Monika Scislowska
AP/Breitbart.com
4/11/2010
WARSAW, Poland (AP) – The leader of Poland’s government in exile while the nation was under Soviet-backed rule. The shipyard worker whose firing helped ignite the labor uprising that ultimately toppled communism here. A banking head who helped keep the country stable while the rest of the European Union plunged into recession.
When Poland lost its president and top military brass Saturday in a plane crash that killed 96, it also lost much of its living history and other elite members of society.
It is a supreme bitterness that they died near, of all places, Russia’s Katyn forest, where thousands of Polish officers were slain by Soviet forces in World War II in an attempt to eliminate some of the country’s brightest.
“This is so very much like Katyn, where our head was cut off,” former President Lech Walesa said.
Killed with President Lech Kaczynski in the plane crash near Smolensk, western Russia, were his wife, Maria Kaczynska, his closest aides, lawmakers, army commanders, church figures, historic figures, plane crew and relatives of the victims of the 1940 massacre of Polish officers in Katyn and in other places. They had been traveling to Katyn to mark the 70th anniversary.
The Soviet secret police killed thousands of Polish military leaders and intellectuals at Katyn and other places at the start of World War II. It was part of a strategy to subdue the country, whose eastern half it occupied starting in 1939, and better control it.
Among the victims Saturday was a former president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, 90, the last leader of Poland’s exiled government in London. The exile leadership was established during the Nazi occupation of Poland and continued to declare itself the rightful government during the decades of communism, until Walesa became Poland’s first popularly elected president in 1990.
The crash also took an icon of Poland’s Solidarity freedom movement, 80-year-old Anna Walentynowicz. Workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk went on strike when Walentynowicz was fired from her job as a crane operator in August 1980 for her opposition activity. That injustice sparked strikes that spread like wildfire to other plants across the nation, giving rise to Solidarity, the movement that helped bring about the demise of communism in Poland nine years later…
Volunteers carry candles in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, Poland, Sunday, April 11, 2010, after Polish President Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash. Kaczynski, his wife and some of the country's highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday April, 10, 2010, when the presidential plane crashed as it attempted to land in thick fog in western Russia, killing 96. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
The article continues at Breitbart.com
Read also this article by Florida Pundit, “Poland’s Role in the Fight for Human Freedom”
And at the Guardian in Britain, ” ‘They were wiped out. It’s our Katyn trauma all over again’; Poland struggles to come to terms with the loss of its president and dozens of senior officials in a plane crash near Smolensk airport; ‘These were some of our best’ ”
The daughter of the late Polish president and his twin brother look on as his coffin arrives at a military airport in Warsaw. Photograph: Alik Keplicz/AP
