Presidential Flight on Death Wings
It's Saturday, beautiful April day. possibly it was fog early in the morning, now the sun is shining. Dogs go to the park on Filter Street. I let them off the leash. They watch each other, they don't decision away, they sniff around the lawn. Then the puppy of the dachshund approaches them. I think his owner lost sight of him. I see he's looking for him, so I say,
- I'm sorry. Ma'am! Your dog's here! - She heard me, nodding away. Holding a cell telephone in his hand goes on the lawn to my alley.
- I'm sorry. There he is, I say, behind that bush!
But she doesn't pay attention to him. He comes closer, stranger, and says,
- I'm sorry. Sir, I just received word that a plane crashed with our president.
Around empty or surviving spirit, I was the only 1 she could share this terrible news with. Stranger, stranger, but there was no reason not to believe her. My first thought is to call my wife immediately! I got my cell telephone out of my pocket, I dial the number, but my fingers, like electrocuted, hit the incorrect button. alternatively of connecting, my camera is on. I press desperately to get free of him, and I yet find that I'm just taking pictures of my own hand. I'm getting off the phone. I'm going home. Open both our TVs, standing in front of the screen dulled. due to the fact that usually erstwhile it comes to the President, gentlemen editors so mockingly, stingyly, all they say about him, ironically, mockingly, now strangely haughty, dignified, solemn. Only contradictory information about the number of victims. 90... 96? 1 thing is certain, the president of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczyński and his wife, Maria, died. Christ, I have their image in my memory! From the celebration in Belvedere, the Royal Castle, the halls of the Presidential Palace, the Opera... And I can't imagine them in the pulp of the broken bodies in the hull of the crashed plane.
But come on, what a scary list! Disaster victims! I've known quite a few them. There's Tomasz Merta, Deputy Minister! So recently, along with the cemetery on Powązki...! There is Janusz Kochanowski, Ombudsman! Through his office, I... Well, it doesn't substance anymore! But not long ago at the Royal Castle the solemn 20th anniversary of the Polish Ombudsman, where he had an excellent lecture. Author of works on the state of law! And Janusz Zaklinski! He played the marshal in films, plays, including me in Madness! But what a perverse spite of destiny - Marshal Piłsudski died under Smolensk! parent and Anna! Anna Walentynowicz! “Will you come to us?” “I would like to, Mrs. Basiu.” They met my wife at any gathering in the Sejm. She was expected to come to us, I was waiting, I was a writer, possibly she'd tell me something else; but the communicative stops with the plane crashing. History...! It was Janusz Kurtyka who nursed her like that. But he left it to lay flowers on a grave murdered seventy years ago. My last gathering with him in any parliamentary hall in a discussion about the assassination in the majesty of Captain Witold Pilecki. The head of the IPN, he didn't know he was going to be in this 1 soon.presidential flight on death wings. Pilecki, Kurtyka - 2 stones of memory next to each other!
But there are inactive others close to me: Stefan Melak, who frequents meetings in the home of Literature, president of the Union of Katyń Families, Stanisław Mikke, associate of the ultimate Bar Council, chief of Palestra's writings participating in the exhumation of Poles in Katyń, Kharkiv, Miednoje, close relatives of my late friend. Secretary-General of the Council for the Protection of the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom, the creator of forgotten cemeteries in the East - Andrzej Przewoźnik: Jerzy Giedroycia award awarded by the diary of the Republic of Poland. “Will you give me a ride downtown?” I asked erstwhile we left the Stanislaw Theatre in Łazienki. The winner dropped him off at the house. And in the car, so much talk! We were expected to meet again, there was no time. And the others, all of them, all of them, in 1 minute! It is modest, mediocre memories, but adequate to remember the eternal thorn after the tragically dead.
