FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - KATYN

Rant Number 358 6 August 2009

‘Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi Government of Germany?’ A question asked to foreign visitors wishing to enter the US. Ground for inadmissibility, should you reply ‘yes’. But notice: they ask no questions about persecutions directed by the Communist Government of the USSR. Such as the horrors of Katyn. Funny that...

Last week in Mayfair I watched this tremendous movie, Katyn. By the veteran Polish director Andrzej Wajda. A moving indictment of atrocious Soviet war crimes – and, by implication, of the Allied collusion with the criminals. Mass murderers the US authorities have no objections to admitting into America, presumably.

Katyn is a forest near Smolensk, in Russia. In 1941 huge mass graves were discovered there. Containing the bodies of 15.000 Polish military officers. Bound and executed with a single pistol shot at the back of the neck. Prisoners of war – though they had never taken up arms against the Soviets. Regardless, the Russians slaughtered them, after Hitler and Stalin had partitioned Poland among themselves in 1939. Communists considered Polish officers a military caste, the bearers of Polish patriotism, the vanguard of Poland’s national self-identity, of her fierce sense of independence. The massacres were therefore a deliberate, savage attempt to wipe out the cream of Poland’s elites. The proud Poles had long been a thorn in the flesh of their oppressors. In 1920 they gave the Red Army a bloody nose, thus stopping Bolshevism’s advance into Europe. The horror of Katyn was part of Stalin’s calculated revenge for that.

The Germans occupied Katyn in 1941. Soon they announced the discovery of the mass graves. To all the world they displayed gruesome photographs and films of the thousands of victims. The Russians shamefacedly responded by accusing the Germans. The Polish Government in exile in London did not buy it. But Roosevelt and Churchill needed to keep in with their wartime chum, Uncle Joe, the mass murderer of Katyn and so covered up his atrocities. Indeed, after WWII the Nuremberg Trial forbade any reference to Katyn. Because two Soviet judges, Rudenko and Pokrovsky, Stalin’s stooges, were part of the prosecution, sitting in judgment on the vanquished bosses of the Third Reich. Yet, Rudenko and Pokrovsky represented a blood-drenched regime, itself guilty of hideous war crimes, such as Katyn. They say the Tu Quoque argument – ‘you too have done what you accuse us of’ – is a logical fallacy. Maybe. Stalin’s crimes do not whitewash Hitler’s, sure. But, if justice means anything, Uncle Joe and his henchmen should have been indicted, too. Instead, the Allied judges kept mum, shamefully complicit.

Is the extent of that complicity fully known, I wonder? In 1943 General Sikorsky, the head of that Polish Government in exile which would not keep quiet over the Katyn massacres, perished in an air crash near Gibraltar. A mere accident? Rumours have since fingered Stalin as having ordered the General’s liquidation. Yet, in his conversations with the Yugoslav Communist partisan Milovan Jilas, Stalin let slip that the British – meaning Churchill - were responsible for killing Sikorsky. All right, Uncle Joe’s word was worth as much as the very Devil’s but...what if the Devil for once had spoken the truth?

Wajda’s films often have a dramatic, pessimistic political theme. The unforgettable Kanal shows the doomed Warsaw uprising against the Germans in WWII. (Doomed because the Red Army instead of helping the insurgents long paused on the other side of the Vistula, allowing the Germans meanwhile to crush the uprising – Stalin at his fell work again.) Ashes and Diamonds is about the assassination of a Communist party leader by a patriotic but irresolute young killer. Katyn itself hints at another film, one Wajda never made, Antigone. The name of the heroine of a Greek tragedy who, in order to give her dead brother a proper burial, defies a tyrant. Similarly in Katyn a girl defies the Communist state. She wants the tombstone over her brother’s grave to tell the truth, but in vain. A shot shows the discarded, broken tombstone, emblematic of heroic Poland’s melancholy fate.

Wajda’s movie does not attempt to mitigate any tyranny. The swastika and the hammer and sickle happily danced together when it suited them. National-Socialism and Communism joined together to crucify Poland. The Poles were crushed under both the German and the Russian jackboots. Hence Katyn begins with a dense, oppressive fog. A fog that symbolises the darkness and the ambiguities of the people’s unfolding martyrdom. A darkness, however, which is not total. The climax of Katyn is the final sequence in which you see, in flashback, the brutal executions of the officers. Each dies with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips. It brought tears to my eyes. Faith and hope and love, they, not the murderers, have the last word.

‘What are we now supposed to do with this information?’ asked at the end my traumatised friend Carolyn, on whom I sometimes inflict my taste in tenebrous pictures. Good question. After Communism’s collapse and the crumbling of the Soviet empire, PM Gorbachev at last acknowledged his country’s guilt over Katyn. But has anyone be brought to trial for the massacre? It happened a long time ago, sure, and any surviving criminals would now be pretty long in the tooth. Yet, we do hear regularly of decrepit old Nazis been prosecuted for war crimes committed just as long ago. Why isn’t what is sauce for the goose also sauce for the gander, eh?

The message of Katyn demands one thing: schools must teach young people about the inhuman crimes, the enormities of Communism. The young should learn of those, at least as much as they learn of those of Nazism. Grizzly competition but, in sheer numerical terms, when it comes to body counts, Communism wins the infamy contest. Why don’t youngsters study about that in their history lessons? The holocaust is now part of the educational curriculum. Rob, a godson of mine, last year was taken with his class on a trip to Auschwitz. Why not trips to Katyn, as well? To show kids what are the true wages of atheism. Of rejection of God made into a system of government. Denial of God and the inhumanity of man to man go hand in hand. They always have and they always will.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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