Tonight's film was "Katyn" (2007) by famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda. I had previously seen three excellent films he made in the 1950s : "A Generation", "Kanal" and "Ashes and Diamonds", all highly recommended, and I was moved to search the library system for more of his films when Professor Tim, of the CSUN Cinematheque, announced last week that our next retrospective in Spring 2018 will be of Andrzej Wajda's movies. In the city library system, besides the three I had already seen, I found "Katyn", which had a high rating on IMDB. The notes revealed that it had been nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar after it's release. Watching it, it is easy to see why. "Katyn" is a tremendous film.
If you are a WW2 history buff like me, you already know the name "Katyn", and that's what stood out to me before I even put the dvd on hold. I knew just by seeing the title that it was about the Katyn Forest Massacre that took place in Poland in 1940 during the early stages of the war. That horrible event was in the news quite a bit in the late 80s or perhaps early 90s if I recall correctly.
What had happened was that in September 1939, right after the war began, Polish citizens near Warsaw who were trying to leave in order to escape the invading Nazis, found themselves trapped - sandwiched in by the invading Soviet army who were coming in the opposite direction. Of course, the Soviets and the Nazis became mortal enemies, but at the start of the war they were unlikely (and short-lived) allies and each country wanted to annex part of Poland. So the poor Poles were caught in the middle of two of the most brutal and merciless police state armies that have ever walked the Earth. The Germans and Russians decided to arrest all Polish Army members, and they were thus divided up accordingly and taken away on trains to different camps.
The movie focuses on four Polish officers who were taken away by Soviet captors. Their wives, children and relatives feature in the story as well. As the war concludes and the Nazis are driven out, the surviving relatives are trying to find out what happened to their husbands, sons and brothers in the army who were taken away. One former Polish soldier has returned from the concentration camps and is now working for the Soviet secret police, the dreaded NKVD. Poland, of course, became a Communist satellite of the USSR after the war. Anyway, this man has a story to tell.
The Katyn Massacre was reported during the war, as most of the detained Polish soldiers failed to return home, stopped writing letters, etc. The news got out of a mass execution in the Katyn Forest. By now, the Soviets and the Germans were no longer allies, the Soviets having teamed up with the United States and Great Britain after Malta. Thus, when the Katyn Massacre was uncovered, both the Germans and the Soviets were quick to blame it on each other. And when the war ended, and the overwhelming horror of the Nazi atrocities were unveiled to the world, it was easy to believe the Soviet version of the Katyn Massacre : that it was perpetrated by the Evil Nazis.
12,000 Polish soldiers and officers, found in mass graves in the forest, shot execution-style in the back of the head and then buried in piles of bodies. Sorry to be gross, but the graves were dug up - by the post-war occupying Soviets - in order to identify the deceased soldiers. This is shown in the movie with actual documentary footage, which is decidedly not for the squeamish.
So to recap, what we have is that the Allies won the war. The Soviets were on the side of the Allies, having broken their early ties to Germany, and when the war ended, they were awarded Poland to annex, the Germans having been completely driven out and defeated. So the Soviet Union was in complete control of Poland after the war, and they had a secret police force (the NKVD) that was nearly the equal of the German SS in it's ability to terrify and intimidate the citizenry.
They had, then, a lockdown on "the truth" of the Katyn Massacre. "The Nazis did it". This "truth" was enforced after the war, even though the Polish soldiers who did make it back knew differently. But to tell the truth was to risk being jailed, or worse.
But finally, the truth could no longer be contained. The Soviets were the ones who did it.
They committed the massacre, and covered it up (literally, in mass graves), and then they blamed it on the easy-to-blame Nazis, who were The Devil Himself. Only, in this case, this was one horror that they did not commit. The Other Monster did, that Monster being Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.
I mentioned Katyn being in the news in the 80s or 90s, and I think it was because either Poland or international authorities were trying to determine, by forensic proof, once and for all, who the culprit was. The movie ends in the late 40s, and doesn't get into concrete proof, perhaps because filmmaker Wajda, by 2007, had commonly known proof on his side by that time.
"Katyn" is a horror story to be put up against "Come And See" or any of the great films about the terrible events of World War Two. In older films about the war, mostly from Hollywood, the story was always watered down. Though the tragedy and loss was made clear, the outright horror was absent in those earlier WW2 films. They didn't show you exactly what happened, nor exactly what it looked like.
But in the modern films, they do show you these things, especially in the WW2 films that are still, almost 80 years after the fact, still coming out of Europe.
Europe has a lot to answer for. We do too, here in the U.S., but Europe, and especially Germany and Russia in the recent era, have the most to answer for.
Because World War Two was not just a war. These days, in these movies we are now being shown, we are seeing it for exactly what it was : wholesale murder, as if the Devil himself had come up from Hell to supervise it. Murder of thousands and thousands. Of millions.
Sorry to be so graphic.
It sometimes blows my mind when I consider that I was born a mere 20 years after this Great Horror took place, the greatest loss of life in the shortest span in modern world history. And it ended with two atomic bombs on Japan.
And then, what happened was kind of weird, in a way.
The whole thing became History, very very quickly. WW2 was not "fresh in the minds" of my young generation, even though we came along just 15 years after it ended.
It was presented to us in school as something from The Past, "ancient history", almost.
And when I was in Junior High, it was less than 30 years prior, the greatest horror in modern history.
Elvis Presley and then The Beatles came along and swept it all away, and the TV Set in the early '50s, and transistor radios, and freeways and cars for everyone. The modern world swept away what had only recently happened.......and so it was presented to us kids as something from Far Away.
Well, I will leave it at that for tonight. Sorry about the Serious Subject, but it was a Serious Movie, and I have to write what I feel, as they say.
Tomorrow morn, a fairly easy song, and an extra hour to sleep in.
See you in church. :):)
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