After a lifetime of charting his country’s social and political upheavals, veteran Polish director Andrzej Wajda finally turns his gaze to the once taboo subject of Stalin’s massacre of 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, POWs and others in a forest at Katyn in 1940. This war crime led to the death of Wajda’s own father, making this is an especially personal project.
Under the short-lived Hitler-Stalin pact the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 two weeks after the Nazis had invaded from the west. After rounding up what they could of the Polish army, the Communists isolated the officers and transported them to camps awaiting orders.
The film’s opening, shot on a bridge where refugees fleeing from eastwards from the Nazis meet up with others from the opposite direction trying to escape the Red Army, captures with admirable visual clarity the terrible dilemma facing Poles. The focus is initially on Anna (Maja Ostaszewska), a young woman whose husband Andrzej is one of the captive officers. Travelling from their home in Krakow she even manages to find him (a little too readily to be believable, though stranger things have happened in war time) and tries hopelessly to persuade him to escape during what appears to be lax security.
A little later Andrzej and his fellow officers are transported in railway cattle wagons identical to those that would soon be used by the Nazis to transport Jews to the death camps. Anna finds that as an officer’s wife she too now faces the threat of arrest. Meanwhile Andrzej’s professor father has been arrested by the Nazis, along with his colleagues, their university closed down.
Though this Academy Award best foreign film nominee was made as a feature, watching it I wondered if had been conceived as a TV production - its narrative rhythms are much closer to those of a two-part teleseries. At the half-way point the end of WW2 is announced abruptly via newsreel footage. We haven’t seen what has happened to the officers at this point. Viewers are then ushered into post-war life under Communist rule, where a number of mainly female characters, all related to officers, are introduced or re-introduced into the narrative.
All of them are trying to deal in different ways with the disappearance of their loved ones, their lot made especially hard by the ruthlessly imposed party line that the mass graves at Katyn – now known to the nation - had been the handiwork of the Nazis.
Despite endless revelations of Stalinist crimes in both war and peace, Communist totalitarianism has rarely been given the equivalence to Nazism that it deserves, largely the result of a lingering and unexamined romanticisation of communist ideals by the western left. Poles, having experienced at first hand the terrible consequences of both Nazism and Stalinism, have less room for illusion. The great strength then of Wajda’s film is its utter political clarity, its bracketing together of these twin evils as mirror images.
Scripted by Wajda and PrzemysÅ‚aw Nowakowski based on Andrzej Mularczyk’s book, Katyn features some powerful scenes, though as storytelling it is uneven, the splintered narrative of the second half less than satisfying. It can be hard at times working out how some of the characters are related and it is not always easy to enter emotionally into their stories. Compared to Wajda’s WW2 trilogy of the 1950s – A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds – this is the lesser work, despite the power and importance of its subject matter. Its historical recreations are thoroughly convincing and its performances exemplary, but its style can’t help but appear a little old-fashioned.
Still, in leaving a depiction of the massacre until the end, the film gets its most important scene absolutely right. Yes, it’s grim, watching these terrified men line up on the side of a mass grave, or muttering the lord’s prayer or clutching rosary beads. And so it should be.
