Katyn – tragedy of a lifetime

I have a weakness for European cinema, esp the ones that have anything to do with the Great War. Torrent downloading of bootlegged movies  is one of my delectable sins although it has to be said that it is not easy to get many European movies with 10+ seeds. Yesterday, after a long wait, the download Katyn was completed. For the uninitiated, Katyn is a Polish movie based on the 1940 massacre of Polish POWs by the Red Army. The movie is based on a book Post Mortem and directed by lifetime honorary Oscar winner, Andrzej Wazda.

Katyn movie poster

During the World War, Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union and Germany on two fronts. At that time, the Soviets and the Germans were bound by a pact not to attack each other (It was later  that Hitler broke the pact by invading Russia and paid the price for it). The Polish Army was rounded up by the two invading armies and some of them were sent to Germany and the rest to the Soviet Union. In March 1940, Stalin decided to exterminate the Polish POWs as he felt that they were a potential threat to Soviet expansion plans in the East. What followed was the systematic shooting of nearly 22,000 odd Poles. Apparently, all of them were shot in the same fashion: a bullet in the back of the head which came out through the temple. Among the dead were generals, admirals, majors, captains, NCOs, lawyers, engineers and even a painter.

The movie is about the anguish, fear and helpness in wartime Poland told through the eyes of the widows of the Polish POWs. I am not going to go through the plot as the story is out there all over the web. I had some difficulty in finding the correct subtitle as all subtitles available were insanely out of sync with my avi file. Thanks to Ctrl-J feature of the VLC Player (it delays the text of the subtitle), else I’d never have seen the movie.

It was really touching and gruesome, esp towards the end where the Russians put the Poles to death in a systematically, horribly repugnant manner. The manner of killing is said to be enacted in exactly the same way as the real incidents of 1940. The prisoners are brought to the ’slaughter house’ in black Marias (that is similar to our mortuary vans).  Each prisoner’s hands are tied up, then led through a felt-lined room where a soldier hidden behind the door shoots him dead before he even knows what hit him. The corpse is taken out through another opening in the room, loaded into a truck (like our kuppa lorry) and the next prisoner is led in.

 It reminds one of the horrors of war, where humanity loses out to brutality and cold bloodedness. The most shameful part of the entire incident is the entire cover-up of the entire episode by the Red Army. Stalin claimed the Germans were in control of the region and that they were to blame for the mass killings. The Germans, in turn, used the gruesome pictures and videos for propoganda against the Red Army and also to hijack the symbiosis between the Allies and the Soviet Union.

 

I had my own misgivings about the final scenes in the movie: it could have very well sparked off another war between the Russians and the Poles!! In fact, the comments page on the torrent site was loaded with snide remarks by both Russians and Poles alike, with the Russians thrashing the movie as junk fiction and the Poles retorting back. I salute the generation of Poles who bore the tragedy of a lifetime.