After the Soviet attack on Poland (17. 09. 1939) more or less 4500 Polish officers and cadets were imprisoned in the camp of Kozielsk on the territory of the USSR. Most of them were killed in Katyn near Smolensk in April and May 1940 as the result of Stalin’s orders. Altogether 15,000 officers, soldiers and policemen kept in the camps of Kozielsk, Ostaszkow and Starobielsk were murdered. In 1943 Germans declared the discovery of the mass graves around Katyn. The Soviets denied their responsibility and accused the fascists of the crime. In 1944 the evidences were falsified. In communist Poland everyone who discussed the Katyn crime was persecuted by the police. For the world it still did not exist. What was 15,000 people in comparison to Holocaust? For the Poles the crime was a special tragedy – it was a part of the German and Soviet plans to destroy the intellectual potential of the state. The fascists were killing Polish intellectuals – for example the professors of the Jagiellonian University – or imprisoning them in concentration camps for the same reasons.

“This film is not a story of the crime itself. It is a story of the lie about it. The families of the murdered people have to live with it for many years. Their fate is the main topic of the movie.”
Andrzej Wajda