Katyń commemoration: Barbara Szacka and new Andrzej Wajda’s movie

A new Andrzej Wajda’s movie „Katyń” is now being shown in polish cinemas. The film story of the execution of 22.000 polish officers at Katyn by agents of the NKWD became a part of all-Polish Katyń commemoration. Wajda stressed that the film would not have seen the light of day during the communist period. He said he hoped his film will be followed by more on the same topic.

Governmental action „Katyń 1940. Pamiętam” (Katyn 1940. I remember.) is supposed to remind Poles the truth about Katyń massacre. As polish sociologist Barbara Szacka tells in „Gazeta Wyborcza”, the memory of Katyń has a class character. The less educated people does not care about history and the facts, or they accept the old communistic propaganda, which blames Germans for this killing (11 percent of Poles). 61 percent of Poles knows, who has been murdering in 1940. But – as Szacka have said – people with high education do not talk about history. She describes the research from 1988, when the analysis of collective historical memory in Poland. research done in Wroclaw and in Warsaw pointed that only 2.9 percent of high educated Poles has been talkig about Ribbentrop-Mołotow pact, Katyń or ideas such as Syberia or concentration camps in the north of ZSRR. It can be compared to the 5.5 percent of Poles discussing about stalinism, KOR or martial law. If the history topics were quite popular in the conversations (54 percent said, that they talk about history sometimes, 23 percent – often), topics of the Second World War (including Katyń) was less popular than the history of PRL.

Szacka said, that memory of Katyn was quite exclusive. Because officialy this topic was prohibited, only families and the close circle of friends connected with this families was interested in keeping the memory life. And – because the executed persons from Katyń, Smoleńsk, Charków, Kalinin, Kijów and Mińsk were members of Polish intelligentsia, most of all this group held memory about the Katyn massacre.

You can read the article about Katyń in the english Wikipedia here. More about Wajda’s movie can be reached in nternational Herald Tribune.

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Kategorie: Formy upamiętnienia / In english / Świadomość historyczna