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Danuta Stenka as the General’s wife. |
Moving portrait of Polish pain in wartime
KATYN
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Certificate 15
THIS cleverly made and thoughtful story tells of the massacre of around 12,000 Polish army officers in the early days of the Second World War, and the effect this crime had on the country’s people and the relatives of those who were lost.
It opens in September, 1939: with the Germans advancing rapidly from the west, the USSR coming the other way, fulfilling the Stalin-Hitler carve-up of the country. The Russians quickly took 250,000 soldiers captive – they let the lower ranks go but took the officers to camps, telling them they would be needed to liberate their homes from the Nazi yolk. Instead they were taken into forests and shot through the head.
There was great controversy following the discovery of the murders. The Nazis used it for propaganda purposes, then, when the war was over, the Soviets blamed the Germans. This incident forms the basis of a personal story of grief and the search for truth.
We meet Anna, whose husband is a cavalry captain. The tension is set from the start. It is obvious we are about to witness one of those defining moments in history. Anna is frantically looking for her husband as the Nazis steam through Poland. She is told by a sympathetic padre at a makeshift church hospital that all officers are waiting for trains to take them into the protective custody of the USSR. She races to the station to find him, but he refuses to leave, telling her he has made an unbreakable oath to the Polish army and cannot desert. You sense this is the last time the pair will see each other.
Soon after, the mass graves are discovered and the Nazis inform Anna he has gone for good. They try to use her story as propaganda. She refuses, but what emerges for the viewer is a crucial element of this incredible film: the director asks us to consider the demands made on the individual by the state, and to wonder about the choice between personal loyalty to family or following a less defined concept of giving yourself to nationhood.
Katyn presents an interesting and personalised insight into what the war meant to people in Poland. Horribly sad, intensely made, director Andrzej Wadja has interspersed the drama with real footage gleaned from newsreels.
There are moral issues littering the scenes for our unfortunate characters to stumble over: at one point our heroine is asked by a friendly Red Army captain to marry him. He knows her husband is dead and fears that she will suffer the same fate as he hears the wives and families of Polish officers are being arrested. He begs her, explaining how he could not save his own family or her husband, but could do this. She refuses, and vows to wait for her husband to return. It is a fruitless wait, and because of the skilful direction and top-class performances form all concerned, Katyn brings her pain, and the utter inhumanity of war, horribly alive. |
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