History's Orphans - A Sunday Read

It was the worst of all possible worlds. So much has been written and documented about the Jewish Holocaust that the massacre of some 22,000 Polish prisoners in the Russian forest location of Katyn in 1940 virtually escaped history itself.  Ironically, it was the Germany Nazis that discovered the mass graves in 1943, attributing the devastation to the Soviet military.  With Western efforts to appease the Soviets at the end of World War Two, Katyn’s tragedy fell into eclipse.The Polish people got it from both sides, as both the Germans and the Soviets squeezed the very life out of the country.  We often forget that the largest German concentration camp was in fact in Poland and the doomed from that nation were being sent to death camps even before the majority of Jews began their final journey.  By the time the war ended, the nation had lost some 16% of its population.All this presently comes into focus in light of the plane crash that claimed the lives of a significant portion of Poland’s politicians and elite, including the President of the nation himself, Lech Kaczynski. Though not universally popular within his own country, Kaczynski was nevertheless widely respected for his 20-year effort to obtain the confession of the Russian establishment as to their culpability and outright slaughter. He never fully succeeded – the formal admission and apology never materialized.Yet there were smaller victories along the way. The last number of years have brought about something of a rapprochement between the two nations as Russia slowly began admitting its fateful link to Katyn and the thousands of deaths.We are witnessing one of history's great ironies.  The presidential party was on its way to Katyn itself to commemorate, along with Russian officials, one of Poland's painful legacies.  Once again, Poles died in a Russian forest after the plane hit a series of trees and never recovered.All this has to be understood if we are to gain something of a foothold on understanding of the grief we watched poured out in Poland in these last few days. The official remembrance of the President, his wife, and the numerous other leaders on the plane, took place in front of a huge crowd. Seemingly cursed again by fate, world leaders were unable to journey to the funeral because of the huge ash clouds filling the flight paths of jet travel.Again, the Polish people will suffer mostly on their own. Only this time, unlike Katyn, the world will know and hundreds of millions will be watching. Following the Second World War, those orphaned by Katyn and other travesties began the long climb of having the historical atrocities acknowledged by the world community and especially confessed to by the Russians. Almost at the point of that ultimate goal, they are orphaned once more, suddenly and tragically devoid of the decades of political leadership that brought them so near to what they were looking for.Scattered in the trees of a Russian forest, the plane wreckage is but a puny portion of the desolation resident in the heart of each patriotic Pole. As my friend and Polish journalist Peter Cwynar stated this week:

People barely can talk.  Most of us just try to stay silent, otherwise we choke on our tears. This tragedy is an extension of what happened to us 70 years ago.”

History's orphans cry out again, perhaps their only comfort being that this time the world has noticed and many of us can now respectfully mourn along with them, in solidarity and acknowledgement of a remarkable history of recovery.