What was it like for someone from Poland to be in the United States on the day that that Poland’s president, a good portion of his government and some of Poland’s leading lights were wiped out in a plane crash? Gazeta Wyborcza’s Washington correspondent Marcin Bosacki writes that if they were looking down from the heavens, those who died would have been happy at the way the nation they gave their lives for was being treated.
For Gazeta Wyborcza’s, Marcin Bosacki writes in part:
The telephone calls and e-mails kept coming on Saturday. And the people who called weren’t just American diplomats, former ambassadors to Warsaw, or Poland and Europe specialists from Washington think tanks. There were also ordinary Americans, acquaintances, neighbors, and sometimes they were people we hadn’t been in touch with for years. No one was able to say very much. But they all offered us their solidarity and prayers.
It has been many years since I’ve heard people in the U.S., and abroad generally (I can see the same on BBC), speak with such sympathy about Poland. Then came the exquisite words of Barack Obama …
This tragedy, this grief and sense emptiness, cannot be removed. Not yet, not on this sad Saturday. But I’ve talked a number of times with some of those who died on their way to the ceremony in Katyn. I knew Andrzej Przewonik, Slawomir Skrzypek, Jerzy Szmajdziski and, first of all, Mariusz Handzlik, the guiding spirit of president’s foreign policy. I think that all of them, along with President Kaczynski and the others, are watching this from above. And they are happy that this is the way the world is talking of Poland – about the country for which they dedicated their lives and, ultimately – sacrificed them.
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