Katyń

A couple weeks ago there was a screening of the 2007 Polish film Katyń down on campus. The room in the Humanities building filled up with a mixture of people from their late teens to octogenarians. There were students, at least one emeritus professor, and members of the community. Several of us from the Polish Heritage Club of Madison were in attendance as well. To make matters even more interesting, it was introduced by historian Milan Hauner who is a professor of modern history and an Honorary Fellow in the department of History at UW-Madison. He has researched the topic of the film, the Katyn Massacre, extensively.



I went into the screening completely ignorant of the Katyn Massacre despite having downloaded a BBC documentary on the subject a year or more ago. Hauner began his introduction by noting that in mid-April 1943 Nazi propaganda began telling stories of mass graves containing the corpses of Polish officers that were found in the Katyn Foreste. The Germans accused the Russians of the murders and even allowed the Red Cross to examine the remains. These accusations led to Soviet denials and counterstatements saying that the atrocities were carried out by the Germans in the autumn of 1941. Moscow severed relations with the Polish government which had been exiled to London, much to the delight of Joseph Goebbels as that is exactly what he'd hoped would happen.

The Soviets denied responsibility for as long as there was a Soviet Union. After its collapse, a memo dated 5 March 1940 was released which suggested the murder of Polish officers. It bore Stalin's signature.

Director Andrzej Wajda lived through World War II and even lost his father in the massacre. Unfortunately, in order to pursue a career in film in Communist Poland, he was forced to deny the truth of his father's death. He was moved to make Katyń when he discovered that many young Poles didn't know the significance of the date of 17 September 1939, the date of the Russian invasion of Poland.

The film opens with two groups of refugees who meet on a bridge. One of them is fleeing the Germans from the west and the other group the Russians from the east. We then meet Anna who, with her daughter Weronika in tow, is seeking her husband, Andrzej. They find him amongst a group of captured Polish officers. Both Anna and Weronika plead with Andrzej to flee with them but his loyalty to his fellow soldiers is too great and he refuses. Instead he ends up in an old monastery which doubles as a POW camp.

The scene shifts to Kraków where a kindly old professor and father of one of the captured Polish officers prepares to head to campus for a meeting called by the Nazi occupiers. The professors are told that they have broken the law by holding classes without permission. As they protest, German soldiers burst in and everyone is taken away never to return.

While this particular scene was not directly related to the massacre, Prof. Hauner noted that it was not simply one army killing members of another army. In addition to officers, civilians such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers were also rounded up and killed as part of the massacre itself making it an attack on the Polish intelligentsia. This was emphasized later in the film during a scene at the POW camp when a general tells his men that, without them, there will never be a free Poland.

Most of the movie takes place after the war in Communist Poland. Anna, like many Polish women at the time, never knew what had happened to her husband and clung to hope that he would return. We also witness a young student who wants to attend a college but is told that he must alter his application so that it does not say that his father was killed by the Soviets at Katyn.



Considering my ignorance, it was really nice to have Prof. Hauner on hand. Once the movie had finished, he answered questions from the audience and added some more commentary of his own. He explained references in the film that were lost to those of us not familiar with Polish culture and history such as one to anti-Communist fighters. Another tidbit he offered was that the film didn't touch on the fate of Polish Jews, whether they were civilians or soldiers. My notes on the audience commentary is pretty spotty but I do recall some lively discussion with Prof. Wacław Szybalski. If memory serves, he talked about how Churchill suppressed the truth of the Katyn Massacre in order to maintain the English alliance with the USSR. Sir Owen O'Malley, the English ambassador to Poland had written a memorandum explaining that the Soviets were responsible. Prof. Szybalski also noted that he had met a Polish general that Hauner had mentioned. I also recall a woman who was living in Poland when the film was released who mentioned that it was the must-see movie of the time. The impression I got was that the opening of Katyń was a bit like the opening of films about 9/11 here.

Katyń was a very sad film that ended with some scenes recreating the massacre. But it did have the occasional scene that defied the gloom. One such moment was when the widow of one of the officers who was killed walks up to a van which is roadshowing Soviet propaganda about the massacre and yells, "This is a lie!" Had Prof. Hauner and some of the audience members not been there, I think I would have just seen the tragedy in the film. However, the commentary and reflection leads me to believe that many Poles view the fact that the film was made as cathartic. That is, they had to live under the Soviets which meant denying the truth of the massacre and Katyń is a very large and very public vindication.