Katyn

Locations
Call Number: DVD FLC-POL Katyn
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 1st Floor 1-week checkout	DVD FLC-POL Katyn	1-week checkout	On Shelf

Based on the novel "Post mortem" by Andrzej Mularczyk.
Originally produced in 2007.
Special features: Interview with director Andrejz Wajda ; Polish premiere: interviews and reactions ; photo gallery.
Andrzej Chyra, Maja Ostaszewska, Artur Zmijewski, Jan Englert, Danuta Stenka, Magdalena Cielecka, Agnieszka Glinska, Maja Komorowska, Sergey Garmash.
Dramatization of the massacre of 20,000 people (interned Polish officers as well as civilians accused of treason by the occupying Soviet forces) by the Soviet secret police at Katyń in the spring of 1940, and the cover-up that followed. Follows the fictional stories of four families, separated from one another in the confusion of September 1939, when the Soviets and Germans invaded Poland, through the Soviet occupation in 1945 when the truth of the massacre gets suppressed.
DVD, widescreen.
Contents: Post mortem.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A little-known episode of WWII. submitted by GJBarnett2 on June 30, 2012, 10:16am Little known in the West, when Germany invaded Poland, setting-off WWII, the USSR invaded from the east, capturing thousands of Polish soldiers, most of whose officers were drawn from the Polish middle-class and intelligentsia, regarded by the Russians as class-enemies of the Proletariat, the mass graves of more than 12,000 of whom were discovered by the Germans in 1943. The Germans and the Russians each blamed the other and it wasn't until many years later that the Russians admitted responsibility. Ironically, after the German invasion of the USSR only a few months after the mass executions of these officers, most of the Polish troops captured by the Russians were re-armed and re-organized and returned to action against the Germans. Ironically, the shortage of Polish officers was problematic. Many Poles who refused to fight under Russian command were expatriated to the west through Iran and re-formed into Free Polish units which fought valiantly in Italy, capturing the German position at Monte Cassino, and in Normandy, particularly at the Falaise Pocket, and in the case of Sosebowski's Polish Airborne Brigade, in Operation Market-Garden. This film presents a harrowing picture of the captivity and execution of these officers and the political repression for years afterwards as the Russians sought to keep the truth from coming out. An unspoken footnote: thousands of other Polish officers remained unaccounted for after the War and stories persisted that the Russians had packed them onto barges and drowned them in the Baltic. Probably not true. Bullets are less expensive than barges.