Auschwitz w reklamie… klubu fitness. “Obóz koncentracyjny dla kalorii”: Zdjęcie torów prowadzących do obozu ko… http://t.co/4f4aQBhV

January 7, 2012 9:33 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@polskathetimes

Polska The Times

OK, maybe you don’t know Polish, but nonetheless you can see the “Auschwitz” there . . . and the word “fitness” . . .

A rather strange combination, no? Well, the payoff is really the Polska article linked to here, to which I would encourage you to click through since it shows the poster in question for a recent advertising campaign undertaken by a fitness-place called The Circuit Factory: a long, low shot of a railroad track leading to a bleak building (with the label “Auschwitz” off to the left, in case there is any confusion), and the catch-phrase below “Kiss Your Calories Goodbye.”

Let me hasten to add that this “Circuit Factory” place is by no means Polish – it’s apparently to be found in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. In his response to initial press inquiries, though, its owner – one Phil Parkinson – tried to explain the campaign as an effort to demonstrate that his club was “a concentration camp for calories.” Somehow that seemed to contribute nothing further at all towards stemming the waves of opprobrium that headed his way via the Internets and social media.

Then again, on-line there is no such thing as bad publicity. The Polska article ends by citing comments Parkinson made to the Arabian Business website about how beneficial the Auschwitz campaign has been for his firm’s Google/Facebook/YouTube results – “and we have had about five times as many enquiries [presumably about club membership] as before.”

                          

In the middle of this, as the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza now reports, the EU Commission is likely to open up visa-free travel from Russia. Well, not really all of Russia – but rather that strange Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, stuck there between Poland and Lithuania, outside of Russia proper. Oh, and they won’t actually be able to go to Lithuania – just to Poland. And, to make it clear, there still will be border controls in place, these Kaliningradians (?) will just be able to go through them (presumably flashing their Russian passports) without having to go through the trouble of getting a visa beforehand.

Then again, Poland itself has been within the Schengen zone for a while now; who knows where some of them will want to go on to from there? But the Commission is seemingly willing to take that chance and announce such visa-free entry tomorrow; according to the article (no by-line), it’s motivation is essentially that it feels sorry for the Kaliningradians, they must be so lonely: “to avoid the isolation of Kaliningrad from its immediate neighbors, it is necessary to ease the travel of its citizens.” Because that sort of isolation can’t be very healthy for any body politic.

Don’t laugh: since Kaliningrad was first isolated this way by the independence of Lithuania in 1990, it’s been mainly known (when noticed at all) for the shady activities of all sorts going on there: weapon-smuggling, alcohol/cigarette-smuggling, the dispatch of freighters with suspicious cargoes, and the like. This is quite simply a gesture to persuade people there to start behaving themselves.

                          

(Symbolically-important only to the Poles, as that is the anniversary of their invasion by forces of the Soviet Union, back in 1939 when they were already trying to fight off German forces attacking from the West, that effectively sealed their fate and sentenced them to five years of brutal occupation. Apparently not so symbolically-important to, say, the US State Department, which must be suffering from a shortage of anyone with an awareness of modern Polish history.)

So too bad, that’s it then, right? Not so fast, as this recent tweet from the leading Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita reminds us:

Ustawa o ratyfikacji umowy ws. tarczy antyrakietowej podpisana: Prezydent Bronisław Komorowski podpisał ustawę u… http://bit.ly/eJo9DW

April 26, 2011 10:22 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@rzeczpospolitaa

Rzeczpospolita.pl

This tells us of the recent signing by Polish President Bronisław Komorowski, following ratification by the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, of the US-Polish agreement initialed back on July 3, 2010, to let Poland station some US-made, US-controlled interceptor missiles after all. For when it comes to US allies and American missiles, everyone is a winner and all must have prizes!

