Katyn Andrzej Wajda Film (english version)
"Katyn", directed by Wajda, is the first Polish film on the Katyn crime and the so-called Katyn lie. The movie uses stories from an authentic diary of major Adam Solski found during the exhumation in 1943 to tell the fate of four fictional officers and their families. Wajda's father, lt. Jakub Wajda, then 43, was among the Polish officers taken prisoner by the Soviet army and killed by a shot to the back of the head in the Katyn forest. In March 1940 Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the executions of 22000 Polish army and police officers, intellectuals and clergy. The killings took place in the spring of the same year in the Katyn Forest. The victims, mostly from POW camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszkow, were shot in the back of the head. The Nazis discovered the mass graves during their march on Moscow in the fall of 1941, but Soviet propaganda blamed the deaths on Adolf Hitler and punished anyone speaking the truth with harsh prison terms. In 1990, Moscow admitted that dictator Josef Stalin's secret police were responsible.
