A Plane Crash Changes Poland

The presidential plane was carrying a delegation to Katyn, to commemorate the mass murder of a previous Polish elite: the 20,000 reservist officers murdered by Stalin's NKVD in 1940.

The symbolism of the tragedy to many Poles is almost unbearable. In 1943 General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of the Polish wartime government, died in a plane crash in Gibraltar. No foul play was proved there, but many Poles believe that he was murdered because of his resolute determination to expose the Katyn massacre-which the Soviet Union blamed on the Germans. Now another Polish president, closely involved in the same issue, has died in an all too similar manner.

They included Poland's deputy foreign minister and a dozen members of Parliament, the chiefs of the army and the navy, and the president of the national bank. They included Anna Walentynowicz, 80, the former dock worker whose firing in 1980 set off the Solidarity strike that ultimately overthrew Polish Communism, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre that they were on their way to commemorate.

Reports in Britain will no doubt describe President Kaczyński as "a controversial figure" (the BBC has already started). Leftists resented him for pursuing a policy of lustration: that is, of requiring public servants to declare whether they had played a role in the previous Communist regime. These critics applauded a similar policy when it was imposed on former fascist countries after 1945 and, indeed, generally support the Spanish government in its attempts to reopen what happened under Franco but, for whatever reason, consider it tasteless to apply the same standard to former Communists.

In fact, Lech Kaczyński was a patriot: a man who never collaborated with the dictators or accepted the occupation of his country by the Red Army. Some Polish politicians, who had made occasional compromises - muting their criticism in return for being allowed to take up foreign postings, for example - found his purism uncomfortable. But ordinary Poles admired Kaczyński, and elected him with a handsome majority.

Praising the work of Kaczynski and his wife to promote closer ties between the Polish and Jewish peoples, by "making a significant contribution to the healing process of the scars of the past and the building of a common better future", Israeli President Shimon Peres emphasized that bilateral ties between Israel and Poland had been strengthened during Kaczynski's presidency, and had been distinguished by a spirit of friendship and warmth....

Kaczynski who played an active role in the attempt to eradicate anti-Semitism from post-Communist Poland, noted with regard to Jews murdered by the Nazis on Polish soil that while there were several European regimes which collaborated with the Nazis even before the war, the Polish government did not, and when German troops entered Poland in September 1939, Poland went to war against the German Reich.