Still, it seems very much a consolation prize. The original Bush plan called for land-based ballistic-missile interceptors fancy enough to require that separate radar and command-and-control installation (which even could be located in another country, as it happened). Now the Poles will just host a bunch of SM-3 missiles, a sort of jack-of-all-trades interceptor up until now based only on US Navy (and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force) ships of the “Aegis” air-defence type. Rumania will also get to host these missiles – but not the Czech Republic – and the missile base there is supposed to be operational by 2015, while the Polish one will be ready only by 2018.

Then again, that eventual Polish base will be right on the Baltic Coast, at an old airbase in a place called Redzikowo, and the SM-3 is versatile enough to attack enemy ships as well as shoot down ballistic missiles (and even low-flying satellites, it is alleged), so NATO is gaining that extra capability that it would not have had with the interceptor missiles of the original plan. Plus, the SM-3s are known actually to work, and even rather well (at least in tests), likely better than those higher-prestige devices envisaged in the original Bush plan. (But since when has actual military effectiveness been any sort of priority consideration in this sort of geopolitical gesture?)

An additional key aspect of this US-Polish interceptor-missile plan, from its very first incarnation, was the stationing in Poland of Patriot missile batteries also manned by American troops – sort of missiles-to-protect-the-missiles, but really more that classic American “skin in the game” military presence every country under threat wants, since an attack on them will now presumably also involve genuine American casualties and therefore a greater likelihood of some substantial American response.

This Patriot deployment has been ongoing for some years now, with a new battery (meaning “military unit”) coming in to replace an old one once per quarter-year, although there was a minor scandal – whipped up by Polish commentators evidently not familiar with that “skin in the game” rationale – when it was discovered that the US Army was using these deployments just for training, with only dummy training missiles that would not be able to actually shoot down any incoming airborne threat. So the new agreement signed by the President fixes that: for this year, at least, three out of the four rotations will wield combat-ready Patriot missiles.

                          

You would think that, for its part, the Russian government would welcome the improvement in relations with Poland that was the initial result of the tragedy and the common investigation both nations’ authorities then undertook, and so would try to prolong that any way possible. Or maybe not. For an article in one of the leading national newspapers Rzeczpospolita now informs us of a piece of trickery – petty trickery, at that – which would have elicited an approving nod from the likes of Lavrenty Beria, long-time head of the NKVD under Stalin.

What’s worse, it took an on-site inspection by no less than Poland’s First Lady, Anna Komorowska, to reveal the transgression. Last Saturday she led a ceremonial delegation to the Smolensk memorial site, now meant to commemorate not only last year’s crash but the Katyn atrocity that indirectly led to it. There, the delegation discovered to their horror that a change had been made to the memorial plaque that had been placed there shortly after last year’s tragedy. Those of you out there who would like to try out your Polish can click here to see the before-and-after for yourselves, otherwise let me just inform you that the original Polish-language tablet was gone and replaced by a bilingual Russian-Polish one. OK, there’s nothing wrong with that per se, except that space had been created to fit the Russian in by deleting the text in the first plaque which had mentioned the Katyn atrocity, cited as “genocide” (ludobójstwo)*, together with the Russian government’s admitted responsibility for that.

Naturally, the Polish government had never been consulted – because it would never have approved. The Russian authorities apparently just went ahead and made the change. Actually, it would have been more appropriate to consult the “Association of Katyn Families” since that was the name on the original plaque, responsible for putting it there. Instead, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski will have a chance to “consult” with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev today on a number of things, including – one would expect – this plaque affair.

UPDATE: Poland’s other mainstream national daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, is now reporting that the two presidents have found a solution to try to tamp down the public outrage in Poland over the Smolensk memorial plaque shenanigans. A competition! There will be a competition, run by the Polish Ministry of Culture, to come up with yet another memorial plaque, to be placed at there in time for the two-year anniversary of the tragedy next year – which, we can only hope, will proceed a bit more tranquilly, in both countries.

*Of course the Katyn massacre per se was by no means “genocide.” That word unfortunately has been so overused by those out to make cheap political points that its original meaning and impact are truly under threat – and it is only roughly 67 years old!

