SPLINTERED and uncertain, “Katyn” re- creates Po land’s experience of denial, rumor and finally the dreadful truth about the Soviet massacre of 15,000 Poles in a forest in 1940.
The film, by Poland’s most celebrated director,
Andrzej Wajda, begins in 1939, with refugees slammed between advancing Soviet troops on one side and Germans on the other. Anna, a young mother, searches for her husband, a Polish army officer. Together with professors and other professionals, the officers are im-
prisoned in concentration camps where Stalin plans their elimination.
As Anna and her family struggle to stay alive, the film achieves an unusual balance between the experiences of anxious wives waiting for a letter and loyal soldiers who know nothing about what is happening to them.
Most of these characters seem more like types than individuals, and the strange shape of the narrative leaves the viewer in a fog of unease that isn’t quite suspense. Wajda skips the 1940-to-1943 period, leaving us wondering what happened at Katyn. Before we learn about its gruesome shallow graves, we witness Poland after it was “liberated” from the Germans (by equally depraved USSR troops). All of this mirrors reality, in that the Soviets refused to admit culpability until 1990.
Wajda, who lost his father in the purge, gives the film an awful silence and mystery at its core. He proceeds to question the way postwar Poles joined the coverup to remain in favor with the Soviets, who released propaganda stating that the slaughter occurred in late 1941 (when the Germans were in charge) rather than in 1940.
Merely noting on a plaque that a loved one had died in 1940 became a subversive act. “There will never be a free Poland,” says one woman who urges another to go along with the official Soviet rewrite of history.
The facts of that history emerge in the final act of a clear-eyed and unsentimental work about memory and forgetting.
KATYN Agony unearthed. Running time: 121 minutes. Not Rated (profanity, graphic violence). At Film Forum, Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street.