They don't teach that little tidbit of history to our kids in public schools.
After all, Uncle Joe was our ally, right?
KATYN MEMORIAL Online Museum: http://www.electronicmuseum.ca/Poland-WW2/katyn_memorial_wall/kmw.html
Posted on 02/15/2006 1:13:42 PM PST by lizol
Polish director Wajda makes film on Katyn atrocity
Wed 15 Feb 2006 1:43 PM ET By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Celebrated Polish director Andrzej Wajda said on Wednesday he aims to finish a film close to his heart this year about the 1940 Soviet massacre of 15,000 Polish soldiers, including his own father, in the Katyn forest.
Wajda, in Berlin to collect a lifetime achievement award from the Berlin Film Festival, said most Poles always knew it was a Soviet atrocity even though propaganda during World War Two and afterwards wrongly tried to pin the blame on Germany.
The 79-year-old filmmaker also said it took so long to tackle the subject that has strained relations between Poland and Russia for decades because he was waiting for someone to write a book about it that he could base the screenplay on.
"It's always easier to make a film on the basis of novel that already exists, that someone has already written, rather than writing a script," he said. "I waited for a long time for such a novel but unfortunately there was never any such novel."
Wajda, who won an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2000, made films such as "Land of Promise" and "The Maids of Wilko". Earlier classics "Ashes and Diamonds" and "Kanal" were based on his experience as a resistance fighter.
"We knew from the very beginning that this was a Soviet crime," Wajda said. "There were letters (from the detention camp) that people received, including from my own father. All of a sudden the letters stopped coming. We were aware that something happened in the spring of 1940. There was no doubt."
Russia still denies the 1940 execution of 15,000 Polish prisoners of war by Soviet secret police was genocide even though Poland has long pushed for Moscow to bring to account the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre.
The mass shootings of interned Polish officers followed the 1939 partition of Poland by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin at the start of World War Two. Germany later reneged on the pact, invading the Soviet Union in 1941. Advancing forces found bodies in mass graves in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk.
Soviet propagandists blamed the killings on the Germans, however, and only in 1990 did President Mikhail Gorbachev admit that the Soviet NKVD secret police had been responsible.
Russian investigations into the case dragged on for over a decade, ending inconclusively last year. Poland has opened its own probe, but says it has been hampered by delays in handing over case documents, two-thirds of which Russia has refused to declassify.
"I plan to finish shooting this film this year," said Wajda, whose film has a working title "Post Morten". "I had been delayed trying to find the right technical methods to depict this dreadful tragedy.
"I don't want to show two sides of it. The film is set in my home town, waiting for my father and realising he will never come back. We don't know if he's dead or alive. These are the emotions, the psychological pressures we had to live through."
Finally someone's going to make a movie about it.
Long overdue.
Looking forward to seeing it.
Finally, an 'entertainment vehicle' about Katyn. Let's hope this 'product' has 'star talent' in it and generates 'record box office receipts'. Well, I suppose it's better that Wajda and not Spielberg makes it.
They don't teach that little tidbit of history to our kids in public schools.
After all, Uncle Joe was our ally, right?
KATYN MEMORIAL Online Museum: http://www.electronicmuseum.ca/Poland-WW2/katyn_memorial_wall/kmw.html
I don't see this as 'entertainment vehicle about Katyn".
I hope this is going to be a tribute to those heroes.
And if it's done well - it will tell much more about that tragedy than any book or article.
Ping
That and how the Red Army sat by as the Germans crushed the Warsaw uprising.
Thank God, I have been hoping Wajda could make such a film.
I recently saw a TV Polonia documentary on Wajda, that thankfully was subtitled in English, what an amazing man.
Except for those "National Socialists" of course.
"Korczak" is another excellent Wajda film. Ten times better than Schindler's List, IMHO.
The FReeper Foxhole Remembers the Katyn Forest Massacre (Poland~1940) - October 13th, 2003
Where is the "russian club"? Isn't the Katyn masacre the appropriate response to the polish crimes? /sarcasm
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