“KATYN”, the new film by Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s best-known director

“KATYN”, the new film by Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s best-known director, should leave you shaken and sleepless. It is worth seeing just for the scene in which the senate of Cracow University is arrested en masse by the Nazi occupiers, as well as for as the almost unbearably realistic execution scenes in which Soviet murder squads kill 22,000 captured officers, and also for the way it portrays the attempts by the communist lie machine in post-war Poland to cover up the truth.



Andrzej Wajda, director of “Katyn”Second should be the deportations to Siberia from the Baltic states and elsewhere in eastern Europe. “Collect your things!” barks the arresting NKVD officer in the Wajda film to a woman and child whose only “crime” is to be the family of a Polish officer—who by then is already dead in a ditch in a forest near Smolensk. Such hurried packing in the middle of the night, followed by a cattle-truck to Siberia, was the fate of tens of thousands of people across the Soviet-occupied territories of eastern Europe in a few June days in 1941. Those few that returned came home not as heroes but as released criminals, living on the fringes of Soviet society.


Perhaps most gripping of all is the story of Witold Pilecki, a Polish intelligence officer who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to find out what was happening there. When he escaped and reported to the Allies what he had discovered, they said he was exaggerating. After the war, he was captured by the communist authorities and executed in 1948.

If the screenwriters get going, the West’s historical understanding will belatedly gain some balance. But do bring plenty of handkerchiefs.