The film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda was a bit of a plod. It sounds awful to say that, since the material it deals with, the murder of 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviets in 1941, is serious and horrific and Wajda’s own father was one of the victims. Europe last century was an abattoir and Poland one of the bloodiest rooms:-
The Germans killed more than a hundred thousand Poles when suppressing the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Had the Holocaust not happened, these "reprisals" too would be regarded as some of the greatest war crimes in history. In fact they, like the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, are scarcely recalled at all beyond the countries directly concerned. German occupation policies killed non-Jewish civilians in other ways as well, for example by hard labor in prison camps. Again: these were chiefly people from Poland or the Soviet Union.
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The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both [Soviet and Nazi] regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.
What kind of fictionalisation can do justice to facts like these? The film Katyn is constructed so that the mass murder is in the last scenes, when the officers as if in an efficient assembly line are taken out one by one from their prison trucks, shot in the back of the head, and their bodies buried in the woods. The earlier scenes show the officers in their POW camp and then the aftermath of their slaughter, as their families wait for news of then, overjoyed when the name of a husband or son is not on the latest list of the unearthed bodies. The Soviets having blamed the massacre on the Germans, attempt to co-opt the families of the victims to denounce the atrocity in anti-German propaganda. Everyone’s life has been distorted by the suffering of their country. Some compromise with the regime to keep surviving, or to keep Polish culture surviving. Others stay defiant, and do not stay free or live long.
The acting is good and it looks fine. But the film just isn’t big enough for the story. I suppose a film that did such things justice would be totally unbearable to watch. I find King Lear unbearable to watch and that only deals with a few mistreated aristocrats. Or is it Stalin’s "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic" and being able to take on this kind of subject matter is something a feature film simply can’t do? The audience can only engage with a few representative human beings, not a whole mass. On such times and events documentary facts are about much as we can take.
I’ve seen a few of Wajda’s films before – Man of Iron, Man of Marble, Danton. Man of Marble was pretty good, taking a worker-hero propaganda figure as the central character. The other two were like Katyn, workmanlike films about strong subjects that didn’t quite reach the heights to which they were aiming.
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