Katyn

Tags: 1940, History, Katyn, Poland, Soviet Union, War, WWII

Silly intro – how we pick films

I have a habit of looking up highly rated films on MetaCritic, and then just watching them from highest to lowest rating. It is a great system, because you do get to watch great films from all over the world on an eclectic set of topics. This habit does unnerve Anna (my wife) who likes to know what she will be watching, so she tends to ask me for 5 film titles, does her research and then picks one out. Anna likes to be in the right mood to watch the film that compliments that mood.

Yesterday, the film du jours was Katyn. Having an unruly mind that pre-judges everything it comes in contact with, the title conjured up images of the life of a woman detailing her passage of rites.

I could not have been more wrong…

Katyn – the WWII massacre

In 1939 Poland succumbed to the twin invasions of Germany and Soviet Union, carving up the country between the two behemoths. The film Katyn starts with a scene on a bridge. One side tries to cross it attempting to get away from the German military machine, while the other side crosses it in a hope to escape the Soviet invasion. Panic and confusion arises when both groups realize they are trapped in a steadily closing vise.

Cut to Polish military officers who surrender to the Soviet Union. One of the officers remarks they surrendered to the wrong side, as the Russians never signed the Geneva convention. They are taken to a POW camp.

The film then follows the lives of their relatives, who learn that these 12,000 men were killed in a terrible massacre near the forest of Katyn. In the German occupied lands, this massacre unnerves the occupiers, fearing that this might lead to a violent uprising of the Polish people. They issue documentaries rightly accusing the Russians of callous murder and argue that the Polish people are safer under German occupation. They also express their condolences to the family members, then pressure them viciously  in recording and signing anti-soviet statements, manufacturing hatred for the Russian occupiers on the other side and strengthening their grip on their part of the country.

1945 – Germany surrenders, and the Soviet forces flood over Poland. Recognizing the dangerous situation that has been created by the German public briefing on the massacre of Katyn, they issue propaganda attempting to blame the Germans for a mass murder although it happened in a Russian zone. The propaganda films, of which we see clips in the movie Katyn, are utterly unconvincing. They act only to stir up further hatred for the regime, which the Russians counter by suppressing the population mercilessly and extracting all hope for a successful revolution among the Polish, who still bitterly remember how no-one came to their rescue in ’39. The Polish people feel more and more fatalistic and inclined to cooperate with the occupiers.

The film then explores the lives of the relatives and friends of the murdered soldiers. Those most vocal are rounded up and disappear. Those who remain behind, try to protect themselves against Soviet prosecution, try to blend in, but are slowly hollowed out. The Russians re-ignite their propaganda, create new films and radio documentaries calling the Katyn massacre a German evil, and it inflames those families left behind again. We see their lives unraveling before our lives in self-destructive acts: a sister of one of the murdered soldiers attempts to erect a tombstone for her brother detailing the true events and is rounded up and asked to sign a statement that she saw proof it was a German massacre. Her passions betray her, she cannot submit to this governmental lie, and defies her captors. This act proves to be ultimately self-destructive, and she is locked up in a cell, deep underground, never to be heard of again.

A pragmatic Polish soldier enlists in the Soviet army, recognizing that if you can’t beat them, you must join them. In his capacity as a Soviet major, he attempts to help where he can, in his own way protecting the Polish people by shielding them from Russian aggression and taking on the role of mediator. It is a difficult yet heroic role that leaves him despised by both sides. He desperately attempts to spare others of the fate that the women we mentioned in the last paragraph had to suffer, trying to give relatives a middle road, in which they can move on instead of unleasing the Soviet wrath. But instead he ends up alienated from the Polish people, who see him as a traitor, and in his despair, and the growing conflict in his soul created by serving the perpetrator of this crime, he ends up committing suicide.

The film details many more of these stories, including a General’s wife who seems to be able to accept the futility of rebellion while privately hanging on to her hatred and contempt.

It ends with the protagonist, a wife of a Polish lieutenant, receiving the diary of her husband, detailing his last moments.

Here, the film that had a previously confusing storyline, really becomes great. It shows us the sheer ruthlessness and viciousness of war in its uncensored horror.

We follow the lieutenant on his trip to Katyn, where the 12,000 soldiers disembark, wagon by wagon. For 10 long minutes, we are witness to all the soldiers that we have come to love and respect in the film being slaughtered, one by one. The scene is all the more harrowing because of the mechanical nature of the executions. The soldiers are lulled into a belief that they are going to a cell, stripped of all their valuables, bound, taken into a room where a one sentence trial is read out and then shot through the head. Then their bodies are shipped via a slide to a truck that takes them to a mass grave. The scene shows the Russians getting more and more ‘efficient’ in their slaughter, slowly changing the process in order to deal with the mammoth numbers required in the execution. The trial is skipped, eventually the doomed are simply driven to the grave and shot inside of it.

As you watch this protracted scene, you cannot help but crawl up in your chair in sheer horror. I wondered how these soldiers could execute so many as if they were animals?

It dawned on me that the very armies that we create to protect ourselves are the very danger that we put upon ourselves. These men were selected, trained, desensitized and educated to become sheer killing machines. An environment and reasoning was created for them to no longer see the enemy as human, but even less then animals.

But how can humans be so cruel and inhumane towards each other? That topic we explore in our next blog topic: Are humans good or evil?

Tags: 1940, History, Katyn, Poland, Soviet Union, War, WWII