Polish massacre
KATYN
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Cert. 15
This film was made in 2007 and is the work of the 81-year-old Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Its story is based on one of the murkiest episodes of World War II: the cold-blooded murder of over 20,000 Polish army officers and high-ranking civilians in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, and in various other Russian locations. The director has a deeply personal interest in this, as his own father Jakup was one of the victims.
The film’s dialogue is conducted in Polish, German and Russian, with not a word of English! It opens with a crowd of panicking Polish civilians caught on a bridge over the River Bug. It is September 1939. Hitler’s troops have invaded western Poland and Stalin’s Red Army forces are attacking the east of the country. Poland is thus caught in a giant pincer, and is quickly crushed by the two ruthless totalitarian regimes. The elite of the Polish armed forces and society are rounded up and herded into PoW camps. The film concentrates on the human drama: wives and children are forcefully separated from their menfolk and the main focus is upon them, in their agony of suspense as they wait, in vain, for the husbands’ and fathers’ return.
Nazi / Russian pact
The unspoken, unseen background to these traumatic events is the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact forged between Russia and Germany in 1939, with its secret protocols dividing up Poland between the two powers. Soviet forces were thus able to seize the Poles with impunity and carry out the Katyn massacres in spring 1940. However, Hitler turned against his erstwhile Soviet allies with Operation Barbarossa starting in summer 1941. In April 1943 his troops uncovered the mass graves at Katyn and revealed the ghastly truth, which was used by the Nazis to discredit the Soviets. The film contains actual German documentary footage of the forensic examination of the victims in situ at the time.
With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union came to dominate Poland and absorb it into the Warsaw Pact. A massive propaganda campaign insisted that the Katyn massacres were carried out by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in August 1941. Anyone in Poland who dared to suggest otherwise was intimidated into silence. This continued during the Cold War years until 1990, when President Gorbachev officially recognised Soviet culpability for the crime.
Monstrous events
At the centre of the film, then, are two monstrous events: the horrors of premeditated mass murder; and the following cover-up, a web of lies and deceptions, backed up by brutal force, to hide the truth and hoodwink the world. In this sense, Katyn is a gruesome testimony to human depravity.
It is an eloquent commentary on the first chapter of Romans, where Paul charts the downward spiral of human sin. In Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s Communism are two contradictory yet strangely similar anti-God systems which ‘suppress the truth by their wickedness’. Both are man-centred ideologies which have deliberately and wilfully ‘exchanged the truth of God for a lie’. Their adherents are therefore given over by God to ‘a depraved mind… They have become filled with every kind of wickedness… They are full of murder,.. deceit and malice… they are…faithless, heartless, ruthless’ (Romans 1.18,25,28,29,31).
Dignity amidst suffering
Katyn is a dark film, yet we can admire the dignity of the Polish people amidst all their suffering. The wives remain faithful to their captive husbands. Some brave souls try to challenge the official lies being perpetrated about the massacres. And the light of Christian hope does shine out from time to time. It would be fair to say that, despite the overwhelmingly Catholic orientation of the Polish culture, the film contains very little explicit Roman Catholic dogma as such. Near the beginning we are shown a church and its grounds, which has been turned into a hospital for the treatment of the wounded — surely a symbolic scene. Amid the injured troops lying on the ground there is a statue of the crucified Christ covered by a soldier’s overcoat. Later on comes a sequence depicting the Christmas Eve supper in the PoW camp at Kozielsk. A general leads the captive officers in the singing of ‘Christ is Born’, a Polish carol celebrating the Incarnation. The low, dark tones of the men’s voices represent the steadfastness of faith despite the despair of their situation.
These Christian motifs are present at the film’s climax, where one by one the officers are led to their execution in a horrific sequence which somehow combines brutality with monotony. They are all dispatched by Stalin’s NKVD forces with a single bullet to the back of the head before collapsing into the burial pit. To a man they die with the words of the Lord’s Prayer on their lips.
The truth of Katyn is now out, Poland is free from Soviet tyranny and the Nazis have been decisively defeated. But the film indirectly raises one other huge issue. What about the victims and the executioners? At our church we recently hosted a Christian-humanist debate. During the question time after the set speeches, the advocate of humanism was asked repeatedly about all the injustices in the world. What could he say to those who died in tragic circumstances having been denied justice? What possible redress could they ever obtain, and how could the perpetrators of crimes against humanity ever be confronted with their evil, having evaded punishment in this life? The humanist had the honesty to admit he had no answers to such disturbing questions.
Day of reckoning
Again, Paul’s letter to the Romans provides the answers. There will come a day of reckoning when everyone will be held to account for deeds done while in the body. There will be no escape from ultimate justice. Paul addresses such culpable sinners directly: ‘…because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God “will give to each person according to what he has done.”… This will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares’ (Romans 2.5-6,16).
Christians viewing the film Katyn, then, will be reassured that lies, murder and oppression can never finally triumph, though for a time they may appear to do so. It exposes the utter darkness of the fallen human heart, while giving strong hints of the comfort of faith in One who has entered this world of sin and misery as a human being and directly experienced innocent suffering, injustice and extreme oppression. Unlike the victims of Katyn, Christ chose to do what he did. His sacrifice can redeem from the devastating, dehumanising effects of human evil. His resurrection is the solid ground of our hope. He is uniquely qualified to judge the world, and set to right all its wrongs.
Andrew Baldwin
