Another movie called "Katyn"

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• published: 01 Nov 2009
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Plot Summary: The events of Katyn are related through the eyes of the women; the mothers, wives and daughters of the victims executed on Stalin's orders by the NKVD in 1940. Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), a young Polish captain in an Uhlan (light cavalry) regiment who keeps a detailed diary. IN 1939, he is taken prisoner by the Soviet Army, which separates the officers from the enlisted men, who are allowed to return home, while the officers are held. His wife Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) and daughter Weronika, nicknamed "Nika" (Wiktoria Gąsiewska) find him shortly before he is deported to the USSR. Presented with an opportunity to escape, he refuses on the basis of his oath of loyalty to the Polish military. The Nazi operation codenamed Sonderaktion Krakau, which involved shutdown of Jagiellonian University in Crakow and the deportation of professors to concentration camps is depicted in the movie. Father of Andrzej is one of the professors deported; later, his wife gets a message that he died in a camp in 1941. In a prisoner of war camp, Andrzej is detained for a while and continues to keep a diary. He carefully records the names of all his fellow officers who are removed from the camp, and the dates on which they are taken. During the winter, Andrzej is clearly suffering in the low temperature, and his colleague Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra) lends him an extra sweater. As it happens, the sweater has Jerzy's name written on it. Finally, it is Andrzej's turn to be taken from the camp, but Jerzy is left behind. The film jumps to the post-WWII period back in Poland, when and where Andrzej's wife and daughter are still awaiting word about him. News of the Katyn massacre is reported, including the names of the victims, but Andrzej's name is not included in the list of victims, leading his wife and daughter hope that he was not among them. Jerzy, who has survived the war, has enlisted in the Peoples Army of Poland (LWP), which is now under control of the post-WWII communist government, but still feels personal loyalty to his friends, and like all Poles he loves his country and has sympathy for those who have suffered. He visits Anna and her daughter to tell them the news. Apparently, when the list of the names of the victims was compiled, Andrzej was misidentified as Jerzy on the basis of the name in the sweater that Jerzy had lent to Andrzej: it was Andrzej who was killed, not Jerzy. The film presents the plight of Polish citizens in the aftermath of the War, who were faced with the choice, in the words of one of the characters, between the world of the living, trying to preserve as much of their Polishness as they can, even if it involves compromise and rejection by those who cannot accept the new order, and the world of the dead, the world of those who are principled and refusing to compromise. Evidence of Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre is carefully concealed by the authorities, but a few daring people working with the effects of the victims finally deliver Andrzej's diary to his widow Anna. The diary clearly shows the date in 1940 when he must have been killed from the absence of entries on subsequent days. The date when the massacre happened is crucial in assigning the responsibility for it: if it happened in 1940, the USSR had military control of the territory where it happened, while by 1941 the Germans had control of it. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katy%C5%84_(film)