Andrzej Wajda to Tackle Katyn Massacre

The official Slovakian news agency, TASR, has reported that Polish film director Andrzej Wajda is currently planning to make a film about the Katyn massacre.

Several months after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, approximately 15,000 (some sources claim as many as 25,000) Polish prisoners of war were killed by Soviet secret police in and around the forest near the city of Katyn, in what was then the western section of the Soviet Union (currently western Russia).

The Nazis uncovered the remains in 1943 during their invasion of the Soviet Union, and blamed the Soviets for the massacre. In turn, the Soviet government accused the Nazis of trying to cover up their own atrocities. Despite incriminating evidence pointing to the Kremlin, the U.S. and Britain — at the time allied with the USSR — opted to look the other way.

It was only in 1990 that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted culpability for the massacre. Two years later, the Russian government handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa previously secret documents proving that Joseph Stalin had directly ordered the killings.

Many of the dead were Polish intellectuals and professionals who had been drafted following the Nazi invasion. Those men found themselves prisoners of the Red Army because of a secret deal between the Nazis and Stalin, which had granted the eastern half of Poland to the Soviet Union.

"My father was also executed then," Wajda said. As a result, his mother had to look for work, and the once privileged family of intellectuals was reduced to a working-class existence. "The real hero of this story is my mother," the director added.

Wajda received an honorary Oscar in 2000 for his body of work, which includes A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957),Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Man of Marble (1977), and Man of Iron (1981).