President Kaczynski’s last speech

Below is the text of the speech which Lech Kaczynski, who died on Saturday, was going to deliver at the 70th anniversary ceremony of the Katyn massacre.

“Dear Representatives of the Katyn Families. Ladies and Gentlemen. In April 1940 over twenty-one thousand Polish prisoners from the NKVD camps and prisons were killed. The genocide was committed at Stalin’s will and at the Soviet Union’s highest authority’s command.

The alliance between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the Soviet attack on Poland on 17 September 1939 reached a terrifying climax in the Katyn massacre. Not only in the Katyn forest, but also in Tver, Kcharkiv and other known, and unknown, execution sites citizens of the Second Republic of Poland, people who formed the foundation of our statehood, who adamantly served the motherland, were killed.

At the same time families of the murdered and thousands of citizens of the eastern territory of the pre-war Poland were sent into exile deep into the Soviet Union, where their indescribable suffering marked the path of the Polish Golgotha of the East.

The most tragic station on that path was Katyn. Polish officers, priests, officials, police officers, border and prison guards were killed without a trial or sentence. They fell victims to an unspeakable war. Their murder was a violation of the rights and conventions of the civilized world. Their dignity as soldiers, Poles and people, was insulted. Pits of death were supposed to hide the bodies of the murdered and the truth about the crime for ever.

The world was supposed to never find out. The families of the victims were deprived of the right to mourn publicly, to proudly commemorate their relatives. Ground covered the traces of crime and the lie was supposed to erase it from people’s memory.

An attempt to hide the truth about Katyn – a result of a decision taken by those who masterminded the crime – became one of the foundations of the communists’ policy in an after-war Poland: a founding lie of the People’s Republic of Poland.

It was the time when people had to pay a high price for knowing and remembering the truth about Katyn. However, the relatives of the murdered and other courageous people kept the memory, defended it and passed it on to next generations of Poles. They managed to preserve the memory of Katyn in the times of communism and spread it in the times of free and independent Poland. Therefore, we owe respect and gratitude to all of them, especially to the Katyn Families. On behalf of the Polish state, I offer sincere thanks to you, that by defending the memory of your relatives you managed to save a highly important dimension of our Polish consciousness and identity.

Katyn became a painful wound of Polish history, which poisoned relations between Poles and Russians for decades. Let’s make the Katyn wound finally heal and cicatrize. We are already on the way to do it. We, Poles, appreciate what Russians have done in the past years. We should follow the path which brings our nations closer, we should not stop or go back.

All circumstances of the Katyn crime need to be investigated and revealed. It is important that innocence of the victims is officially confirmed and that all files concerning the crime are open so that the Katyn lie could disappear for ever. We demand it, first of all, for the sake of the memory of the victims and respect for their families’ suffering. We also demand it in the name of common values, which are necessary to form a foundation of trust and partnership between the neighbouring nations in the whole Europe.

Let’s pay homage to the murdered and pray upon their bodies. Glory to the Heroes! Hail their memory!” (mg)

Local Polish-Americans remember plane crash victims

By Joseph Popiolkowski and Dan Herbeck

NEWS STAFF REPORTERS

News of the plane crash Saturday in western Russia that killed 97 leading Polish officials, including President Lech Kaczynski, was met with grief and disbelief across Buffalo's large Polish-American community.

Students and teachers of the Polish Saturday School at St. John Gualbert Catholic Church in Cheektowaga looked "visibly shaken" by the news that top political and military leaders had died, said the Rev. David Bialkowski.

"You just have to trust and pray for [the victims], for all their families," the pastor said after saying Saturday's 4 p.m. Mass, which included prayers and a Polish hymn for the dead. "They need to be comforted and strengthened now during this terrible time."

The school requested the parish's Polish flag and held a memorial service. The flag was returned with a black ribbon tied around it, which is a Polish tradition in times of mourning, he said.

Bialkowski expects the mood to be somber Sunday for the church's weekly 10:30 a.m. Mass in Polish.

Meanwhile, Dick Solecki, president of the Western New York division of the Polish American Congress, remembered meeting Kaczynski in 2008.

The former member of the Cheektowaga Town Board was one of a dozen people invited to a dinner held in honor of the Polish president at Blair House — the official state guest house in Washington D.C.

When it was Solecki's turn to meet the president, he tried to arrange a presidential visit to Buffalo.

"I told him we're close to Niagara Falls and his eyes lit up and he said, 'Wodospad Niagara!' meaning falls of Niagara," Solecki said.

Solecki followed up with a letter inviting Kaczynski to Western New York but received a reply that said a visit wouldn't fit his busy schedule. Solecki had planned to try again.

"When [Kaczynski] spoke he had everybody's attention," he said. "You could tell he was a diplomat, he was a president. You knew he was somebody special."

A federal prosecutor from Buffalo who spent seven years working in Poland lost two close friends in the plane crash.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephan J. Baczynski, like many Polish-Americans from Buffalo, was shocked and saddened.

But Baczynski, 54, also has personal ties to the tragedy.

"I knew nine of the people who died on that plane, including the president of Poland," Baczynski said on Saturday. "Two of the men who died were people who I became close friends with while I was in Poland."

Representing the U.S. Justice Department, the Polish-speaking Baczynski worked in Poland from 1995 until 2002. He worked in Warsaw and served as a resident legal adviser to Poland's parliament and to Polish law enforcement agencies. Baczynski also has family members living in Poland and visited there as recently as last week.

He got word of the disaster Saturday morning when a Polish friend called him.

"I immediately went on the Internet to look for a list of those killed, because I knew there would be people on the list I knew," Baczynski said.

Solecki knew at least eight people on the plane, he said, including Solidarity labor movement co-founder Anna Walentynowicz, 80, and Krystyna Bochenek, 56, deputy parliament speaker.

"This is like losing the cream of the crop — these people that cared about the government, that cared about the country," said Solecki, who, with his mother, Jozefa, was featured in a September Buffalo News article about the Polish Legacy Project, which is preserving the memories of Poland's World War II refugees.

Baczynski said he learned that Jerzy Szmajdzinski was killed. He was a member of Poland's Parliament during Baczynski's time there. He was also Poland's former minister of defense. Another victim was Janusz Kochanoski, a Polish law professor and civil rights ombudsman.

"These were two of the wonderful people I spent a lot of time with ... good friends," Baczynski said. "This is a very tough day."

Baczynski, a Buffalo resident, spoke to The Buffalo News at federal court, where William J. Hochul Jr. was sworn in as U.S. Attorney for Western New York.

Hochul is the first Polish-American to hold the post in Buffalo, and he was sworn in by Chief District Judge William M. Skretny, the first Polish-American to hold that post here. Standing a few feet away was Carl L. Bucki, the first Polish-American to serve as chief of the Bankruptcy Court in Buffalo.

While the European Union nation of 38 million begins its official week of mourning, local Polish-Americans are planning a solemn Mass for the crash victims at 6 p.m. Sunday in St. Stanislaus Catholic Church on Townsend Street. The service is being organized by the Polish American Congress and Polish Saturday School.

"This is a tremendous day in the history of Polish-Americans in Buffalo, and at the same time, we have this horrible tragedy in our home nation," said Peter G. Sloane, former president of the Polish-American Congress of Western New York. "We're seeing positives and negatives on the same day. There are a lot of mixed emotions."