The terrible plane crash tragedy that caused the death of today’s Polish leading officials in a terrifying remake in Katyn forest, just as the Polish officers (maybe fathers, grandfathers or acquaintances of the ones who passed away last Saturday) were shot on Stalin’s Orders in April 1940, brought back to public attention the “film-document” of the veteran Andrzej Wajda. On its release in 2007, the film was extremely wronged. Nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar award, after the members of the American Film Academy members voted, the statue went to another historical film, “Counterfeiters”, by Austrian Stefan Ruzowitzky, displaying again the Jewish drama under Nazi occupation. There is no doubt that Wajda’s film was incomparably better, both artistically and as a historical document, as it was for the first time that a film was based on the mass murder in Katyn forest.
I cannot figure it out, but for possible political or economic reasons (the construction of a new gas pipeline may be more of a “concern” today than exposing the historical truth), again, for the nth time, the communist holocaust did not “qualify” as tragedy. The hundreds of million of victims in communist gulags and prisons were never important enough to America or the Western world. It is still trendy to be a socialist, while anti-communist easterners are regarded with suspicion. It is common knowledge how aghast French intellectuals were at Solzhenitsyn's confessions from the gulag. The orthodox Russian ruined the entire scaffolding of Marxist-Leninist ideology that they were numb with.
The Polish president, may God rest his soul, was labelled as ultraconservative, nationalist and too catholic, as if it was a sin to confess your faith and be proud that you are part of a honourable and combatant nation. Russian leaders today, intrepid followers of Stalin, would not admit the massacre in Katyn. This is why Lech Kaczynski went there personally, in disappointment with the outcome of the meeting between prime ministers Putin and Tusk. If Russia would have apologised to Polish people three days before, the president would have never travelled to Smolensk. The man had bought tickets for the Barcelona-Real Madrid football match that very weekend. In the speech he would have read, had he lived, the Polish president would have said that the memory of the massacre was still a bleeding wound that he wanted to see cicatrized. Not completely healed, but cicatrized; for the scar this hideous crime left on the Polish soul to be a subject of reflection for the descendants.
Such a terrifying reminder is Andrzej Wajda’s film, whose father was among the 22,000 Polish officers who gave their souls at Katyn in 1940. A flawless film, dignified and unvindictive, showing no hatred, putting no curse on anyone, pointing no fingers at anyone. It only seeks to do what Antigone once did (we actually see a Polish Antigone in the film): cry and burry her dead. As long as the dead of the defeated will not be considered as “dead” as those of the winners, there can be no forgiveness and no forgetfulness. This is what Andrzej Wajda so outrightly states.
