Post by pim on Mar 20, 2014 16:45:08 GMT 10
I recorded the eponymously named movie from SBS and watched it last night. It's in Polish so unless you know Polish - and I don't - you'll have to read the subtitles which is what I had to do. I hadn't seen the movie before but I'd heard lots about it and was keen to see it. It's a film version of a war crime perpetrated on the officer corps of the Polish Army by the Soviets during WW2 and concerns the murder/massacre of 22,000 Polish officers who were POWs of the Russians inside the Soviet Union in a forest called Katyn. When the Germans advanced into the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa they discovered the site of the massacre and the mass graves, and publicised it for propaganda purposes. The Soviets countered by accusing the Germans of the massacre and there things stood with each side blaming the other. After the war, as Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, the official Soviet version ("It was the Nazis wot dun it!") prevailed until the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union and the truth finally came out and was acknowledged by the Russians.
The movie is a very moving Polish tribute to the victims of that massacre. It ends with scenes from the massacre with Polish officers being taken out individually and shot in the back of the head with a pistol. They don't know of their fate until the last couple of seconds. I won't spoil the movie any further by revealing how the Communists tried to suppress the truth over many years, and how evidence of what happened nevertheless seeped out. As the credits rolled at the end they were accompanied by solemn church music which I recognised as the "Agnus Dei" from the Catholic Requiem Mass - or Mass for the dead:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi
Dona eis requiem
= Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest
It was a very European treatment of the war, nothing Hollywood about it. It was a great movie and I'd like to see it again.
The movie is a very moving Polish tribute to the victims of that massacre. It ends with scenes from the massacre with Polish officers being taken out individually and shot in the back of the head with a pistol. They don't know of their fate until the last couple of seconds. I won't spoil the movie any further by revealing how the Communists tried to suppress the truth over many years, and how evidence of what happened nevertheless seeped out. As the credits rolled at the end they were accompanied by solemn church music which I recognised as the "Agnus Dei" from the Catholic Requiem Mass - or Mass for the dead:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi
Dona eis requiem
= Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest
It was a very European treatment of the war, nothing Hollywood about it. It was a great movie and I'd like to see it again.