Posts Tagged ‘Andrzej Wajda’

From "Katyn"

Today is the 86th birthday of the renowned Academy award-winning Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, of Ashes and Diamonds, Danton, Korczak, and Katyń  fame.

Three film clips to celebrate the occasion, courtesy Web of Stories.  Go for the full collection of clips here.

Wajda received an honorary Oscar in 2000, and said as he received the award:

From "Korczak"

“I will speak in Polish because I want to say what I think and feel and I always thought and felt in Polish.

“I accept this great honor not as a personal tribute, but as a tribute to all of Polish cinema.

“The subject of many of our films was the war, the atrocities of Nazism and the tragedies brought by communism.

“This is why today I thank the American friends of Poland and my compatriots for helping my country rejoin the family of democratic nations, rejoin the Western civilizations, its institutions and security structures.

“My fervent hope is that the only flames people will encounter will be the great passions of the heart – love, gratitude and solidarity.”

CLIP #1

“Since Agnieszka Holland [the director recently nominated for an Oscar herself – ED.] had helped me on Danton, being in Paris at that time, and also with a few scenes and even directed a bit with me on Love in Germany, I asked her to write the screenplay to Korczak. Agnieszka got very excited then because she wasn’t able to make any films herself, so this screenplay was a substitute for her active membership in cinema. She wrote a beautiful, very vivid screenplay about a doctor from that time when the fate of an orphanage is being determined during the war.”

CLIP #2

“There will be no summary”: “And as long as I feel that I had the next work to look forward to, that I have sufficient strength, health, desire and conviction, that I can still say something about what’s happening around me, then my feeling is that it’s too soon to provide a summary.”

CLIP #3

On the future: “Why should I be a pessimist, why should I think badly? And even if I do think that way, why shouldn’t I take part in the things that are happening, in various ways?”

The Germans investigated in 1943 (Photo: Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation records, Hoover Institution Archives)

One of the pleasures of blogging is receiving cyberletters from those I mention in the Book Haven. So I was pleased when my inbox showed the name of Timothy Snyder of Yale, who had read my recent blog posts about the current Katyń exhibit at Hoover Institution and also my discussion of his new book, Bloodlands. (I also challenged the London Review of Books for allowing a hostile critic, Richard J. Evans, review the book.)

In his letter, Snyder added a few more reasons why the Katyń atrocity plays such an important part in Polish memory: about two-thirds of the Polish officers killed at Katyń and the four other massacre sites were reserve officers.  University graduates served as these reserve officers.  The move was part of “a general Soviet policy of decapitating the nation.”

“Thus the blow struck chiefly the educated elite — people who, in Polish national myth and also in reality, were crucial to the survival of the nation,” he writes.  It also struck their families:  “Just as the men were being shot, their wives, children, and parents were being deported to Soviet Kazakhstan (about 60,000 people).”

For those who have seen Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń, this won’t come as a surprise – the movie portrays precisely one such episode.

After my recent conversation with Hoover archivist Nick Siekierski, he wrote,  “I may have mentioned earlier that while the Soviet’s were preparing and carrying out the Katyń massacre, the Nazis executed about 40,000 Poles in the part of Poland that they occupied from  1939-1940. These were also local government officials, public servants and professionals, the community leaders of their respective areas.”

This was news to me, though I don’t pretend to be a scholar of the war.  I asked Tim about it.  He apparently finds Nick’s numbers a little conservative:

“The first major killing actions of the German Einsatzgruppen involved the murder of educated Poles.  At almost exactly the same time as the Katyń crime, the Germans were carrying out the AB-Aktion, which murdered thousands of people thought likely to resist.  The demographic profiling of the two regimes was so similar that, in some cases, the Germans murdered one sibling in the AB-Aktion right after another was killed at Katyń.  The Germans kept poorer records than the Soviets, but we can be sure that these policies killed more than 50,000 Polish citizens.”

September 1939. Warsaw.

That’s right.  That means the Nazis had a systematic killing that was more than double the Katyń murders.  Who speaks of it?  When it came to the Poles, the Nazis and Soviets worked, more or less, as a team – not a surprise to anyone who remembers the Nazi destruction of Warsaw, as the Soviets waited for the Nazis to complete their block-by-block destruction of the city before they entered the city the following year.

Of course, after the Germans discovered the mass graves at Katyń in 1943, the Soviets naturally blamed the Germans for the crime. This was the version that the Americans and the British found convenient to believe.  After all, we had been allies of the Soviets – and the denial of what Stalin was ran deep.  Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times.

“Thus the Polish sense of abandonment runs a bit deeper than perhaps we like to remember,” Snyder writes.

