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."
RusIvan actually has said something like that.
yaeh...he even took some numbers out of space. 100.000 to be precise. I had to do some research to prove he is totaly wrong about it. Yet he still posted it several times, why? As he said once: "to piss of vox_pl". What a menda (polish word, don't ask me to translate it...)
of=off
On the other hand, if it's true (as Borges says) that Mr. Wajda has done great work in the past, and that he's given some credit for being an influence on Schindler List -- which is a great movie about a difficult subject -- maybe he's just the man to make this movie.
This is great. Finally an atrocity committed by Communists will finally be more than just a name. It will be made real in this film, a film I hope will be as widely known as Schindler's List.
"Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov said that criminal case was closed because investigators didn’t find any evidence of genocide in the 1940 Katyn killings. According to Savenkov, the case consists of 183 volumes, 116 of which contain state secrets. The remaining 67 volumes are open for study and the Polish side has already been informed that Russia is ready to hand them over."
____________________________________________________
Of course.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure that the executions could be honestly termed "genocide" against the Poles any more than the French Revolution could be termed genocide against the French aristocracy. Katyn was a systematic effort to wipe out the Polish political elite, which was closely tied to their officer class. It was purely political and not ethnic or racial. It's still a crime, make no mistake, and the Russians are clearly hiding a lot, but is it genocide by any meaningful definition?
Main Entry: geno·cide
Pronunciation: 'je-n&-"sId
Function: noun: the deliberate and systematic destruction
of a racial, political, or cultural group
- geno·cid·al /"je-n&-'sI-d&l/ adjective
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.