Katyn

September 23, 2009

What makes the film Katyn (2007) so interesting is that it does not really focus on the massacre per se. The director Andrzej Wajda does come round at the end to show us scenes of systematic slaughter, but by this time he has spent the majority of the film examining the uncertainty of the wives, sisters, and children who lived to see the end of the war. You could see it as a film about how to choose between the past and the present, and given that it's no surprise to see this reference to Antigone come and go:

The play by Sophocles examines the conflict between what is owed to the dead and the living. Antigone chooses to disobey the ban by the ruler and bury her disgraced brother.. out of a sense of obligation to the dead. For this crime she is sentenced to be buried in a cave. It is the classic case of destroying the present in order to fulfill obligations to the dead.

Poland as a nation appears to have been in a similar situation after World War 2. They are occupied by the Soviet Union, who were the perpetrators of the massacre at Katyn. This massacre at Katyn and elsewhere took almost 22,000 Polish lives. A horrific number, but made worse by the fact that these were the officers and intelligentsia of the nation. So it was something of a decapitation of Polish leadership. So the question arises, how should one live after the war? Is the correct path unending hostility to the occupiers? Or does one try to get along and keep the embers of Poland alive until some unknown future time? Wajda evidently has no real answer to that question. His characters embody the spectrum of choices, and none of them appear satisfactory.

To make things more complex, the Soviets tried to blame the massacre on the Nazis and constructed an elaborate narrative to deny their responsibility. (This was the official Soviet version until 1990!) The movie gives us hints of the battle of narrative that ensues. The correct dating of the massacre and the naming of its true perpetrators becomes an act that the Soviets cannot allow. One woman tries to set up a memorial for her brother, and is not allowed to place it in a church.. and when she has it set up in a cemetery it is broken down.

This is a reminder that national narratives are constructed by monuments and tangible things. The battle to tell a narrative is not just about writing history books, but also about controlling stones and statues. In this case no amount of official vigilance was going to keep the story obscured. But that only goes to raise the question: why not trust in the future and keep the truth within oneself, and dissimulate on the outside and learn to make do in the occupation? Do the dead command that much from us, that we should give away ourselves and our children for the sake of truth?

Photo "KatynPL-mogily" by Smolensk Memoryal. The photo is public domain.