                          

Citizens of what was then known as the “Free World” have by-and-large been spared such abuses. Indeed, here in the Eurozone we have the common European currency, a medium of exchange not subject to the whims of any one national government. What’s more, it was adopted on 1 January by yet another EU member-state, Estonia. Yet that was recognized by most observers as somewhat of a bittersweet occasion; taking up the euro does say important things about the extent of that country’s European integration, yet the sovereign debt financial crisis with which the EU has struggled for a little over a year has revealed several cogent reasons for a country to regret ever giving up its own national currency.

But I’m not out to talk about any of those here. Rather, let’s get back to the “currency reform” scam: it’s the damndest thing how prices seem to rise whenever a country adopts the euro! You see, all prices, wages, etc. have to be converted then by a fixed conversion-ratio – for example, it was 2.20371 for the Dutch guilder – and usually the new price that results is not a very round number. No, much better to make it so – and do you think that merchants then round it upwards or downwards?

Any of you out there over the age of twelve knows the answer quite well – strange, isn’t it, how wages and bank-account totals don’t benefit from a similar rounding? – and so the result inevitably is an otherwise uncalled-for bit of inflation. That’s what made the Germans nickname their new currency the Teuro (teuer is “expensive” in German); on a local note, I can remember how Amsterdam bars, in particular, raised their prices under the quite shameful assumption that their customers were not capable of doing elementary division with a calculator.*

Naturally, then, the same thing has come to Estonia, as we see in a pieces from the Polish national daily Gazeta Wyborcza: Inflation in Estonia highest for two years. Specifically, December’s inflation rate was 5.7% higher than it was in December, 2009. (And how much was that? Annoyingly, the article prefers to use differential rather than absolute inflation rates.) We do know that inflation was high there throughout the last part of the year, as last month’s rate was also only 0.5% higher than last November’s. The main commodities driving this are listed as mainly foodstuffs and non-alcoholic beverages. (Can we hope, then, that the owners of Estonian drinking establishments actually restrained themselves?)

Anyway: Welcome to the club!

*Interestingly, grocery-store prices were mainly converted in a straightforward manner – mainly because Dutch consumer-rights organizations promised to watch them like a hawk!

                          

Poland had already shown up as a bit player in another Wikileaks dispatch from earlier this week, revealing new NATO contingency plans to make extensive use of that country’s transportation infrastructure to shift troops to the Baltic States should they be invaded by Russian forces. (Polish soldiers would also be heavily involved, in the form of at least one of the nine divisions slated to be included in any such maneuver.) But the only really new element disclosed in that connection by the Wikileaks dump was a certain dissatisfaction among Polish political and military authorities over the plan, since in such a situation Russia would by definition be at war not only with the Baltic States but also with Poland and with NATO in general, and such a commitment of resources would necessarily thin out Poland’s own defences somewhat.

No, the new and notable revelations that have emerged over the past few days have to do with the physical commitment to Poland’s defence made by US authorities in the form of US Army Patriot anti-rocket and -aircraft missiles sent to be stationed there. (Those who want to read an English account can turn to the UK’s official Wikileaks publisher, namely the Guardian, which spreads the story out over two articles here and here.) Recall first of all that those Patriots were stationed in Poland in the first place as an accompaniment to the anti-missile rockets that were also to have been there as part of a “missile shield” system to protect the US from Iran-launched ICBMs that the Bush Administration had worked so hard to establish, but which was then canceled by Barack Obama in September of last year. The Poles were glad to have at least that one sort of partial American military presence in their country even as the other was canceled – for the old, crude reason that having American soldiers in your country heightens the chance that they will also be killed if anyone attacks you, thus making American intervention to do something about that attack much more likely – but they had always been more concerned about threats from Russia rather than from Iran. “Don’t worry,” was the American reaction, “the Patriot can defend your territory against airborne threats from any direction, not just from the Middle East.”