There’s more.  A little chunk of history even Poles scarcely remember that occurred just prior to the outbreak of war:

“We know now that the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937 and 1938 included a number of ethnic shooting and deportation actions, the largest of which was the Polish Operation.  In the Great Terror, about 700,000 people were shot, of whom about 85,000 were ethnic Poles (who represented only 0.4% of Soviet citizens).  An ethnic Pole in the Soviet Union was 40 times more likely to be shot than his fellow Soviet citizens during the Great Terror.  Katyń was the last time that the Soviets applied the methods of the Great Terror.  It is no less horrifying but it is perhaps less surprising when this prior history is borne in mind.”

August 1944. The destruction of Warsaw.

Why is this so little known, even compared to Katyń?   Tim points out that these Nazi massacres bring back the “awkward recollection” of a time when the Nazis and the Soviets were allies — not a memory the Soviets wanted to revive.  Nick Siekierski suggested this:

“I haven’t studied the issue enough to know so I can only hypothesize. Since the Katyń graves were uncovered during the war and the Nazis made a concerted propaganda effort to use it against the Soviets, it entered the public consciousness early on, and continued to be a sore spot as the Soviets denied complicity for half a century. The cover-up of the massacre magnified the crime. Also, the list of crimes committed by the Nazis is so lengthy that their earlier crimes are less focused on than the Holocaust. It seems that slowly a greater understanding of the breadth and depth of the atrocities committed by both the Nazis and Soviets, against a variety of social and ethnic groups, is emerging.”

And as this understanding deepens,  it certainly gives more weight to Norm Naimark’s arguments in Stalin’s Genocides that our definition of genocide ought to be broadened to include what is certainly a systematic attempt to destroy a nationality through massacre, by two totalitarian states working in tandem.

I’ve always liked Christmas carols — even with their sing-songy obvious rhymes (bright-light-night) and simplicity of form.  Perhaps that’s why I like them.  I’m happy to say Czesław Miłosz shares my enthusiasm.

In any case, last Thursday I made the terrible trek to Berkeley during rush hour.  The occasion:  the eighth annual “Slavic Choral Concert Christmas in Kraków” at the Historic Hillside Club.  I guess all the recent posts about Katyń have returned my mind to Poland.

Carols are an important part of Christmas for all Slavic peoples, especially Poles.  The program brochure put it this way:  “The melodies are truly Polish – jolly, meditative, tender, and sometimes humorous. The Polish Christmas carol occupies a unique place in the musical literature of Christianity.”

The event was heavily attended – a crush, really – and among other seasonal accoutrements was a Polish szopka, an elaborate, cathedral-like Nativity scene.

Miłosz wrote in his A Year of the Hunter, “In Poland, it isn’t easy to separate ‘folk’ elements from the contributions of Church writers and musicians, not to mention seminarists and minstrels who worked for the parish.  The most intense activity occurred in the 17^th century; thus, old Polish ‘folklore’ and, most of all, the carols bear a strong imprint of the Baroque.”

My favorite is “Bóg się rodzi” – a Polish Christmas carol that is, in part, a national anthem.  The carol is actually a mazurka,  which is to say, a Polish folk dance in triple meter, with an accent on the second or third beat.  The lyrics (“God is Born”) were written in 1792 by Franciszek Karpiński, a leading poet of the Enlightenment period.

In the Andrzej Wajda movie Katyń, the imprisoned Polish soldiers sing “Bóg się rodzi on their somber Christmas Eve.  A mazurka usually has a lively tempo, but not this one  (it’s a little after 6.20 on the Youtube video here); the melody remained with me long after the carol movie was over.

In a controversial move (and I can’t remember why it was controversial), Miłosz ended his A Year of the Hunter with a story attending the Pastorałka: “Without a doubt, Polish carols possess a particular charm, freshness, sincerity, good humor, that simply cannot be found in such proportions in any other Christmas songs, and perhaps one ought to look at them for the essence of Polish poetry,” he wrote.  “My susceptibility to that performance can be explained by my having listened to carols from childhood, but also because only the theater has such an impact, appealing to what is most our own, most deeply rooted in the rhythms of our language.”

The occasion, of course, was not just for Poles.  A number of other national groups performed – each accomplished, and together emphasizing the distinct and very vibrant cultural groups of Eastern Europe — a Ukrainian performance; the curious flattened singing of the Hungarian Christmas carols that’s a sound unlike any I have heard; the loud and noisy Bulgarians, with bagpipes, singing and stamping — the brochure referred to their “antique, pre-Christian and Hellenistic roots”

Miłosz wrote that “to this day I am united in enthusiasm … with the entire audience, when Pastorałka concludes with a Dionysian dance.  This is total madness, an unbridled frenzy on stage, a letting-go beyond all bounds, although the words are as plain as can be.”

I thought the same, as I pulled away during the intermission for the trek back to Palo Alto.  The excited crowd had spilled out into the sidewalk and curb.  And in the midst of the clapping mob, the exuberant Bulgarians with their bagpipes, stamping and singing and dancing as if it were their last night on earth.

Some time ago I wrote about Mary Skinner‘s new documentary,  In the Name of Their Mothers, about Irena Sendler and the women of Żegota.

