“They wanted to cut off our head there,” Lech Wałęsa said shortly after the crash, “and here the flower of our nation has also perished.” It was “the curse of Katyn,” a “second Katyn,” and the forest, “a damned place,” in the words of former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski. The fact that this rarest of delegations, bound from Warsaw to Smolensk on a Polish air force-flown Tupolev Tu-154, was flying to commemorate what has come to be known as the Katyn Massacre-the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police in 1940-compounded the almost unimaginable loss, shrouding the tragedy in a terrible symbolism. On April 10, 2010, heavy fog in the vicinity of the Russian forest of Katyn determined the fate of Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, and ninety-six other Polish leaders, including members of parliament, the heads of both the army and navy, the president of Poland’s national bank, and Anna Walentynowicz, the eighty-year-old former dockworker whose firing in 1980 catalyzed Solidarity.
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