Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country’s consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of cinema history. He was modest and wrote, “Films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West,” in his 1989 memoir, Double Vision: My Life in Film. Yet the impact of his canon was much wider than that remark would suggest.
His main early films expressed a dark realism—not “socialist realism,” but a unique variety of “resistance realism.” Decades later, Wajda contributed to the rise and triumph of the Solidarity labor movement, which swept Communism from its rule over Poland in 1989.
Wajda produced almost 50 motion pictures, both shorts and full-length features, comprising dramatic narratives and documentaries. His long career may be framed by his 1958 classic, Ashes and Diamonds, and, 49 years later, his 2007 film Katyn.
Both of these films reflected Wajda’s own experience as a Pole. He had fought during World War II in the Home Army, a Polish underground movement founded in 1942 in support of the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile. The Home Army recruited hundreds of thousands of participants to combat the Germans but had to contend further with the enmity of Joseph Stalin, who had assisted Hitler in partitioning Poland in 1939. Even after Germany invaded Russia in 1941, determination that the Poles should not be fully independent motivated decisions in Moscow.
Ashes and Diamonds appeared at a crucial time. Two years before its release, in October 1956, the Polish Communist order was confronted by acts of revolt, leading to the reappointment as head of the state “Workers’ Party,” of Wladyslaw Gomulka. The former Russian satrap, Gomulka had been purged from public life, including his imprisonment, for eight years beginning in 1949. He was not much of a reformer, but he was a symbol of Stalinist repression. Then the Hungarian Revolution began in Budapest as Polish defiance proved contagious.
The Hungarian insurrection was defeated, and hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Austria, whence they were resettled in the United States and elsewhere. The early period of reform in Poland included abandonment of strict Stalinist controls over the arts and literature. Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds became a banner for free thought in the Soviet sphere.
Based on a postwar novel, Ashes and Diamonds tells the story of two veterans of the Home Army: Maciek, played by Zbigniew Cybulski, and Maciek’s commander, Andrzej. The action unfolds on the day the war in Europe ended in German surrender. Facing brutal aggression by the Soviet secret police after the expulsion of German forces from Poland, they and other Home Army members are ordered to assassinate a Communist functionary, but their mission is mishandled. Maciek is killed by Communist soldiers, his body crumpling in a trash-filled field.
Cybulski, as Maciek, was not only a remarkable antihero portrayed in a movie produced under Communist rule; he was electrifyingly charismatic as a troubled young rebel. Throughout Ashes and Diamonds, most of which is filmed at night, Maciek wears sunglasses, having suffered harm to his sight while hiding in the sewers of Warsaw during the 1944 Polish National Uprising against the Germans. The doomed fate of many fighters who escaped through the sewers was depicted in the predecessor to Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal (1956). (The Russian army, which was close to Warsaw at that moment, had refused to help the Polish patriots.) Maciek also manages to sport rumpled hair somewhat reminiscent of Elvis Presley. Wajda said he had been influenced by Marlon Brando’s similar performance in The Wild One (1953) as well as the diffident acting style of James Dean. Cybulski died in a railroad accident in 1967, at 39.
Wajda’s audacity in making Ashes and Diamonds began the critical film movement in Eastern Europe, and influenced other filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, both of whom listed it among their 10 favorite movies.
Katyn, released in 2007, revealed the full horror of Stalin’s Polish phobia. It recounted the detention and execution of at least 14,500 Polish officers and civilians by the Russian secret police in the Katyn Forest, an obscure site in Russia, in 1940. Hitler and Stalin were still friendly then, and when they divided Poland between themselves, the Russians had taken the Polish officers as prisoners. After the Germans attacked Russia, they discovered the mass graves at Katyn in 1943 and blamed the murders on Moscow. The Russians attempted to place responsibility for this ghastly crime on the Nazis, but the attempt failed.
Predictably, Katyn remained a forbidden topic in Poland until the fall of Communism. For Wajda, the ordeal of the Polish victims was acutely personal: his father, a Polish Army captain named Jakub Wajda, was among those killed.
Wajda’s memorial to the dead of Katyn is a compelling, if terrible, chronicle. It treats the fear and dismay of the families of the captives, waiting for word that, when it came, was devastating, and brought by the hated German occupiers. The Germans tried to use the Polish survivors in a propaganda campaign. After the war, some brave Poles organized a secret investigation into the atrocities, turning up evidence sought by the victims’ relatives.
As noted in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 2008, Wajda said Katyn was intended to communicate with “the young generation . . . [which] is moving away from our past. Busy with mundane matters, they forget names and dates, which, no matter if we want it or not, create us as a nation with its fears and misgivings surfacing at every political opportunity.” The film was accompanied by an austere and anguished score written by the modernist Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
With Russia under Vladimir Putin attempting to reassert its former power in Eastern Europe—and the rest of the world—Wajda’s films have gained a renewed relevance. The director lived an impressively productive life, receiving awards around the world. While none of his films won an Oscar, four were nominated, and in 2000, he was given an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. But the example of his dedication to truth, one hopes, will long reaffirm his moral greatness.
