The air crash at Smolensk is more than a tragedy of lives lost, and it is more than a national disaster: The death of a president with his wife and all his retinue. It is also a test of nerve, for all Poles the world over. They are asking themselves: Have we truly escaped from the nightmares of Poland’s past? Or have the demons returned to surround us once again, those giant bloodstained phantoms who came out of the forest to destroy every Polish generation for two centuries?
For 20 years, since the fall of communism, Poland has lived at peace with its neighbors and the Poles have enjoyed a rising prosperity. At last Poland was becoming the “normal country” it never was before. That old Poland lived in cycles, a hermetic history of repression, betrayal, resistance and rebellion. Everyone knew a list of dates and places — tragedies, resurrections, noble “Polish January” or piteous “Polish September” — which meant nothing to a foreigner.
So the joy of normality was that all those dates and all their haunting code could at last be forgotten.
But now this. On the way to the mass grave in Katyn forest, where Stalin murdered the military and civil elite of Poland in April 1940, the president of a free Poland dies as his Russian plane crashes into the trees a few kilometers from Katyn itself. He and his wife and the military, religious and political leaders who came with them intended to honor the Polish dead who lie in that piece of Russian earth. Now they have joined those dead men and become part of that tragedy, precisely 70 years on. A people whose collective memory has relied so much on mystical coincidence, the sense of a providence sometimes loving but often malign, will be tempted for a moment to think that Katyn will never be over, that Lech Kaczynski and his companions are not just part of the tragedy but part of the crime.
Millions of Poles, hearing this news, will have caught themselves thinking “Gibraltar!” — then made themselves suppress the thought. On 4 July 1943, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, head of the free Polish government in exile, was killed when his British plane crashed at Gibraltar. The British said it was an accident. Many Poles, then and now, didn’t and don’t believe them. They point out that the crash took place only three months after the Germans discovered the mass graves at Katyn; when Sikorski accused the Soviet Union of the crime, Stalin endangered the whole anti-Hitler alliance by breaking off relations with free Poland. Wasn’t it obvious that the British and the Soviets had a common interest in getting rid of Sikorski? And doesn’t Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hate and fear outspoken Polish leaders as much as Czar Nicholas or Stalin had done? And wasn’t that what the former Polish president, Lech Walesa, meant when he exclaimed on Saturday that “this is the second Katyn tragedy; the first time, they tried to cut our head off and now again the elite of our country has perished?”
But it’s paranoid nonsense which any Pole can be excused for entertaining for an awful moment — but which then blows away in the fresh air. Smolensk is not Gibraltar. The Russian-built plane was the president’s own, not a cunning loan from Moscow. Putin, who uneasily visited Katyn with the Polish prime minister on Wednesday, dislikes Polish aspirations but does not murder foreign heads of state.
Poland today is not cursed by destiny but by a brutal share of bad luck. This weekend it proved it was “a normal country” as the constitutional provisions for electing a new president went smoothly into action. I knew and liked some of the people who died at Smolensk on Saturday. They would not have denied that phantoms still lurk in the forest of Polish imaginations. But they wanted them to stay hidden among the trees.
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