Parallel Worlds.(Katy?, Coraline, and The International)(Movie review)

I have been to Poland just once, briefly, in 1978, to talk about movies, but I kept meeting people there who wanted to talk about something else--the Soviet betrayal of their country. In particular, they were obsessed with a single event: the murder of Polish officers in the Katy? forest, near Smolensk, in 1940. For many Poles, the lies spread about this massacre amounted to a virtual negation of the country's identity. "Katy?," a stunning, epic film directed by Andrzej Wajda, is an attempt to settle the truth of the affair once and for all. In such films as "Ashes and Diamonds" (1958) and "Man of Iron" (1981), Wajda, who's now eighty-two, has dramatized the issues of Polish politics and national destiny, and at the beginning of "Katy?" he reminds us, with onscreen titles, of the twin events that turned his country's fate into a joke between two dictators. On September 1, 1939, Hitler's forces invaded Poland; on September 17th, the Red Army did too, and the country was split into two occupied zones. The Soviets then captured around ten thousand Polish Army officers. What to do with them? Stalin was murderously prescient; he may have anticipated the future of the war--the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet recovery and counterattack, which, in the event, rolled through Eastern Europe--and in that future he had his own plans for Poland. During April and May of 1940, the Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D., shot nearly all the captured officers--many of them reservists who had built careers as engineers, doctors, and teachers--and dumped their bodies in mass graves in the Katy? forest and at other N.K.V.D. execution sites. At the same time, many other Poles held in Soviet custody were also shot. In all, more than twenty thousand people were killed. Then came the second betrayal: during the long Soviet domination of Poland after the war, the crime was officially blamed on the Nazis. It's as if Poland's grasp of the truth had been taken away along with its sovereignty.

In "Katy?," after the opening titles, smoke and clouds fill the air, and the camera slowly moves through the murk and takes in a bridge filled with people converging from two directions. It is September, 1939. A group entering from one end is fleeing the Germans; a group entering from the other is fleeing the Soviets, and they mingle in abject confusion. Wajda's movie is based on a novel by Andrzej Mularczyk, "Post-Mortem," and it manages the feat of telling the story of a nation through typical characters who nevertheless retain their individuality. A captain, Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), held captive by the Soviets, says goodbye to his wife; he keeps a diary thereafter, which occasionally forms the movie's narration, but he never fully understands what's happening to him. "Katy?" re-creates one of the everyday terrors of living under totalitarianism: no one in power ever tells you the truth, and you live on rumor and hope. The captain's stubborn wife, Anna (Maja Ostaszewska), longing for his return, goes to live with his parents in Nazi-occupied western Poland. Earlier, we had seen the Nazis arrest her father-in-law, a professor, along with most of the faculty of Krakow's Jagiellonian University--all the men, middle-aged or even elderly, hustled into trucks and taken away without explanation. Wajda goes back and forth between the sudden, stunning seizure of large groups of people and the intimate moments of companionship among their families waiting for news--any news. The scenes are curt, decisive, and unsentimental to the point of bluntness. "Katy?" has the severity of an old man's work--forceful plain statement and implication convey all that Wajda wants to say.

Once the Red Army kicks the Nazis out of Poland, and local Communists backed by the Soviets begin to take over, the new society forms itself, in part, around the Katy? lie perpetrated by the Soviet "liberators"--a lie enforced by prison for those who will not accept it. It is a situation of excruciating irony: at least part of the population agrees to the fiction in order to forestall still worse repression and to save whatever it can of Poland's integrity as a nation and a culture. "There will never be a free Poland," a bitter woman says. Wajda takes us into the Communist period, and only at the very end of the movie, as if recalling a nightmare that had been suppressed by everyone, does he show us what actually happened in 1940. The officers are shot in a basement, one by one, with a single bullet through the head, or pushed to the edge of a pit and killed there. The scene plays in ...