Poland's "Katyn" revisits WW2 massacre

By Kirk Honeycutt

BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - In "Katyn," Poland's master filmmaker Andrzej Wajda vividly and movingly dramatizes one of the last major crimes of World War II to be acknowledged.

This was the mass execution of 15,000-20,000 Polish officers -- the intellectual elite of that society, among them Wajda's father -- by Joseph Stalin's secret police in spring 1940. The Soviet Union long maintained the mass murder was perpetrated by the Nazis and punished anyone who said otherwise in Poland, which it occupied until the fall of communism in Europe. In 1990, the Kremlin officially accepted Russian responsibility.

The film, which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, will compete for the foreign-language Oscar at the Academy Awards on Sunday.

This is a very Polish story with deep resonance for Wajda's countrymen, but it might have trouble attracting a wide audience elsewhere. There are perhaps too many characters and references that might confuse those unfamiliar with Polish history. Unlike Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," no single protagonist takes us through the war years. Rather, the point of view shifts from this character to that as children grow up, women cling to hope and men await their fate.

Working from a novel by Andrzej Mularczyk, letters and diaries by many of the victims and reportedly details from his own family's struggle, Wajda -- who co-wrote the script with Mularczyk -- works on a wide canvas as he weaves the fictional stories of four families, forever separated from one another in late 1939, through the Soviet occupation in 1945, when the truth gets suppressed. It is more the story of the women and children left behind than of the men, but Wajda has cagily constructed his film so that it ends with a chilling flashback to the crime itself, a sequence lasting more than 20 minutes that brings all the story lines to a horrific conclusion.

Some sequences sear the mind: A group of refugees heading east, crosses a bridge, fleeing the Wehrmacht. On the bridge, they encounter another group of refugees heading west, fleeing the Red Army. The wife of a Polish army officer pleads with her husband to flee with her and their child before the train arrives to transport the officers to the Soviet Union. But his army vows trump his marriage vows.

The Nazis close Cracow University and mass arrest every professor, including the father of the army officer. Months later, his wife receives a package containing his things and a letter saying the aging man died of an untreated disease.

Loudspeakers in town announce lists of the dead found in mass graves by the German army in 1943. No mention of a loved one ignites false hope. After the fall of the Nazis, surviving wives and sisters confront Soviet lies to their own peril. A young man loses his life by tearing down a Soviet propaganda poster.