Tragedy and Tears

We arrived home from our family trip to England on April 10th, at the same hour the tragic deaths of The President and First Lady of The Republic of Poland were announced. Mariusz, a driver from Alex's school, recognized us at the airport taxi stand and he was the one who broke the news.

But we had no idea what had actually happened, as so many wildly exaggerated rumors were floating around. "The Russians finally did it--they killed our President," or "Turkish terrorists blew up the plane, and that's why the EU shouldn't let Turkey in", being most commonly repeated. It became a mockery of the simple tragedy that we eventually learned had occurred:

While headed to the airport nearest Smolensk, Russia, on their way to the Katyn memorial for official ceremonies there, President Jaroslaw Kaczynski's plane clipped some trees at the end of the tarmac, going down on the runway in heavy fog.

Many influential Poles, with important cultural, historical and political roles to fulfill, were presumed lost in an instant. And while fatalities couldn't be calculated at the time that we first heard, eyewitness accounts were pretty clear: no one on that plane could have survived the fireball which ignited after it fell.

People were crying openly in the streets, as was our cabdriver, who was trying to wipe his eyes, blow his nose, talk to us in broken English and valiantly keep his car on the road.

Alex misunderstood the words, "The President is dead." He has a semi-obsessive thing for Obama; he thought that's who we were talking about. He tried hard to listen through his tears, but of course things still weren't ok, even when he finally understood. How could they be? An important person that a lot of people cared about was gone, forever, and he sensed the shock and fear and disbelieving grief all that day, in the faces of friends we would later see and meet.

Poland was hurting, having lost their leader, and despite Kaczynski being hugely unpopular with a large number of them, her people felt alone, and rudderless and sad. The office of the President was being respected and mourned, if not the actual man.

More sorrow, once we arrived at the house: Alex's doggie friend Max back home, a loveably lazy, sweetheart of a Lab, the only dog Alex could be around for any length of time without screaming and running away, was dead. We piled it on by accidentally reminding him during dinner that Tony was leaving the next day, for a 7 day trip to the States.

A Polish friend came over and the story began to unfold; the heads of the Polish national bank, Navy and Army Chiefs of Staff, and several Members of Parliament had been on the flight. The depth of the pain felt by people we knew, and the true scale of the loss, simply grew and grew.

Feeling badly already, for our friends and for Poland, but also for our son, we felt powerless with no way to help. The crash site was too big and complex, it would take time, lots of time, to know what happened and make any sense of it. The wrangling between the Poles and Russians over who was best qualified, or deserved the right to investigate the crash, started up. Anger mounted, and everything came to a halt.

The Katyn tragedy of 1940, so long covered up, was supposed to be fully aired by this memorial visit, and by Russia's public apology and admission of their wrongdoing. Most people know of the rather reserved general apologies made, for the killings of 20,000 Polish miltary officers and enlisted men of the Polish Reserve Corps; they took place in 1990, and again recently, this year. But not all Poles did, and those who did, did not believe those apologies went far enough. Their anger over the delays in investigating the air crash, steadily grew worse and worse. They saw propaganda or cover-up, or deliberate stalling, in each and every thing.

No one seems able to see any of the events surrounding Katyn clearly, to grieve it and the aftermath of the tragedy then, or now, in a way those who died there deserve.

Truly sad was the disbelief and finger pointing which surrounded the news that it was likely that the Polish pilots disregarded orders to fly to a more distant airport, as their first two attempts at landing took place in weather deemed too dangerous. The working theory was that, exacerbated by the President's or their on-board Commander's need to be seen as in charge on this day of all days, the pilots were too inexperienced to recognize that their third attempt would fail.

So much of Polish history is like this, oftentimes preventable, foreseeable, painful and sad, with no real winner in the end. Even when they win, there's no feeling of triumph, or sense that they've come out ahead. I see more pain in Poland's future, I can't help it. As any Pole will tell you, it's just the way it always is.

Learn more about the 1940 tragedy at Katyn:

See the article at www.cia.gov in the CSI Library pages, titled 'The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field,' by Benjamin Fischer

Watch the 2007 Andrzej Wajda film, 'Katyn' (in Polish with English subtitles)