Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn nominated for an Academy Award
A Polish film about the infamous Katyn Massacre has been nominated for an award in the Foreign Film Category of the Hollywood Academy Awards. Famous director Andrzej Wajda, aged 81, has already earned numerous acknowledgements for his body of work, hailed as some of the best known film making to ever come out of Poland.
In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union joined forces, invading from opposite directions and dismembering Poland. As the Germans were soon to find out themselves, fighting a two front war is difficult, and tiny Poland soon succumbed to the overwhelming odds. The invasions sparked the Second World War, and while the Germans were finally driven out of Poland, the Western Allies betrayed the Poles to Stalin in 1945. Poland was to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1252 struggle that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
One of the strategies of Soviet consolidation of power was to liquidate the leadership of the targeted nation. In the aftermath of the invasion, the Communists arrested and detained thousands of members of the Polish officer class, as well as artists and intellectuals. At a site in Katyn Forest, in Russia, as well as at Soviet concentration camps, at least 22,000 Poles were butchered. Their crime, according to the Soviets, was being “intelligence agents, gendarmes, spies, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests and officials.”When the Germans turned on their old allies, they uncovered the mass graves at Katyn, and attempted to use the crime for propaganda purposes. Despite outside confirmation, the Soviets denied their role, and blamed the massacre on the Germans. That line was official history until after the fall of the USSR, when Russian and Polish investigations proved beyond all doubt that the Communists carried out the crime.
Because Zionists have a strangle hold on Second World War claims of suffering, Katyn is little known outside of Poland. Polish war losses in general are often derided, with the Poles, helpless victims of the Germans and Russians, being lambasted as “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2434 the Communist seizure of power are also attacked as “pogroms.” Attempts to draw attention to the Katyn crime are even slandered as “pro Nazi,” an outrageous allegation considering Germany aided and abetted the Soviets by jointly invading Poland in the first place.
Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn is based on letters and diaries recoverred from the massacre sites. Wajda’s own father was one of the victims. An award for Katyn should help draw attention to one of the worst crimes of the Second World War, compounded by the lies and ignorance used to suppress the tragedy.
This is the second piece of exciting film news to come out of Poland recently. In December, an http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2746 was made that Mel Gibson plans to star in a film about the great Polish hero, Jan III Sobieski, whose army smashed the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683 and saved Europe. The film is expected to be a lavish portrayal of one of the most important events in European history and will be the most expensive Polish film ever done.