There was one catch, however, as we are only know finding out thanks to the Wikileaks dispatches: those Patriots can defend Poland against airborne threats coming from Iran, Russia, or anyone else only if they are equipped with bona fide live missiles, which for the majority of their presence on Polish soil they have not been. Indeed, these communications make clear that the concept for the Americans the whole time was for the Patriot contingent in Poland (stationed in some patch of wilderness up in the Northeast, near the border with the Russian Kaliningrad enclave) to be only a training post – fly Patriot crewmen in there on occasion just to get some practice in wartime deployment to a more-exotic location to the East, work a little with what amounted to only mock-up equipment, and then get out of there again back to their home unit. Naturally, the level of permanent personnel stationed there reflected this role, usually numbering only around 20 or 30 whereas Polish authorities had expected something more like 110, reflecting staffing for a ready-to-go combat unit.

It’s something, then, but it’s not much – and it certainly is nothing that would stop Russian aircraft or missiles should the need arise. But it was all that Polish authorities found themselves able to get out of the American government, and they did their complaining quietly (e.g. about getting nothing better than “potted plants”) while never letting up on efforts to try to get even more of an American deployment of forces to Poland, and maybe with some actual combat-teeth for a change. Ideas that have arisen along this line are stationing some F-16s on a Polish airbase and/or maybe some C-130 transport aircraft and/or maybe even moving a detachment of Naval Special Warfare troops from Stuttgart to Gdansk. As it happens, Polish President Komorowski will have the opportunity today to discuss such things as he visits President Obama at the White House. But the shine is already considerably off the encounter after these latest revelations of the fast-and-loose behavior American military and diplomatic authorities display towards even the country’s closest allies (e.g. still with its own troops fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with American forces in Afghanistan).

UPDATE: As a great philosopher once observed, “two out of three ain’t bad”! The Gazeta (Wyborcza) Twitter-feed carries the news coming out of the Polish-American presidential summit:

Amerykańskie F-16 i Herkulesy w Polsce. Od połowy 2013 roku http://bit.ly/hZyovB

December 9, 2010 6:30 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@gazetapl_news

Gazeta.pl

So that will be 16 F-16′s (how symmetric!) and 4 C-130′s (all American-manned and -operated; this isn’t an equipment sale) stationed on a Polish airbase starting in mid-2013. And if you click through Gazeta’s link to the article you even can see, amid all that Polish, a nice photo of Komorowski chatting with Obama in the Oval Office.

                          

Jacobs has been Potsdam’s mayor for a while now, since March of 1999, and he did come out on top of that initial vote with 41%. But Scharfenberg was not all that far behind at 33%, and the guy does have many useful qualities, such as being a shrewd judge of people’s character, and able both to keep a secret and submit thorough, informative reports. How do I know this? Because Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg is also unique as the first significant German political candidate known to have been an informer back in the day for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi.

Some good coverage of the Scharfenberg phenomenon is to be found in the German press, of course (like in Die Welt: Stasi informant wants to become Potsdam’s mayor) but also in the press from not so far away to the East in Poland, namely Gazeta Wyborcza (Will a Stasi agent govern Potsdam?). All accounts agree that the guy was very good in those side-activities he engaged in next to his formal post at the Academy for State and Law in Potsdam (from 1978 to 1986). The file he accumulated on people he spied on totals some 300 pages, and he was apparently quick to root out and denounce to his Stasi masters not only colleagues who let it be known that they were trying to find some way to escape to the West, but also those who were womanizers or homosexuals (and so “mennenizers” maybe?) or had other aspects of their personalities or behavior that could constitute weaknesses for the Stasi to use to blackmail and manipulate them.

But then times changed – rather drastically – and Eastern Germany saw the DDR regime’s collapse and reunification with the West. Scharfenberg eventually found his feet in this new world rather well, actually running for Potsdam Oberbürgermeister in 2002 and losing by a total of only 122 votes in the run-off – yes, to the SPD’s Jacobs. The thing is, back then no one other than himself knew about his Stasi background; indeed, he denied anything of the sort and in the 1990s had refused to allow any sort of screening or investigation into his DDR past.

