By: Daniel Nardini
This is one of the best films I have seen in recent years. It is also a bone chilling historical drama, produced in Poland in 2007 by the great director Andrzej Wajda, on the atrocity known as Katyn. Before I say anything else, I should give some background on what Katyn is all about. Katyn refers to the name of the forest area in the Ukraine where in March of 1940 14,000 Polish officers, soldiers and civilians were slaughtered by the Soviet secret police the NKVD. The mass executions were ordered by then Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Stalin’s plan was to eliminate the cream of Polish society so that when the Soviet Union took control of all of Poland (which it did in 1944-45) it would be able to fill the political vacuum it had created. All of those Polish prisoners of war murdered by the NKVD were buried in Katyn and Stalin had hoped to keep this a secret.
The film Katyn opens with a Polish wife (played by Maja Osteszewska) finding her husband, a colonel in the Polish Army (played by Andrzej Chyra), being taken away by the Soviet NKVD. The colonel’s wife, Anna, is befriended by a Soviet officer who helps her and her daughter escape from the NKVD. Anna returns to Cracow and awaits for the news of her husband. Anna learns years later that her husband and all under his command had been slaughtered by the NKVD. After their invasion of the Soviet Union, the German armed forces discover the Katyn graves and report it to be a Soviet atrocity (which it was). From then on until the end of the movie, Anna tries to piece together the circumstances how her husband died. Meanwhile, the families who also lost their loved ones at Katyn are trying to hide all of the information on what really happened at Katyn as the Soviet armed forces advance towards Cracow.
From the time that the Soviet armed forces took control of Poland until the fall of the Communist government in Poland in 1989, the Soviet government insisted that the Katyn massacre was a German atrocity. Since the fall of Communism in Poland, the Polish people have erected memorials to the victims of the Katyn massacre and all Polish school and history textbooks provide numerous details of this Soviet atrocity. The Soviet and later Russian governments did not fully acknowledge this atrocity as the work of Stalin until well into the 2000’s. The film Katyn is a beautiful cinematic piece of a terrifying historical event, and one of the best Polish movies I have ever seen.
Katyn (The Movie)
By: Daniel Nardini
The film Katyn opens with a Polish wife (played by Maja Osteszewska) finding her husband, a colonel in the Polish Army (played by Andrzej Chyra), being taken away by the Soviet NKVD. The colonel’s wife, Anna, is befriended by a Soviet officer who helps her and her daughter escape from the NKVD. Anna returns to Cracow and awaits for the news of her husband. Anna learns years later that her husband and all under his command had been slaughtered by the NKVD. After their invasion of the Soviet Union, the German armed forces discover the Katyn graves and report it to be a Soviet atrocity (which it was). From then on until the end of the movie, Anna tries to piece together the circumstances how her husband died. Meanwhile, the families who also lost their loved ones at Katyn are trying to hide all of the information on what really happened at Katyn as the Soviet armed forces advance towards Cracow.
From the time that the Soviet armed forces took control of Poland until the fall of the Communist government in Poland in 1989, the Soviet government insisted that the Katyn massacre was a German atrocity. Since the fall of Communism in Poland, the Polish people have erected memorials to the victims of the Katyn massacre and all Polish school and history textbooks provide numerous details of this Soviet atrocity. The Soviet and later Russian governments did not fully acknowledge this atrocity as the work of Stalin until well into the 2000’s. The film Katyn is a beautiful cinematic piece of a terrifying historical event, and one of the best Polish movies I have ever seen.