[BretLudwig]

"Katyn"

"In an essay entitled "Never Forget. You're Reminded" in today's New
York Times, film critic A.O. Scott cautiously raises the question of why
there will be, once again, so many Holocaust-related movies opening during
the upcoming Academy Awards season:

The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree
a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early
21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is
intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of
the mid-20th century.
The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and
feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and
their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so
many?


Tough question ... Let me think about it... No, I'm drawing a blank. I'm
as baffled as A.O. Scott is. I don't have a clue either why Hollywood
keeps making movies about the Jewish Holocaust as opposed to, say, the
Ukrainian Holocaust or the Gulag Archipelago. It's completely baffling.

Seriously, if you want your ancestors' suffering to be remembered, you've
got to make the movie yourself. Here's my review of "Katyn" from The
American Conservative:

It often seems as if humanity's seven decade struggle with Communism
has disappeared down the memory hole. While Nazis in glistening black
leather remain our culture's omnipresent exemplars of evil, Communists are
apparently too dowdy to bother remembering.

A few filmmakers have begun to dissent, however. Florian Henckel von
Donnersmarck's superb drama about the East German secret police, "The
Lives of Others," won the 2006 Best Foreign Film Oscar and ran for a half
year in American art houses.

In Warsaw on September 17, 2007, director Andrzej Wajda, recipient of
a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, premiered "Katyn," his long-awaited epic
about the 1940 Soviet decapitation of the Polish nation in which his
cavalry officer father had perished. The 82-year-old cinema legend
reminisced, "I cant really talk about him, except to say that he was my
ideal and that he died at the age when I needed him the most." The mass
murder's cover-up then lasted a half century in Soviet-run Poland: not
until 1989 was Wajda free to inscribe the year of his father's death on
his tombstone.

A blockbuster in Poland, "Katyn" earned a Best Foreign Film nomination
here. It hasn't, though, found an American distributor. Fortunately, you
can buy the Polish DVD on eBay for $25. (Look for "English subtitles" and
"Region Zero.")

"Katyn" begins September 17, 1939 as Polish civilians flee eastward
over a bridge from the invading Germans -- only to collide with countrymen
running westward from the Soviets, who, pursuant to August 1939's
Hitler-Stalin pact, are now grabbing their share of Poland.

The overwhelmed Polish forces surrendered to their fellow Slavs, who
sent most of the enlisted men home. When the wife of a captured captain
locates him awaiting shipment east and begs him to escape with her, he
responds, with that fatalistic sense of honor that is the outstanding
feature of the Polish character, that his pledge binds him to his brother
officers. "Katyn" follows the cavalry captain into a Soviet POW camp
inside a defiled Orthodox church, and tells of the women who longed for
him to come home and of the postwar hoax that covered up the atrocity.

Because all Polish college graduates were commissioned as reserve
officers, the Communists found themselves in possession of Poland's
natural leaders, the men who would not abide a Poland ruled by Soviet
stooges. On March 5, 1940, Beria, boss of the NKVD secret police, sent
Stalin a memo recommending extermination of the Polish POWs. The NKVD
methodically shot 22,000 in the back of the head and dumped most of the
bodies in trenches in the Katyń Forest.

In 1943, the German Army stumbled upon the mass grave. In perhaps the
ultimate example of the pot calling the kettle black, Goebbels launched a
propaganda campaign over the atrocity. In turn, Stalin used the outrage
expressed by the legitimate Polish government-in-exile in London to accuse
them of collaborating with the Nazis, justifying him in imposing his own
Polish puppet regime.

FDR and Churchill acquiesced in the Soviet counterclaim that the Nazis
had killed the Polish officers during their 1941 attack on Russia, making
gravestones with a death date of "1940" politically incorrect in Poland
until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Of course, the Germans were doing the same in their half of Poland:
"Katyn" depicts the Nazis arresting 144 college professors, including the
captain's father, at Cracow's Jagiellonian University (incidentally,
putting young Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope, out on the street).

Echoing Solzhenitsyn, Wajda extols remembrance: "The best remedy for
political and social problems is to show them and to speak truly about
them." In contrast, the Kremlin shut down its Katyń investigation in 2005
without prosecuting any perpetrators. KGB alumnus Vladimir Putin classified
as secret 116 volumes of findings.

"Katyn" is an effective, moving film comparable to "The Pianist," the
celebrated 2002 Holocaust film by Wajda's old colleague Roman Polanski.
Americans will find "Katyn" more comprehensible on DVD than if it had run
in the theatres. Wajda perfected his craft under Communist censorship, so
his storytelling is implicit -- he assumes that his audience knows enough
Polish history to fill in his gaps. Luckily, by pausing the DVD
periodically to talk it over, we can sort out the large cast of rather
similar-looking Poles and distinguish the slight differences in color of
the Polish, Soviet, and German officers' greatcoats.

As Stalin noted, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a
statistic." Thanks to "Katyn," the 22,000 aren't a statistics anymore."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/katy.html

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