Poland's Painful Past

By Vera von Kreutzbruck , The Women's International Perspective. Posted April 18, 2008.

Andrzej Wajda was 13 years old when World War II broke out. Together with his mother he lived most of his life in the vain hope that his father might have survived the war: his father's name had never appeared on any official list of Polish soldiers killed in combat. The truth, discovered years later, was that Captain Wajda had been shot cold-bloodedly by the Soviet secret police in a prison in the western Soviet Union. Andrzej and around 22,000 other people had waited for their loved ones in vain.

In his teenage years Wajda joined the resistance against the Nazis. His father had taught him to draw, which inspired him to study fine arts in Krakow, Poland. But three years later he transferred to the Lodz film school, where he found his true profession: cinema.

Now 82 years old, he is one of the most renowned Polish film directors. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the "Polish film school," a group of highly talented individuals whose films brought international recognition to Eastern-European cinema.

His film oeuvre depicts the key historical events in Poland during the second half of the 20th century with a tragic veil that is very characteristic of Wajda: his films focus on WWII (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958), pass through the period of political oppression and social agitation of the 70s and 80s (Man of Marble, 1977), and continue up to the birth of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement (Man of Iron, 1981).

Wajda's devotion led him to stand as a Solidarity candidate in the first free Polish elections in 1989. In the early 1980s the Solidarity movement, a Polish trade union, had become the first independent labor union in a Soviet bloc country. Solidarity went on to play a central role in the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Wajda served a two-year term in the Senate.

His film work has been consistently praised. In 2000 he was awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences for his lifetime contribution to world cinema. In 1981 he won the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film festival for Man of Iron. His latest film, Katyn, was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category for the 80th Academy Awards.

The Katyn Massacre

Katyn is the most personal film Wajda has made: he lost his father in the Katyn massacre. He also was a witness to his mother's desperate and hopeless efforts searching for his father and her ultimate discovery of his tragic fate.

In 1940 22,000 Polish citizens were executed under the orders of Josef Stalin in the Katyn forest in the western part of the Soviet Union. The tragedy was not revealed until the spring of 1943 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and discovered the mass graves. The Nazis used the news of their discovery to deflect attention from their mass murders of Jews, Slavs, gypsies and other opponents. However the Soviet propaganda machine blamed Adolf Hitler for the deaths. Any Soviet citizens who spoke out to tell the truth were punished with harsh prison terms.

In Poland under the country's post-war communist regime, talk of the massacre was taboo. Consequently the film's premier last September in Poland was a major national event; around three million spectators viewed the film.

Throughout the Cold War, for almost sixty years, the secret was kept. Finally in 1990 the Kremlin confessed that Stalin's secret police had been responsible for the crime. Nearly seven decades later, for Poles, even the mere mention of the tragedy still evokes incredibly painful memories.

In Katyn, Wajda dramatizes the fate of four fictional officers and their families whose lives begin to unravel along with Poland when it is attacked on two fronts in 1939 under a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler: the Nazis struck from the west on September 1st and then the Soviets hit the country from the east on September 17th.

The script, based on Andrzej Mularczyk's book Post-Mortem: The Katyn Story, uses real accounts the victims' family members found in letters and diaries pulled from the Katyn graves. The cinematographer is award-winning Pawel Edelman (The Pianist, Ray, All the King's Men, and Oliver Twist).

Overall the film received passable to bad reviews in Germany, with every newspaper acknowledging Wajda's cinematographic craft but also criticizing the direction he gave his actors that made most scenes melodramatic. The prestigious German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung for example said in its review: "When even people of his authority find it necessary to adapt their style to the excessive sentimentalism present in cinema nowadays, then what does this say about the state of historical movies? Probably nothing good."

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Vera von Kreutzbruck was born in Argentina. She started her career in journalism at the English language newspaper, Buenos Aires Herald. After a fellowship in Germany three years ago, she decided to settle in Berlin. She currently works as a freelance journalist contributing to media in Europe and Latin America. Her articles focus on international news and culture in Germany and the European Union.