Wajda’s Katyn

— Pan Wajda, With Katyn you’ve made a fictional film; how big a role does the documentary element play in it, and how historically accurate is the film?

— The screenplay was written by the famous Polish author, Andrzej Mularczyk, and the documents were just the starting point, the essential basis. Polish filmmakers cannot and must not ignore them. There are films about the Warsaw Uprising, about 1939 [when Poland was divided in two by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and ceased to exist as a state], and about the Warsaw Ghetto. It is inconceivable that Katyn should not also be reflected in the artistic consciousness. If I hadn’t made this film, it would nonetheless have appeared... The film is in no way anti-Russian: it’s about how Stalin’s crimes were committed. It’s a film about how a terrible truth unfolds. Several thousand Polish officers were shot by the NKVD [the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the leading secret police organization of the Soviet Union] at Katyn, even though they could have taken part in the war against fascism. Of course, I studied the documents about the Katyn incident released by Russia. These were materials from Stalin’s Politburo, where the decision was made. To this day there’s no access to anything that could explain how it all happened, how it was organized.
I read the fragments of diaries and memoirs found when the remains were exhumed. The French journal Kultura published the memoirs of the wives
of the murdered officers. All of this formed part of the historical foundations. It would have been possible to make a political documentary but the audience, Polish society, expects something different. Even more so because the story didn’t end with the shooting at Katyn – there were still the wives and children. The film is also about their fate. I remember my mother telling me about Katyn – my father died there. In fact there is hardly a single family in Poland that Katyn didn’t affect.

— Katyn also affected the family of Krzysztof Penderecki, whose music provides the soundtrack to the film. Would you say that the film is to some extent autobiographical for both of you?

— No, I avoided that. The film contains five novellas, five subject lines, which intersect. Each of them is based on a genuine story. Most of the action takes place in 1945, when some came home and others didn’t... One of the leading roles is played by Sergei Garmash, a truly brilliant actor. I first met him when I-- was staging Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed at the Sovremennik Theatre in Moscow. He plays a Soviet officer who saves the wife of one of the Poles killed at Katyn. He hides her when she should be arrested following the shooting of her husband.  

— That’s a difficult question. Not so many years ago, there was no interest in the past. Young people just wanted to look to the future. Young actors were the same. But slowly they have come to realize that without the past there is no future. They are the ones who I would like to watch Katyn. My task is to tell the truth. There are dark events which symbolize the 20th century. They need to be understood and experienced to avoid speculation.

— To what extent does the situation in Poland now accord with your personal outlook? Having joined Solidarity in the 1980s, you left politics altogether a decade later. Why?

— In the life of every country there are moments when the artist cannot stay on the sidelines. He has to be a citizen, and not only in his work. It’s possible that the engagement of the intelligentsia prevents society from turning to destruction at climactic moments of history. Although that’s not always the case...

Now the time for idealism has passed. When Solidarity appeared, we thought that we would move forward quickly. Then it turned out that our old ailments had a strong grip on our consciousness. Society develops and grows more slowly than we would like. Most frightening of all, disappointment can send the pendulum of history swinging back. The old system clung on very doggedly, grimly and cruelly. I have to say one thing — that we all understood what we were leaving behind. That understanding became the guarantee for our movement forwards. Now Poland has changed massively. It has become a civilized country both politically and economically.

— When a state moves away from totalitarianism, is it easier for the intelligentsia to be in opposition or to sing in unison with power?

— It’s gets hard for the intelligentsia. [He smiles.] In a democratic country there is no need for the intelligentsia to be monolithic. However, there remains, it seems to me, the obligation to highlight the mistakes of our leaders. The intelligentsia has lost its unofficial podium — under totalitarianism its voice was the voice of conscience among the general silence and political “silencings”. Now everything is different and that has frightened many people, disappointed them. But it is fair and just. We need to exist in polyphony. £