RALEIGH -- The tragic airplane crash on Saturday that wiped out nearly half the leadership of the Polish government is a stark reminder that death stalks always in ways no man can see.
In Warsaw, late Friday, I declined an offer to fly with those whose lives were so suddenly and unexpectedly lost in the crash at Smolensk. The invitation came at the end of an hour-long meeting with a close friend, Andrzej Przewoznik, the Polish official in charge of on-the-ground arrangements for the visit of President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage to the cemetery in Katyn Forest near where the crash occurred.
"Come with us - you really should - stay for next week's observance as well," Andrzej said as our meeting ended. He was referring to the next day's flight and a national ceremony in Warsaw to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Stalin's 1940 massacre that liquidated a high percentage of Poland's officer corps early in World War II.
My first reaction was to accept his offer and go back to Katyn. I had been there Wednesday as part of the official delegation that accompanied Prime Minister Donald Tusk to his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The Polish prime minister had invited me because my book about Katyn has proven highly popular with the Poles. I had given more than 20 television and radio interviews in the three days, many of them just after the Putin-Tusk encounter.
If I went back, there would be more interviews and even more attention for the book. But after a week away from home, I was tired and needed to get back. A U.S. national observance of Katyn, an event I proposed last September, is scheduled for May 5 at the Library of Congress in Washington, and I am one of the organizers.
"No, I'd better get back," I told Andrzej with reluctance.
He responded by throwing up hands and nodding his head in disagreement - an image that will be forever etched now in my mind. "Dobrze (OK)," was all he said, but the implication was clear: I'd be missing out on a great opportunity.
"He's probably right," I remember thinking at that moment. We then posed for a photo, gave each other the bear-hug that friends in Poland so often exchange, and I was off. Moments later, as I waited for the elevator, Andrzej dashed out of his office and down the corridor; he waved and was gone. It was half past five and he had a plane to catch at dawn.
I hope he was able to go home, that he had a last and memorable evening with his lovely wife Jolanta, and his daughters, Ashia and Kasia. Just before we parted, I asked about his family because I had dined at their home and spoke three years ago to the assembly at Ashia's gymnasium. He beamed with parental pride when he told me Ashia, now 21, is studying Hebrew like many young Christian Poles who are interested in the rich, thousand-year heritage of the Jews in Poland.
In that sense Ashia is a chip off the block: Her father supervised the establishment of the haunting memorial at Belzec where approximately 435,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Nothing infuriated Andrzej more than the occasional references that still appear in the press to "Polish death camps." In fact he oversaw the restoration and maintenance of Polish cemeteries all over the Eurasian land mass - from Ukraine to Western Russia, to Siberia and at Monte Cassino in Italy, where Polish troops made a famous and heroic assault that helped clear the road to Rome in 1944.
The tragedy of the deaths of Andrzej Przewoznik and of the 96 others on the plane is compounded by the fact that it came fast on the heels of a new turn in Russo-Polish relations. Andrzej was confident that a new path forward with the Russians had been established that eventually could bring closure to the most important issue blocking the road to better relations. On the trip back to Warsaw on Wednesday night, a member of Tusk's inner circle told me "Now there will be no turning back from what was accomplished today."
In the aftermath of this ghastly crash, I fear that there will be a spate of accusations and recriminations - bitter and strident ones at that. Poland has a hard-line faction that wants to cling to old grievances over Stalin's crimes. God knows all too well they spring from a blood-soaked earth. It is indeed ironic that so many leaders of Poland should perish near the very spot that symbolizes, more than any other, Stalin's treacherous policy to liquidate the best and brightest of Poland.
President Kaczynski was particularly outspoken in his criticism of the Russians over the Katyn issue. One reason he went there only three days after his rival, Donald Tusk, was to salvage something with the domestic audience. He was trailing badly in the polls in an election set for this fall (but which has now been moved up). Poles who think the worst of Putin will surely say: "Putin detested Kaczynski and now he's done him in."
Andrzej Przewoznik, the Tusk inner circle and other progressives readily acknowledged that Putin has a very difficult challenge on his hands - that the typical Russian has a hard time understanding why the Poles complain about losing a mere 22,000 (officers, police and border guards slain at three major sites and elsewhere) when the Soviet Union lost millions. Educating the Russians about their tortured history will be a very difficult task.
Were he still alive, Andrzej, my warm and generous friend, would be the first to say: "Do not turn back; the old grievances must not force another long and pointless stalemate, we must embrace the future with confidence and hope." The words may be mine, but he expressed that very thought in the last hours of his life. If he could, he would now call on his countrymen to once again dry their tears and bravely face their ancient conflict with the Russians, to put the enmity aside and resolve it at last.
Allen Paul, a former newspaper reporter, lives in Raleigh. His book "Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth" has been a bestseller in Poland twice. A new edition has just been released in this country.
