In The New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum (Gulag) hails Andrzej Wajda's Katya, the 81-year-old Polish director's latest feature and an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film, as "a movie that matters". The film "tells the story of the near-simultaneous Soviet and German invasions of Poland in September 1939, and the Red Army's subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the forests near the Russian village of Katyn and elsewhere, among them Wajda's father." The murdered men's crime was that they were the cream of the Polish military, educated patriots and courageous intellectuals whose continued existence might make it just a little harder for Stalin to absorb and subjugate the eastern territories.
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