Poles Reeling from Crash That Killed President Kaczynski; Sympathy Worldwide

The deadly plane crash in a foggy forest outside Smolensk, Russia Saturday was another horror story for Poland, a nation that has endured more than its share. The tragedy cut short the life of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, as well as nearly the entire leadership of his political party, along with the top brass of Polish Republic Armed Forces -- 97 in all, dead in a terrible Twilight Zone-like twist in another foreboding woods in western Russia.

It was a cruel reminder to all Poles -- and to freedom loving people with a sense of history -- of a cursed forest known as Katyn, and a legacy too heavy to bear: two slaughters, separated by seventy years, each devastating in its own right, and each sending the Polish nation reeling.

This time the world did not look away and pretend to not see what had happened. And that was something, maybe everything. As Poles across their country came to pay their respects at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, and leaders across the globe offered sympathy to the stricken nation, the reality of the ash and smoldering ruin in the Russian forest left a country wondering what would come next -- even as it marked the anniversary of one catastrophe with the shock of another.

Mikolaj Kunicki, professor of modern Polish History at the University of Notre Dame, said the tragedy was of historic proportions. "Voices today are coming from all sides of the political spectrum ... I think it is highly symbolic -- it will add more into this, you know, 'black meaning' of Katyn for Poles. What you hear today is that this place is just the Curse of Poland."

Indeed, on Polish television former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, called Katyn a "cursed place" with "horrible symbolism."

The Katyn Massacre took place in 1940 at a site not far from Saturday's crash. Nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were cut down in cold blood by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police forces. The dead included, according to CIA documents:

"[A]n admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. It was their social status that landed them in front of NKVD execution squads. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded. In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps -- part of Stalin's long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland."

It took decades for Russians to acknowledge the massacre, which, even as word trickled out during the Second World War, was difficult for outsiders to comprehend in scope and intention. Just two days ago, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader to commemorate the massacre, standing alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Putin --who blamed the deaths on Stalin's "totalitarian" regime – was widely seen as moving Russia closer to Poland by acknowledging Soviet wrongdoing at the scene.

Saturday was to have been a second commemorative ceremony, attended by the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the bulk of his party leadership, the Polish equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff including the heads of the land, air, and navy forces. Also aboard: members of the original Katyn massacre's families, the head of the national bank, and assorted other dignitaries including the former president of the Polish government in exile, a shadow government launched during the Second World War and continuing through the Communist era.

"Observers are emphasizing the symbolical parallel between the Katyn crime and the current tragedy," said Professor Kunicki. "The presence of children of fallen officers among victims is striking, but I already heard one opinion indicating the link between the murder of Polish elites in 1940, and the death of the president and other members of the contemporary elite."

Russian officials immediately issued statements of sorrow and solidarity with the Polish people and vowed to aid in investigating the disaster, an apparent accident during an attempted landing. "As our first priority, we must establish the causes of this tragedy," Putin said at the site of the crash. "As a second priority, we must do everything in our power to assist the families and relatives of the deceased."

Kaczynski was not a universally beloved figure in Poland or abroad. Although he'd been an anti-communist and Solidarity figure in his youth, by the 1990s Kacyznski had broken with others from the movement. After founding the Law and Justice Party in 2001, first as mayor of Warsaw in 2002, and then after his election to the presidency in 2005, Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw (who was not on the plane) became polarizing conservative figures in Europe. They promoted anti-corruption, pro-traditional Catholic values stands that ran counter to the more liberal expectations of Western Europeans, including positions that were anti-gay, as well as those that were suspicious of the European Union.

And yet, even as the Law and Justice party may not win any new converts, the shock of the mass deaths may be remembered, around the world, as the worst single blow to a nation's leadership in modern history.

There have been other tragedies of smaller proportion – Africa has seen its share, as when, in 1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyramiana and his Burundian equivalent Cyprien Ntarymaira were shot down, and in 1986 Samora Machel, president of Mozambique, was killed in a plane crash. In 1980, Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco Sa Carneiro and his defense minister Adelino Amara da Costa died in a suspicious plane accident now believed to have been an assassination.

But it would be hard to find a non-war time event that has brought down so many high ranking officials at one moment -- or at a such a poignant time in a beleaguered nation's history. As night fell Saturday in the Polish capital any such comparisons to other tragedies surely rang hollow. Thousands of stricken Poles walked Warsaw's streets holding candles, singing the national anthem, raw emotion creating a kind of solidarity not seen since Communism fell; a solidarity laced with a bitter taste of pain.