President Lech Kaczynski and Maria Kaczynska have been buried with the highest Polish honours in Cracow. Some memories of people whom I knew on the doomed flight to Smolensk. Such as former young communist Jerzy Smajdzinski who adapted well to democracy and rose to become Poland Defence Minister. I recall […]
Michael Dembinski counts the days: From Poland regaining independence at the end of World War I to the Poland’s invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – 7,615 days … From Poland regaining democracy to the Smolensk air crash – 7,615 days.
Last September at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire a solemn ceremony was held to dedicate a new Polish Armed Forces Memorial in honour of Poles who fell defending their country and freedom in World War Two. Three Poles who played a prominent part in that ceremony were killed in […]
Part of the human drama of the Polish aircrash lies in the fact that President Lech Kaczynski had a twin brother Jaroslaw, who shared with him all the tumultous ups and downs of their political and private life. Jaroslaw never married, and lived with the twins’ now elderly mother Jadwiga. […]
This is a well turned article in the Guardian about Poland’s sorrow, marred only by dismal errors in two Polish names. The Kaczynski family home is in Zoliborz, not Zoliborcz. The rz on the end of Zoliborz is not the ‘ch’ sound on the end of the non-existent Zoliborcz. It’s the difference […]
A somewhat reshaped version of my earlier appreciation of Lech Kaczynski has been published at National Review Online in the USA. Here it is: Conservative? For sure. But not snooty, paternalistic conservatives. Rather, their conservatism was based on rock-hard core beliefs and unshakable private integrity. Yet it was not a […]
I have written extensively on this site about what the Katyn Massaces represents for Poland, for Russia, for Europe – and for civilisation. Type Katyn into the site’s Search function and get the links. See for example this extract from my final FCO telegram, sent to London from Warsaw as […]
Here (below) is the text of my appreciation of the life and times of Lech and Maria Kaczynski, now up at Radio Free Europe. Welcome Steyn Online readers. * * * * * I attended a smart Warsaw dinner party in 2006, not long after the Kaczynski twins and their Law […]
Here from the Polish Interior Ministry’s website is the official list of victims of the Smolensk disaster, excluding the crew. Look at this unbearably poignant series of photographs from Poland’s main tabloid Fakt, which like the rest of the Polish media is doing a magnificent job. I have highlighted those nineteen […]
I have just heard the appalling news about the crash near Smolensk of the plane carrying President Kaczynski and a senior delegation en route to Katyn. As well as the President and his wife Maria it looks as if former President-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, head of the Institute of National Memory Janusz […]
