KATYN

Director's Statement

After many attempts and much thought, I am now certain that a film about Katyri cannot set a goal of discovering the whole truth about that event, since it is now a historical and political fact.

Those facts, to the viewer of today, could be a background for such events as human lots, since only they, shown on the big screen, can move the viewer in contrast to the relations of our history that has its place in the written stories of those times.
Therefore, I see my film about Katyn as a story of a family separated forever, about great illusions and the brutal truth about the Katyn crime. In a word, a film about individual suffering, which evokes Images of much greater emotional content than naked historical facts. A film that shows the terrible truth that hurts, whose characters are not the murdered officers, but women who wait their return every day, every hour, suffering inhuman uncertainty. Loyal and unshaken, convinced that it was only enough to open the door to see the long awaited man at it, as the tragedy of Katyn concerns those who live and lived then.
After years away from the Katyn tragedy, from the German exhumation in 1943 and next the Polish research work in the 90's, and even despite partial disclosing of the archives, we still know too little what the Katyn crime looked like in April and May 1940, committed on the strength of the decision by Stalin and his comrades of the Politburo of the Communist Party in Moscow on March 5, 1940.
No wonder that for years we were convinced that our father could be living, as the last name Wajda featured on the Katyn list, but with the first name of Karol.
Mother, almost till the end of her days, believed her husband would return, my father Jakub Wajda, a combatant of the Great War, the Polish-Soviet war, the Silesian Uprising, and the September campaign of 1939, the recipient of the Silver Cross and the Order of Virtuti Militari awarded posthumously.
I would not like the Katyn film, however, to be my personal search for the truth and a vigil light lit on the grave of Captain Jakub Wajda. Let it spin a tale about the suffering and drama of many Katyn families. About the Katyn lie that triumphs over the grave of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, which forced into silence about it for half a century the then allies, the Western ones of the USSR in the war against Hitler: Great Britain and the United States.
I know that the young generation, fully aware and with enthusiasm, is moving away from our past. Busy with mundane matters, they forget names and dates, which, no matter if we want it or not, create us as a nation with its fears and misgivings surfacing at every political opportunity.
Not long ago, a high school student on a TV program, asked what he associated September 17 with, answered: with a church holiday. Maybe thanks to our film, the young man asked about Katyn will be able to say more than that it is the name of a small town not far away from Smolensk.