A movie that matters – film review of Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn
Anne Applebaum focuses on Andrzej Wajda’s relation to his Polish audience, for his movies always depict themes that are especially meanigful to it. She recounts the story of Polish-Russian relations, deeply disturbed by the Soviet Union’s denial to take the blame for the murder of 22 000 Polish officers near the village of Katyn.
See: Anne Applebaum: A movie that matters In: The New York review of books, February 2008.
Remember. Katyn 1940 – Campaign by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
This website offers background information, such as visual sources and accounts of journalists and others visiting the site of the Katyn massacre in the 1940’s. It also offers a series of English language podcasts covering the story behind the Katyn massacre.
http://www.rememberkatyn1940.pl/
podcasts: http://www.katyn1940.info/podcasts.xml?mode=rss
Katyn Crime – website offering eye-witness accounts
On the occasion of the premier of Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn the Polish NGO Karta compiled a wide range of documents from its extensive archives. Furthermore the filmmaker Andrzej Wajda speaks on several aspects of the events in Katyn, that motived him to make this movie. All of these video sequences have English subtitles.
http://www.katyncrime.pl/Main,page,258.html
Victor Zaslavsky: Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn
Product description
Revisiting the events of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which some 25,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet secret police on Stalin's orders, Victor Zaslavsky explores a paradigmatic and terrifying example of the policy of class cleansing practiced in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories during World War II. By blaming the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, the Soviets constructed one of the greatest historiographical falsifications of the twentieth century. Based on secret documents of the Soviet regime that became available only after its collapse, Zaslavsky unearths the methods used to create and maintain the Soviet "official version" of what happened at Katyn, a process involving the complicity of Western governments and left-leaning historians, which resulted in the upholding of this falsification until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Victor Zaslavsky: Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, Telos Press 2008, 131 pages.