Since 2002, however, researchers rummaging through the extensive archives saved from Stasi destruction at the end of the regime finally came upon information about Scharfenberg and “outed” him, so to speak. Still, he ran again this year for the same Oberbürgermeister post, and he came in second again in the first round. And depending on turnout, how the voters for the candidates who didn’t make the first cut switch their votes (if at all), etc. he could even win on 3 October and become Mayor. (I’ll try to remember to look to see if that happened and let you know via an update to this post, since I realize that, by this point in the post, you’re all dying to know how the story turns out!)

Stasi Don’t Matter?

In other words, his prior work for the Stasi doesn’t seem to matter politically. That’s surprising in one respect because one would ordinarily think that Die Linke would not do well in Potsdam – indeed, that the Left side of the German political spectrum in general would not do well – because Potsdam is fairly prosperous these days as a film industry, computers, ERP software, etc. give it an unemployment rate of under 10% (very good for the East).

The larger issue, though, is of course how someone with such a shady past working directly as a spy for a repressive regime could at all be attractive as an elected public figure. But he is, and this is called Ostalgie or “Eastern nostalgia,” a nostalgia by many Germans living in the East for the DDR where, back then, even if the authorities spied on you all the time, they at least also ensured that you and everyone had a job, an apartment, a pension, etc. – none of them very fancy, but guaranteed (if you didn’t defy the State). For this writer, and for many others I’m sure, such an attitude is hard to understand – but there it is, undeniable, staring us right in the face in the Potsdam mayoral polling figures.

For those needing a subject for their sociology/history dissertation, the obvious comparison here is with attitudes to the Nazis (especially the hard-core: the SS, high regime functionaries) following Germany’s defeat in WWII. Why were Germans willing to definitively reject these after the War yet at the same time harbor this Ostalgie now? Then again: it’s only the former East Germans by and large who feel Ostalgie – back immediately after the war, in the former Soviet sector of Germany, was this particular cohort ever really allowed to confront and resolve the question of how to regard the Nazis among them? Quite possibly not; recollection from my own reading tells me that any and all issues of Nazi guilt were swept under the carpet as the Soviets and their German Communist lackeys rushed to form a Worker’s State to stand in opposition to the fascist-capitalist regime (in their eyes, of course) taking form to the West. So does this affect their attitudes today, more than sixty years later?

UPDATE: Nope, sorry: Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg lost once again in the run-off election, and this time by tens of thousands of votes, not the 122-vote margin of last time. Gerd Nowakowski has an interesting commentary in Der Tagesspiegel, which is after all a Berlin daily and so very close-by. He says there is no way the ex-Stasi informant Scharfenberg could have won, and that because of a simple fact that I should have picked up on, but didn’t: 3 October, the very same day of the run-off election, was not only also German Reunification Day holiday, but no less that event’s twentieth anniversary!

Just imagine if the Potsdam electors had chosen the Stasi-man, on that of all days! Frankly, whichever official was in charge of setting the run-off election date, once the results of the initial poll showed that it would be necessary, was the one who in effect chose who Potsdam’s next Oberbürgermeister was going to be, by picking a date that in effect ensured Jann Jakobs’ second re-election to the post. I wonder if that person explicitly knew what he was doing – he must have! Shades, perhaps, of DDR-style “democracy”?

                          

Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights.

Unfortunately, the Poland-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (actually known as Helsińska Fundacja Praw Człowieka) recently released a document it had (somehow) procured from the Polish office of Border Security showing that the CIA flights to and from that airfield in 2002 and 2003 had departed with a total of at least 20 fewer passengers than they came with, i.e. there had to be some sort of holding facility there. Perhaps a luxury hotel? Not a chance; it was a prison facility which Polish officials at the very highest levels (thus President Kwaśniewski and Premier Miller) had approved for CIA use from December 2002 to September 2003. And then, strangely enough, after the Americans left the Ministry of Interior carried out a thorough cleaning and refurbishment of the installation.

