Schmitz_04_28

SCREENINGS & MEANINGS

Gerald Schmitz

Polish film takes on terrible renewed relevance

Katyn
(Poland 2007)

Acknowledging the mid-April blip of the Genie awards honouring the best in Canadian cinema, mostly little seen, I was going to focus on a couple of Canadian features. However, a fortuitous viewing and larger world events have intervened to hold those over to a next column.

For several years I have been waiting to see Katyn, a drama about one of the worst, earliest and long controversial horrors of the Second World War. It’s the testament of Poland’s greatest living filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda, directed by him when he was 81 years old. To my knowledge the movie has never received a theatrical release in this country, despite being nominated for a 2008 foreign-language Oscar and winning multiple prizes. It is now available on DVD but I watched it, appropriately on Good Friday, on the French network of TV Ontario. Within days it was to take on a terrible renewed relevance.

On April 10, 96 members of Poland’s post-Soviet democratic leadership, including president Lech Kacynski and his wife, were killed when their plane crashed in thick fog approaching Smolensk in western Russia. They were en route to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre of some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, which took place mainly in the nearby Katyn forest in the spring of 1940. The prisoners included the officer ranks of the Polish Home Army, many of whom were reservists and constituted the occupied country’s professional elite, which Stalin wished to destroy. In one of those cruelly ironic coincidences of history, Poland’s gravest post-war tragedy, although purely accidental, will now be linked to those awful events, the truth of which could not be spoken during decades of Soviet rule.

Poland, as the site of Auschwitz and other death camps, is associated with the depravities of the Holocaust, the subject of many films. The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and 1944 Warsaw resistance, both brutally crushed by the Nazis, have fired the imagination of filmmakers, a notable example being Roman Polanski’s 2002 masterpiece The Pianist. Wajda’s own 1950s classics, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds, concern that period. Later he would become best known for chronicling the cynicism of the Communist regime in Man of Marble (1977) and the inspirational rise of the “Solidarity” movement in Man of Iron (1980). He also explored the secular terror of the French Revolution in Danton (1983).

Less recalled, because it was officially covered up for so long, is that much of Poland’s Catholic leadership was ruthlessly exterminated by a future Allied power, well before the United States entered the war. With Katyn, Wajda was finally able to redress that omission in a particularly gripping and powerful way. It is the film that he had been waiting to make all his life.

Wajda’s own father Jakub was among those murdered, so this is a deeply personal as well as collective story of remembrance. The screenplay, co-written with Andrzej Mularczyk, adapting his novel Post-Mortem, utilizes victims’ diaries and letters and draws from the Wajda family’s own experience.

Katyn opens with a brilliantly executed sequence overlooking a Krakow bridge spanning the Vistula River as confused, panicked throngs of refugees are thrown together fleeing in opposite directions before the advances of the German Wehrmacht from the west and the Soviet Red Army from the east. It is Sept. 17, 1939. Just weeks into the invasion, under the terms of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop mutual non-aggression pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are dividing Poland between them. There is no escape from the 20th century’s twin nightmares of totalitarian evil. As J. Hoberman put it in the Village Voice: “No movie has ever made the analogy between Hitlerism and Stalinism so visceral.”

The focus then turns to the family of a Krakow cavalry captain, Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), who has been captured along with almost the entire Polish officer class. His wife Anna (Maja Ostaszewska in a stunning performance) is desperately searching for him with their young daughter. Coming across a churchyard where a statue of Christ on the cross has been knocked down, only a nailed hand left, she shudders upon seeing what she thinks is a body under a blanket. It turns out to be a figure of Jesus, a graphic symbol of the ordeal that awaits but also the faith that sustains a nation in its darkest hour.

When Anna finds Andrzej in a detention camp, he refuses to leave his fellow officers, never suspecting that their fate has been sealed. She returns to the home of his parents in Krakow. The next day his father Jan joins fellow professors at Jagiellonian University to politely protest its rumoured closing. The camera shows the looks of consternation as an SS commander enters and whole faculty is roughly arrested. Jan is sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, never to return.

Anna and her daughter must find some way to survive the war years. In one harrowing and moving scene a sympathetic Red Army officer saves them from deportation. We meet others too who have been left behind. Roza, the dignified wife of a top Polish general, refuses to co-operate with the Nazis when bodies are first dug up at Katyn in 1943 to make a propaganda film blaming the slaughter on the Soviets. After Germany’s retreat and defeat, the Soviets will do the same, only worse, falsifying the date of the killings to 1941 so they can be attributed to Nazi barbarism. The beautiful Agnieszka, who lost a brother, refuses to accept the Big Lie, insisting that a memorial plaque for him be inscribed 1940. She prefers arrest and imprisonment to her sister’s resignation that “Poland will never be free.”

Wajda depicts a society traumatized by unbearable grief and loss through the emotional impacts on individuals. A student in a futile act of resistance rips a propaganda poster from a wall and is shot down in the street. A priest who has presided over the exhumations of mass graves is warned to disappear. Most strikingly, a colleague of Andrzej, Lt. Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra), who has cleverly avoided the death trains to Katyn, returns to Krakow and dangerously schemes to get Andrzej’s diary returned to Anna. But he cannot live with his survivor’s guilt.

The stained pages of the diary, ending abruptly in 1940, reveal the truth that was outlawed until 1990 as the USSR was collapsing. The last 15 minutes of Katyn are an unsparing wrenching recreation of the actual events. The locked trains rumble toward their final destination. Arriving groups of officers are loaded by the Soviet secret police onto trucks in the forest and taken to execution sites — one by one, like an abattoir assembly line, a single bullet to the back of the head. Earth is moved over stacks of bloodied bodies in a massive trench, but not quite covering them all. The final image is of Agnieszka’s brother’s hand entwined with a rosary in a raised gesture as if pointing to the sky.

So shocking an act of remembrance leaves a suggestion of a defiant Easter metaphor of resurrection, and of faith that the suppression of truth cannot endure. Few Russians knew anything about Katyn or associated it with Stalin’s crimes. Yet the conjunction of this commemoration and new tragedy seems to have brought about a historic breakthrough. Wajda’s film, previously unreleased in Russia, was shown there on nationwide television twice, before and after the plane crash. The Russian government declared a national day of mourning. At the state funeral service, the Archbishop of Krakow, a successor in that post to Pope John Paul II, appealed for Polish-Russian reconciliation.

Katyn is a reminder that monstrous evil and death are realities to be confronted, but they do not have the last word. As I write this, huge clouds of volcanic ash and dust hang like a pall over northern Europe, preventing air travel. This strange coincidence too shall pass. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Yet always with the hope that springs eternal for a renewal of life, and for the moral courage to go on.

Schmitz is a freelance writer based in Ottawa.