January 25, 2008
FOREST? WHAT FOREST?:
A Movie That Matters: a review of Katyn a film directed by Andrzej Wajda (Anne Applebaum, 2/14/08, NY Review of Books)
Katyn, as its title suggests, tells the story of the near-simultaneous Soviet and German invasions of Poland in September 1939, and the Red Army's subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the forests near the Russian village of Katyn and elsewhere, among them Wajda's father. The justification for the murder was straightforward. These were Poland's best-educated and most patriotic soldiers. Many were reservists who as civilians worked as doctors, lawyers, university lecturers, and merchants. They were the intellectual elite who could obstruct the Soviet Union's plans to absorb and "Sovietize" Poland's eastern territories. On the advice of his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, Stalin ordered them executed.But the film is about more than the mass murder itself. For decades after it took place, the Katyn massacre was an absolutely forbidden topic in Poland, and therefore the source of a profound, enduring mistrust between the Poles and their Soviet conquerors. Officially, the Soviet Union blamed the murder on the Germans, who discovered one of the mass graves (there were at least three) following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Soviet prosecutors even repeated this blatant falsehood during the Nuremberg trials and it was echoed by, among others, the British government.
Unofficially, the mass execution was widely assumed to have been committed by the Soviet Union. In Poland, the very word "Katyn" thus evokes not just the murder but the many Soviet falsehoods surrounding the history of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Katyn wasn't a single wartime event, but a series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland's loss of sovereignty.
Wajda's movie, as his Polish audiences will immediately understand, is very much the story of "Katyn" in this broader sense.
In Enigma, the terrific conservative novelist Robert Harris reveals how the West made itself complicit in this lie, to its enduring shame.
I drive by St. Adalbert's Polish Cemetery in Niles many times a week. There's a prominent Katyn memorial facing Milwaukee Avenue that reminds me of the massacre each and every time I pass. There's also a ceremony for the fallen every year on the anniversary that seems to be bigger and bigger each year. Uncle Joe indeed.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at January 25, 2008 5:56 PMJim:
As horrible as the massacre and the lies were, I am glad to hear of such a memorial. Would there were one in D.C.
Posted by: jim hamlen at January 25, 2008 7:19 PM1939 was under FDR's watch and the truth about it won't be told for a long time yet. Some of you youngsters may be around when it happens.
St. Adalbert's was the name of the Polish/Catholic church in Maspeth, Queens, NY near where I grew up, but no monument to Katyn that I knew of.
Posted by: erp at January 26, 2008 4:09 PMCount me as one of the youngsters. I've never heard of this. I'm reading up on it now. I also put Enigma on hold at the library. I like the other Harris novels oj has suggested. You learn something everyday - if you are looking in the right places.
Posted by: Shelton at January 26, 2008 6:34 PMWelcome. Here's a tongue in cheek article that makes more sense than anything you'll read in the msm.
Posted by: erp at January 27, 2008 10:11 AM