One by one the unshaven Polish officers are hauled into a cellar and shot in
the back of their heads by Soviet officers. The wall opposite is spattered
with blood and chunks of brain.
You need a strong stomach to watch Andrzej Wajda’s new film, Katyn: the
execution scene lasts 20 minutes and the audience at the Atlantic Cinema in
Warsaw stayed silently in their seats long after the screen went blank.
More than 200,000 Poles saw the film in the first weekend after its release.
Now, a fortnight later, it is playing to full houses.
“I’m really shocked,” said Agnieszka Bendkowska, an architecture student,
outside the cinema. “It shows that the Russians are as bad as the Germans.”
Her use of the present tense was significant: the film about the notorious
1940 Soviet massacre of more than 15,000 officers is feeding into an already
bitter election campaign in which Germans and Russians are being demonised
by politicians scrambling for attention.
Wajda did not want it this way — the veteran director had pleaded to keep the
film, the massacre and wartime history out of the campaign. “I don’t want
the death of my father, and the deaths of thousands of Polish officers
exterminated in the Soviet Union, to be exploited,” he said.
But the Kaczynski twins, who as President and Prime Minister have set Poland
on an ultranationalist course, are trying to shape a new Polish patriotism
that defines itself in opposition to its neighbours. And so the gritty film
has become politically hot.
Poland faces a general election on October 21 because the right-wing
government coalition led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Prime Minister,
collapsed after fierce infighting between the coalition partners. Polish
voters will be looking for political stability.
Before polling day the Prime Minister has to convince Poles that his Law and
Justice party offers the country more security than any other grouping. That
means a campaign against communist old-boy networks, a ruthless use of
information gleaned from secret police files, support for the US missile
shield and a fierce, terrier-like defence of Polish sovereignty.
Lech Kaczynski, the President, though not up for election, travelled to Berlin
yesterday for talks with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. Though the
agenda was tame — technically about the forthcoming European Union summit —
many observers reckon that he was looking for an opportunity to pick a new
voter-mobilising row with Germany.
Certainly there is no shortage of flashpoints, such as those Germans expelled
from Poland after the war who are trying to reclaim estates there. Pawel
Zalewski, chairman of the parliamentary and foreign affairs committee and an
ally of the Prime Minister, made it plain that Warsaw was going to press Mrs
Merkel hard to distance herself in writing from such claims.
If such claims were even considered by the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg “they would throw into question the results of the Second World
War”, he said. “Why hasn’t this issue been solved?” The German Government
has, in fact, publicly stated that it does not support the claims, but
Poland wants more. “We want Germany to state formally that these claims are
not justified.”
It does indeed seem that the Poland of the Kaczynskis is determined to mop up
all the unfinished business of the Second World War. In the midst of an EU
argument about voting rights, the Kaczynskis enraged the Germans by saying
that the Polish population would have been substantially larger had the
Nazis not murdered so many people. Germany therefore had a moral duty to
give ground. Lech Kaczynski has argued, too, for extra German reparations
for the destruction of Warsaw.
The brothers use the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as a reference point for their
relations with Germany and Russia: their parents fought in the bloody
insurgency and, as children, they grew up playing in the postwar rubble of
the city. While the Nazis set the Polish capital alight in 1944, the Red
Army sat passively on the other side of the Vistula river. Many historians
believe that Stalin was effectively allowing the Germans to wipe out a
future Polish political class that could have resisted a Communist takeover.
The Katyn killings, too, have become a metaphor for Poland’s troubled
relationship with Berlin and Moscow. In September 1939 Poland was crushed
between the armies of Hitler and Stalin. From the occupied east of Poland,
Soviet commissars deported hundreds of thousands to Siberia. Some of the
captured officers and intellectuals, held in three Soviet camps at Kozelsk,
Starobilsk and Ostashkov, were offered a role in an army that was to fight
alongside the Red Army. But 15,000 were deemed unsuitable and murdered. It
was an astonishing crime — Poland and the Soviet Union were not even at war.
For decades Moscow lied about the massacre, blaming it on the Nazis. The
Germans had stumbled on the graves when they invaded the Soviet Union and
duly made propaganda out of it.
Between 1945 and 1989 it was forbidden for Poles to suggest even that their
relatives had been slaughtered on Soviet territory in 1940. Even now the
Russians are withholding information from the Poles about the identity of
the killers.
A deep suspicion about German and Russian intentions runs through all parties
apart from the so-called Left and Democratic party, led by Aleksander
Kwasniewski, the former President. This grouping, with a large ex-communist
component, is committed to improving relations with both of the big
neighbours.
Its foreign policy credibility took a knock, however, when Mr Kwasniewski was
spotted drunk while delivering a lecture in Ukraine recently. The incident
reminded voters that as President he had also been drunk while visiting the
graves of murdered officers at a site near Katyn.
For outsiders, the link between wartime martyrdom and present-day politics may
seem far-fetched. But it is part of the daily rhetoric and contains a
serious message.
Radek Sikorski, who used to be Defence Minister in a Law and Justice-led
government, compared the building of a gas pipeline between Russia and
Germany with the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that fragmented Poland. His
point was that an EU and Nato ally, Germany, was deliberately going over the
heads of the Poles to deal with President Putin to guarantee its own energy
security. Although Mr Sikorski has joined the opposition Civic Platform, his
views have not changed and are in line with the thinking of his new party.
Katyn thus fits into the popular mood. An imprisoned officer in the film says:
“We will be slaves under the Germans, and slaves under the Russians — what’s
the difference?”
Well, in modern Europe, there naturally is a difference. But election
campaigning deliberately blurs it.
Donald Tusk, the head of the moderately conservative Civic Platform, has been
campaigning for émigré votes in Britain and Ireland but decided not to meet
Mrs Merkel. Quite simply, a Polish politician loses votes if he even smiles
at a German or a Russian.
Yet part of this extraordinary tension at the heart of Europe has its roots in
the EU itself. “Before EU entry-pressure could be put on Poland to conform
but now that we are in, the Kaczynskis can speak their thoughts out loud,”
said Alexander Smolar, of the Stefan Batory Foundation think-tank. Another
politician, on the Left, says: “It can’t be that Poland is accused of being
anti-European every time it refuses to obey German orders or questions
Russian policy.”
Whoever wins the Polish election next weekend will have to help to formulate
EU policy towards the new post-Putin Russia. Although Mrs Merkel grumbles
about Russian human rights and the British Government has stood firm on the
Litvinenko case, only Poland has really been highlighting the potential
dangers in the east. Russia is embarking on a huge rearmament programme as
well as a response to the US missile shield that could destabilise Eastern
Europe. And President Putin has shown that he is prepared to use energy
exports as a foreign policy weapon.
Maybe the EU should be listening more carefully to the political discourse in
Poland. Behind the sabrerattling and wartime martyrology, the Poles are
identifying a real problem: the emergence of a restless Russia with a newly
enriched and empowered military class ready to flex its muscles in the EU
borderlands.
Polling figures
30 million voters
460 seats up for grabs
22 number of seats Kaczynski's party has over main opposition
4% lead for Kaczynski's party in latest opinion polls
20 polling booths in London
Source: Agencies
