WARSAW, Poland, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- Politicians and victims’ families in Poland were first to see the world premiere of “Katyn,” a film about the Soviet massacre of 22,000 Poles in World War II.
Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s “Katyn” had its first showing Monday night in Warsaw, prompting Russian charges that Poland “chooses to remember only selected fragments of history,” Polish Radio said Tuesday.
It was the first Polish movie about the massacre in the Katyn Forest, west of the Russian town of Smolensk, where Soviet secret police killed Polish army officers and civilians taken prisoners from 1939-40.
The pro-Kremlin Russia Today television show in Moscow said Poles also committed war crimes, killing tens of thousands of Russian prisoners in the 1920 Soviet-Polish war and a few hundred Jews in Jedwabne during WWII, the Polish Radio report said.
The Katyn massacre in World War II was taboo in the communist-run Poland and only Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 admitted Moscow was responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest.
Wajda, 81, dedicated the movie to his parents. His father was a Polish army officer killed in the Katyn forest and his mother refused to believe her husband would never return home.
