New movie, Katyn, receives high praise from Stanley Kauffmann

The Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who has had a sixty-year career, crowns it with a consummate film. Katyn seems to be the work that he has been moving toward all of his busy life. Katyn Forest is the place, or the main place, where more than twenty thousand Poles were massacred in 1940. Most of them were army officers, some of them were intelligentsia--professors, lawyers, doctors, scientists. Wajda's father was one of the officers. Katyn is thus something other than just one more film for Wajda.

A hot controversy flared about responsibility for the Katyn slaughter. The Soviets, who in fact were responsible, tried to pin the guilt on the Germans, who were murdering elsewhere in Poland at the time. For decades it was strictly forbidden in People's Poland under the USSR to suggest that Moscow was involved in Katyn. But after the end of Soviet communism, the guilt of the Soviets was established. Stalin had wanted to crush in advance any possible Polish resistance to Soviet control after World War II; so he had all these possible leaders shot in the head and blamed the Germans. (One purpose of Wajda's film is to underscore Stalin's guilt.) We see a few of the executions. These add to the horror of the deaths in a particularly macabre way: those executions emphasize the grim workaday persistence of shooting all those men in the head one by one. Not even machine guns or gas....