encapsulates the emotional chaos of the period. It is September of 1939, and two streams of Polish refugees run up against each other on a bridge. One group is fleeing the forces of Nazi Germany, which invaded the country a few weeks earlier; the other group, coming from the opposite direction, is in flight from the Soviet Red Army, which has just launched its own invasion from the east. The situation is instantly clear: There is no escape.
Making her way through the panic on the bridge is a woman named Anna (Maja Ostaszewska), who is searching for her husband, Andrzej (the charismatic Polish star Artur Zmijewski), an army captain. When she finally finds him — a prisoner amid the clamor of an improvised medical facility outside a church — he declines to slip away with her under cover of the confusion. Although the Nazis and the Soviets are in cynical league with each other at the moment, Andrzej believes (correctly) that they will soon be at war. He insists on staying with his troops, who are about to be led off ... somewhere. Anna will never see him again.
In occupying eastern Poland, the Soviets captured more than 200,000 soldiers. Among them were some 18,000 officers, most of them from the military reserves, which, in line with the Polish conscription system, consisted of university graduates — the country's intelligentsia: doctors, teachers, writers, lawyers. The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, with his eye already on postwar rule of Eastern Europe, saw the usefulness of eliminating future intellectual dissent. In March of 1940, he signed a directive ordering the execution of all Polish Army officers being held in three Soviet internment camps. Prisoners in the camp near the Russian city of Smolensk were taken to the Katyn Forest, where their hands were bound and they were forced to stand on the edge of mass graves, to be shot in the back of the head. The Soviets were anxious not to let details of this barbaric operation, which went on throughout the spring, become generally known. The Katyn graves only became international news when the Germans unearthed them in 1943 (and loudly attributed them to the Soviets, by that time their enemy). Thousands of corpses were exhumed. Among them somewhere were the remains of Captain Jakub Wajda, the director's father.
Andrzej Wajda's grief and fury appear to have been distilled over the years into an intense desire to bear witness — not just to the savage Katyn murders, which he depicts unflinchingly, but to what he calls the "inhuman uncertainty" suffered by the families who never learned for sure what had become of their husbands and fathers. After the war ended, Poland became a satellite of the Soviet Union, and for the next four decades, although the Polish people themselves knew what had happened at Katyn (and at the other slaughter sites), their oppressors continued to insist that the Germans were responsible for the massacre. Any claim to the contrary invited arrest, torture and possibly death. It wasn't until 1990, when the Soviet empire was beginning to crumble, that the truth was finally, officially acknowledged.
The movie shows us what happened as the horror of the murders fed into the horror of life under the murderers. A lieutenant named Jerzy (the complexly distressed Andrzej Chyra), who survived his own wartime internment and now finds himself entangled in his country's terrible new society, is driven mad with shame. A woman named Agnieszka (steely Magdalena Cielecka), who refuses to stop claiming that the Soviets murdered her brother at Katyn, is coldly dispatched to the torture cells. Life goes on, and there's no escape.
The movie is rich with emblematic moments: tears of despair trickling down a young girl's bleak, expressionless face; a Russian thug ripping a red-and-white Polish flag in two, hoisting the red half as a Soviet banner and then using the white half to wipe his boots. The cinematographer, Pawel Edelman (who also shot "The Pianist" and "Ray"), captures the film's autumnal tones — the oppressive gray skies, the browns and muted greens of the period interiors — with superb technical skill. And the orchestral score, by the great Krzysztof Penderecki, pours off the screen like a night tide of sorrow. Whether or not "Katyn" is one of Wajda's masterpieces is a subject for discussion; it's clearly the work of a master filmmaker, possibly at a late peak of his long career.
Check out everything we've got on "Katyn."
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