Katyn

MESSAGE FROM DIRECTOR ANDRZEJ WAJDA:

"Dear Friends,

It is a great loss to me that I am unable to be with you today during this performance of my film Katyn. This film has for me a special personal meaning, because my father - Jakob Wajda - a captain in the Polish Army - was a victim of this iniquity, and my Mother, who was waiting for his return until her death, was a victim of a Lie of Katyn - when the soviets were accusing the Germans as the executors of this murder.

My film Katyn is the first film accomplished about this subject, after 68 years of those happenings.

This was why I had to contain in it so much information in order to make this film understandable not only by Polish viewers.

I wish to stress very strongly that the scenes which you will see on the screen were taken from the diaries of the eye-witnesses, and of the memories of the families and from the notes made by those who were in Katyn in 1943, during the first exhumations of the Katyn graves.

It was those who gave courage to transfer this terrible theme onto the screen.

I am happy that I lived to be able to produce this film, and that through this film I was able to render homage to the murdered Officers and their Families."

Andrzej Wajda


For master director Andrzej Wajda (Man of Iron), the cinema can offer an alternative vision of events to counter the “official stories” of the Polish communist regime. Perhaps the biggest deception of all was the cover-up of the 1940 massacre of almost 15,000 Polish Army officers by the Soviet Red Army.

In 1943, the occupying German army discovered mass graves in Katyn Forest and elsewhere and used them as anti-Soviet propaganda. When the war ended, the Soviets denied any responsibility, attributing the massacres to the Germans - which then became the official line, despite thousands of Poles knowing the truth. Weaving together several stories of the victims and their families, Katyn is a deeply affecting epic and the remarkable culmination of Wajda’s lifelong wish to make a feature film on the subject; his father was one of those murdered during the massacre.