In Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda journalist Jack Daglish tells Paul, “I think if people see this footage they’ll say, ‘Oh my God that’s horrible!’ and then go on eating their dinners.” During the Katyn Massacre, that is what the whole world did. On the night that I watched Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, after the movie ended I walked out of the theater whispering a few vacuous opinions to my friends and the three of us headed for dinner. At the end of the day, appetite seems to overcome man’s nausea about man’s own inhumaneness.
At the time of Katyn Massacre in 1939, when Poland was under the Soviets, the Soviets held Germany responsible. Then Poland came under the Nazis who put the blame back on the Soviets. Once the WWII ended the Soviets regained control of Poland and tried to force the Poles to accept that the Nazis had caused it. Andrzej Wajda was 13 years old when he lost his father in the Katyn Massacre. Katyn isn’t about heroes. It is about the country coming to terms not just with its loss but with the mystery that shrouded the events until 1990 when finally the USSR formally admitted responsibility and regret.
Katyn ends somewhat like this: One after another, Polish officers are walked to rooms where they are shot at the backs of their heads from close range. Two soldiers drag each body and throw it into a truck filled with corpses. One of the soldiers washes off the blood in the room with a bucket of water. The next Polish officer is brought just in time. Once a truck fills it drives to some location where bulldozers are busy tilling the land. Each of these shots is shown repeatedly over a period of ten minutes and is very graphic. It adds little to the story. By the end the audience is bored waiting for the credits to roll. Why then did the director do this?
I think this is why he did it: The audience got bored because it grew accustomed to the monotonous killings. Like the Soviets who carried out Stalin’s orders, like the Nazis who exploited the massacre for WWII propaganda with French posters that read, “Si Les Soviets Gagnaient La Guerre… Katyn Partout,” (If the Soviets Win the War… Katyn Everywhere), like the Western Allies which kept mum so as not to antagonize the then ally Soviet Union. It may not be unjust to implicate the rest of the world for any such brutality.
The movie is told through the lives of wives and daughters and mothers of the victims. All the women shown are strong and live on. A Captain’s wife keeps herself deluded about her husband’s return; a General’s wife and a Pilot’s sister continue their resistance by openly flaunting what they think to be the truth; the Pilot’s other sister feels that Poland as a country is extinct and she strives to keep alive Polish culture. One wonders about the plight of all those who were not strong.
Lieutenant Jerzi, the only man we get to know well, has lost faith in humanity and waits for the worst to come as against many others who wait for the light at the end of the tunnel. A couple of coincidences save his life for which he pays with the price of his friend’s. Burdened with his fortune to survive, and equipped with enough pessimism and black humor, we would think that he can live on.
Refer Wikipedia for details about the Katyn Massacre.
Image Source: IMDB
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Nice review. I liked the first paragraph the most, especially this: ” At the end of the day, appetite seems to overcome man’s nausea about man’s own inhumaneness.”
How true this is.
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