This morning, there was a terrible tragedy inflicted upon the country of my ancestors…and it couldn’t have happened on a less evil day for Poland than today…
Polish President Lech Kaczynski is dead, along with his wife, the head of Poland’s central bank and various other senior government officials, after the plane they were travelling in crashed Saturday in western Russia.
Kaczynski, 60, and his entourage were flying from Warsaw to the Russian city of Smolensk for a memorial service when the aircraft crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog, officials said. Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors among the 96 people aboard the presidential aircraft, a 26-year-old Tupolev Tu-154.
“We still cannot fully understand the scope of this tragedy and what it means for us in the future. Nothing like this has ever happened in Poland,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Piotr Paszkowski said.
It’s bad enough that this disaster should occur in its own right…but on the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre? Doubly tragic, doubly frustrating, and doubly ironic.
For those unfamiliar with the event, the Katyn Massacre was one of the most evil, vicious, and tragic moments of the Second World War. After the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland in 1940, 20 000 Polish military officers were taken into the forests of Katyn, near modern day Smolensk, in Russia. The cream of Polish society — the educated elite, the future politicians, businessmen, and leaders of the Polish nation — taken into the depths of the forest, murdered by the Soviet secret police, and buried in unmarked, mass graves. It was a deliberate attempt to permanently debilitate and destroy Polish society, and make it succeptible to Russian domination and control. Cultural genocide at its finest…and one that the Russians blamed on the Nazi’s until the 1990s!
The Polish President was leading the delegation to the Katyn memorial, and all I can think about is that the pattern of Polish history repeats itself, over and over — a temporal loop without escape. Triumph & tragedy, one extreme to the other. No middle ground, no pause for contemplation or breath…Poland’s story has been an endless series of lurches, between the lowest circles of hell, and the soaring triumphs of success & power. I experienced it first hand during my trip to Poland last summer. Mourning and grief that spans a millenium seep from the stones and the brickwork…punctuated by the memorials to happier, more glorious times. National — almost mythological — glory and legendary victories, fighting to the death against barbarism and suffering on a scale that threatens to break an entire population. It’s breathtaking, heartbreaking, and emotionally exhausting…
…and now there is one more tragedy to add to the communal experience of Poles around the world, compounded by the memory of an even-greater crime from 70 years ago. Karma seems to work with the efficiency of a whiplash on my countrymen…and I wish with all my heart that it would spare them for a couple of decades, at the very least.
But it’s very likely a vain hope, if history is any judge…and history, like life, is rarely fair.
