It took sixty years to happen, but last night a film about the Katyn Affair finally got its premiere. The eighty-one year-old director who made the film, Andrzej Wajda, could not have been a more fitting man to make it.
Wajda, who won a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars in 2000, would have lost his Polish passport had he attempted to make the film under the Russian-dominated Poland that emerged after World War II. Katyn was a word that could not be spoken in public. The reasons are straightforward enough.
When Hitler turned on his ally Stalin in 1941, and the German army pushed into Soviet occupied Ukraine and beyond, the Russians barely had time to cover their tracks. One track that Stalin had hoped was well covered lay in the pine forests of Katyn, 17 kilometres outside the Russian city of Smolensk. However, two years after the invasion, the Germans discovered mass graves in the forest. The initial find revealed 4,243 Polish reserve officers, and over three times that amount were later revealed at other locations.
Stalin immediately blamed the Germans, and it was not until 1990 that Gorbachev finally admitted that Russia was responsible. Katyn became an enduring symbol of the fate of Poland's officer class.
Andrzej Wajda, who's own father was a victim of the Katyn atrocity, had been searching for the right script since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The premiere last night in Warsaw's National Opera finally realized his long-harboured vision. Regardless of whether the film goes down as a masterpiece, it was a historic moment. Nevertheless, early word on the film has been more positive than negative.
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