From The Telegraph: Polish plane crash: country has shown resilience since President Kaczynski’s death

For Anne Applebaum, the crash that killed the Polish president Lech Kaczynski and his entourage was a personal tragedy as well as a blow for Poland. But she believes the country is emerging stronger.

By the time I met Ryszard Kaczorowski, he was an elegant, elderly man, with no air of tragedy or trauma about him. Yet at the age of 21, he had been arrested by the Soviet secret police —“ this was 1940, in Soviet-occupied Bialystok —“ and sent to Kolyma, one of the worst camps of the Gulag.

Kaczorowski’s story helps explain why Poles have been so traumatised since last Saturday’s plane crash near the Katyn forest, why air raid sirens wailed at 8.56 on Saturday morning, marking a week since that fatal moment, why at least 100,000 people came to Saturday’s public memorial service in Warsaw – and why more are expected to converge on Krakow on Sunday, despite the clouds of volcanic ash drifting across Europe.

Though sentenced to 10 years forced labour, Kaczorowski never served his whole term. In 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR, and Stalin decided to allow the hundreds of thousands of Poles in his labour camps to form an army. Kaczorowski marched out of the USSR under the command of General Wladyslaw Anders, travelled through Persia and Palestine, and fought at Monte Cassino in Italy.

After the war, Kaczorowski did not go home. Like many others in what became known as Anders’ Army, he stayed in London, not wanting to return to a Soviet-dominated Poland. But he maintained ties with the Polish government-in-exile, a group of men who had been Britain’s allies during the war, but who quickly turned into an embarrassment afterwards.

Following the Soviet occupation of Poland, these “London Poles” became irrelevant: Britain, like every other country in the world, recognised the new communist government as legitimate, not them.

Nevertheless, the government-in-exile remained in place, symbolically preserving the memory of free Poland. In 1986, Kaczorowski accepted the honorary post of president-in-exile. He held that title until 1990, when he transferred the insignia of office to Lech Walesa.

Last weekend, Kaczorowski died in the plane crash that also killed the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski. Both were on their way to honour the 20,000 Polish officers murdered by Stalin in the Katyn forest and at other places nearby. That act of mass terror, which took place 70 years ago this month, could easily have killed Kaczorowski too. He did not escape death in Russia a second time.

Contrary to some reports, there was not an unusual number of VIPs on board, given that it was the president’s plane, and given where it was going, and there were no members of the cabinet. Nevertheless, there were many people whose names appear halfway through newspaper articles, people whom “everybody knows” in political circles – people like Ryszard Kaczorowski who had played important symbolic roles in public life, people who do the groundwork for the politicians whose names are more familiar.

I knew or had met about a dozen people on the plane. My husband —“ the Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski – knew almost all of them, stewardesses included. Among them were people like Stanislaw Komorowski, the deputy defence minister and former ambassador to London. He recently negotiated a defence treaty with the United States, and he also laid the diplomatic groundwork for Poland’s presence in Afghanistan. I last saw him a few weeks ago at the opera, with his wife.

Andrzej Kremer, my husband’s deputy, was also on the plane. Kremer helped organise the joint visit of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, to Katyn 11 days ago, just shortly before the President was due to visit. I met him several times at dinners and parties.

Another passenger was Andrzej Przewoznik, whose job it was to look after Polish cemeteries and monuments in places where awful things had happened.

The Katyn memorial, being the most awful of them all, was his organisation’s responsibility. I saw him recently at a conference in Budapest, where he explained his work to a crowd of Hungarians.

All of these people were civil servants, politicians and public activists, the sorts of professional who, in both Anglo-Saxon and Polish political culture, do not always receive much respect. We make fun of them (Yes, Minister) or we investigate them, usually starting from the assumption that they have something to hide.

Yet when a large group of them tragically die, one suddenly realises how much, as group, they had accomplished, and how valuable to the nation they are. Not only Komorowski, Kremer and Przewoznik, but also Arkadiusz Rybicki, the MP who fought for a better understanding of autistic children; General Franciszek Gagor, who prepared the Polish army for Nato accession; Janusz Kochanowski, the ombudsman for civil rights. These men and women were working hard on behalf of the country, and not necessarily gaining much money or glory in recompense.

The loss of such people —“ and so many of them, all it once —“ explains part of why Poland has been in deep mourning since the plane crash last weekend…