But that's not the end of the death list. There are officers, generals irreplaceable in the Polish army: commander of the Air Force, commander of the Garrison Warsaw, commander of the Land Forces, commander of the Operational Armed Forces, commander of the peculiar Forces, commander of the Navy, colonels, top Polish commander of the General Staff of the Polish Army, general Franciszek Gągor. I don't mention another people's names due to the fact that they can be read anywhere, even on lanterns under the presidential palace under their photographs. They all died in 1 second, unthinkable! In the event of the worst war, they couldn't die like this! It's any unearthly devilish curse cast under the wings of an airplane in the fog!
The list found in the shattered wreck besides includes leading politicians, senators, MPs and MPs at the Sejm, activists and opposition activists, folk, independents, and besides those from the left, feminist, combatant and repressive affairs official; the prelate priest, erstwhile Rector of the University of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, members of the Katyn household and their chaplain; boys from the protection of the president, stewardesses, arrogant girls that service in specified elite flight and pilot. The pilot I most likely flew with once. “Fly on the Flight”! My household and I always felt more assured erstwhile a Polish pilot was behind the wheel. Someone's already trying to take responsibility! For what?! For that uncontrollable closet that couldn't choice up and fall apart?! And where's her wreck? Ah, and Ryszard Kaczorowski, the erstwhile president of Poland on emigration! past does not know the case of 2 presidents of the European state being killed in 1 disaster! Not certain yet, ninety-two or ninety-six victims, but all in this one. It's a deadly toll that even plague would not reap among the elites of the nation!
I've been standing at Zwirki and Wigura for an hr at an airman's memorial in a crowd waiting for the president and his wife to return. This beautiful couple will return in coffins. present it is known that ninety-four more will arrive behind them. People are waiting in silence. Nobody comments on what happened. It is beautiful sunny, the close aviator monument throws a long shadow on the empty roadway. I'm thinking, who from France, England, Germany, Brussels will come to this ceremony giant? I don't know yet that a volcano is about to erupt in Iceland. This is simply a very embarrassing incidental for EU and US leaders! Standing under the Lotnik for an hour, I turn my head to years, Stalin's years, where in 1 hundred-man cell in Mokotów I sat with professors, colonels, editors of opposition writings, pro-Western politicians, priests refusing to betray the secret of confession, with cursed soldiers from the Nadbuzhian forests, with hosts who had stayed with them, and with doctors who cursed the wounded gave help. Then this, which had been stifled years ago by the perfidious screaming of servile prosecutors, is an apparent statement: those of Mokotov, of Lublin Castle, of Fordon, Rawicz, Wronek and another peerless murders, sentenced from various paragraphs, whether to death or to many years in prison, all of them were liable for 1 thing and the same thing: for “a criminal game to return Poland to Europe!’ Terrible, terrible paragraph! But their dreams came true. We're in the Union, in NATO! We have a friendly relation with horrible America. But how frightening it must have been that volcano smoke that erstwhile exploded on this distant island that no one, no president, no chancellor, no prime minister from the free world, let alone NATO commanders, dared to fly to that funeral! I don't know anything about that yet. I'm standing among the waiting crowds. My thoughts are inactive with these expected guests and their solemn honors, which they will give to the tragically deceased. Then individual shouted:
- They're coming!
But it's not them. It's not the Union, it's the NATO, it's the coffins.
Janusz Krasiński, May 2010
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Memoirs delivered by Janusz Krasiński during the reception of the Piotr Skórzyński Award “POOK-INFLUENT IN THE PROPERTY” June 4, 2010.
Janusz Krasiński (1928 - 2012) - a large patriot and prominent writer, author of radio proceeding aids and theatre plays. associate of the Grey Lines. Prisoners of German concentration camps (such as Auschwitz, Dachau) and after the war prisoners Mokotów, Wronek and Rawicz.
He is the laureate of many literary awards, including the Józef Mackiewicz Awards in 2006 for autobiographical tetralogy - “On Loss”, “They Face the Wall”, “Impotence”, “Before Death”.
In early 2016, a fresh was published by Arcan "The Breakthrough," which closes the author's autobiographical cycle.