Another opportunity comes at 7 p.m., this Thursday, at the Language Corner.  Followed by a Q&A conducted by yours truly.

I really wouldn’t miss it, if you haven’t seen the film already. Tad Taube, president of the Koret Foundation and founder and advisory board chair of Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, offered not only praise, but help, saying the film “should be seen by every Jew in the United States” when the film had a screening earlier this year at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center.

Irena Sendler, with the women of Żegota, saved 2,500 babies and children from the Warsaw Ghetto (I also wrote about some time ago here).  The film tells you how they did it, and why.  It includes rare footage of Sendler, who died in 2008, interviewed by her friend, the fimmaker Mary Skinner.

I know, I know.   That’s more than twice as many people as Oskar Schindler saved.  So why have you never heard of her?  It’s so easy for those in the U.S. to forget that there was no happy ending after the end of World War II for half of Europe.  Poland was swallowed in the Soviet maw, and Polish patriots were on the hit list — remember Ashes and Diamonds?  Or Katyń, another Andrzej Wajda film.

Some time ago I wrote about the Auschwitz hero and martyr, the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe.  While at Auschwitz in 2008 (a horrible place to “visit,” I know, but Adam Zagajewski convinced me that my work in Poland would not be complete without this trip), I spoke with one of the researchers there, Piotr Lipiński.  Kolbe had offered his life to save a Polish soldier and father — no one ever made such an offer in the history of the camp.  The place was designed to discourage any vestiges of humanity.

Wished she had done more..

I asked Piotr how they could be absolutely sure no one else had ever made the sacrifice.  He told me the Soviets had tried and tried to find some alternate hero — someone who was not a Polish Catholic priest.  The best they could find after years of efforts was a schoolteacher may have volunteered, though others claimed he had been pushed forward.

Such was life under the U.S.S.R.  The Fall of the Wall in 1989 is bringing many names of heroes to light. Think of Polish Army Captain Witold Pilecki.  The communist regime in Poland censored any mention of his name in the public record.

The comparisons with Schindler are limited.  One has to remember that Poles could be shot on the spot without trial for helping Jews; Schindler was a German industrialist. In any case, Sendler’s friend and my friend, Lili Pohlmann, objects strongly to any comparisons.  Quite right.

But let me make one more:  Despite this post, I’m not a big fan of movies, but I did see Schindler’s List.  I was impressed by the ending, when Schindler desperately wished he could have done more.

Apparently, Irena Sendler, too, used to wake up at night, remembering, wishing, she had done more.  She said it often to her friends.

More on Katyń from Timothy Garton Ash in the London Guardian here.  Garton Ash focuses on the complicity of Western powers in the Soviet cover-up of an atrocity, particularly Britain.  He reflects on how the echoes of Katyń reverberate in the present:

Timothy Garton Ash

In 1943, confessing that “in cowardly fashion” he had turned his head away from the scene at Katyn, the head of the British Foreign Office wondered in an internal memorandum “how, if Russian guilt is established, can we expect Poles to live amicably side by side with Russians for generations to come? I fear there is no answer to that question.” But history may even now be producing a most unexpected answer, out of a second Katyn disaster.

The difference:

The first Katyn catastrope was concealed for decades by the night and fog of totalitarian lies; the second was immediately the lead item in news bulletins around the world. Most extraordinary has been the reaction of the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, who has gone to exceptional lengths to demonstrate Russian sympathy, repeatedly visiting the crash site, announcing a national day of mourning today, and ordering Andrzej Wajda‘s film Katyn (which spares you nothing of the cruelty of the KGB’s forerunners) to be shown on primetime Russian TV.  [Will no one bring this film to Palo Alto? Please?  — ED]

Garton Ash is taking some hits for describing last weekend’s plane crash as a “second Katyń” — though of course, he wasn’t the first to coin the phrase.  An intelligent outlook on the future by Adrian Pabst in “This Is No Second Katyn” in Telos.  And a victim’s grandson, Kris Kotarski, remembers Katyń in another Guardian article “Memory Is Sacred Again in Poland“:

In the aftermath of the crash, Poles are avoiding the “second Katyn” moniker that was used by Timothy Garton Ash, calling this the “tragedy in Smolensk” instead. This is apt, since this time the victims do not have to wait decades for information, and people both in Poland and abroad have publicly poured their hearts out while the Russian authorities are assisting the families at every turn.

Postscript: Katyń is now available on DVD, and watching it tonight, it’s even better than expected — and I can expect a lot.  (Hadn’t seen anything by Andrzej Wajda since Ashes and Diamonds.)  Best after a bowl of borscht, “with an egg in it,” as Cary Grant says in Talk of the Town.  The only vodka in the house was, alas, Russian — not quite in keeping with the mood of the film.  Unforgettable movie, by an unforgettable director — one whose father, incidentally, was a Polish cavalry officer, murdered in 1940 during the Katyń massacre.