The trouble these gentlemen are in, in the first instance, involves the questionable approval they provided for this CIA facility and the associated air access, which in several respects seems to have violated ordinary norms of Polish sovereignty, i.e. the control any nation is routinely supposed to have over the use of its airspace, as well as which people are deprived of their freedom at installations upon its territory and why – oh, and how those people are treated within those installations as well, for in other contexts there have been clear revelations of actual CIA torture of terrorism suspects carried out during this period at other such “black sites.” So the charges against these top officials could conceivably extend to enabling the practice of torture on Polish sovereign territory as well.

But Did They Know?

Well, that’s if it can be shown that they knew what was going on there. Remarkably, ex-President Kwaśniewski was actually willing to speak to the Gazeta reporters about this affair, after first admitting that he has not even (yet) been called in for questioning by the investigators. Then: “There was cooperation with American intelligence [authorities]. That’s how you had those CIA flights to Szyman [airport's location]. There wasn’t any prison.”

Gazeta: “Within the framework of that cooperation could Poland have given the Americans permission for a prison and torture?”

Kwaśniewski: “The Americans never asked us for any such permission.”

Gazeta: “Maybe they did it without our permission?”

Kwaśniewski: “I don’t have any information about the Americans torturing prisoners in Poland.”

Ex-Interior Minister Janik also spoke a bit to the Gazeta reporters, expressing his view that, whatever may or may not have happened at any prison that may or may not have existed, he actually doubted that Kwaśniewski or Miller would have known about it.

Again, for all the caginess of their comments (after all, Kwaśniewski denies the existence of a prison which does seem to have been there), these gentlemen were actually being quite cordial with their comments, inasmuch as the Polish prosecutors are refusing all comment since this is still supposed to be a Top Secret matter – understandable, since such serious charges, lodged against such prominent men in Polish politics, must be brought before the parliament itself (the Sejm) and approved there for prosecution before the State Tribunal.

In all, though, this raises the prospect of rather hopeful (if unexpected) further news to come out of Poland soon – namely of high political officials responsible for torture actually facing prosecution for their actions! What a concept! Admittedly, there has also been further progress along this line in Britain, what with the renewed inquiries into that country’s cooperation with the American “War on Terror” occurring with the advent of the new coalition government. Just no hint of anything similar coming along from the wellspring of the “enhanced interrogation” concept, the USA. How long can that situation last once the Obama administration sees foreign officials going to jail for acts that American officials ultimately ordered but that his Justice Department refuses to prosecute?

Postscript: I thought I would offer my readers the following embedded video for their consideration as an addendum to this post. I ran across it during my research, and it’s just over four minutes of a Gazeta Wyborcza reporter, Ewa Siedlecka, explaining to the TV camera what is known so far in this CIA prison matter. Yes, it’s all in Polish, with no sort of translation of any kind. Still, I found it irresistible (yes it’s true, I can understand it) and even historical in a way, to watch such a sober report about a Polish prison and especially the torture that was feared to have gone on there: noise, deprivation of sleep, with licensed physicians standing by to ensure that the abuse would take the prisoner up to the edge of death, but not over – it’s all there, and one can assume that it has a shocking effect on any Polish citizen that might have run across it. (Please pardon the juvenile 15-second cookie commercial you’ll have to put up with at the beginning to be able to see the rest of the clip. Cookies, torture: then again, Central Europe has always been drenched in irony . . . and the additional page-view you provide presumably ultimately redounds to the benefit of the Gazeta Wyborcza company, headed by that truly heroic and historical dissident Adam Michnik.)

                          

The newspaper Rzeczpospolita has posted a copy of that speech here – in Polish, oczywiście. Naturally, it mentions “21,000,” the NKVD, “Stalin’s will,” the “Third Reich” and the “Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact” within the first three sentences; Kaczyński wasn’t going there to use flowery diplomatic language.

If there happens to be a demand for a translation – and no one can find it elsewhere (I’ll be sure to post the link if I do) – then I’m open through the usual media (e-mail or Twitter) to requests to do it myself and post it here.

On the other hand, with all due respect to Poland’s tragedy of last Saturday, I can assure readers that neither this weblog nor the Twitter-feed intends to become “all Kaczyński plane-crash, all the time.”

                          

Please note that I will use “RP” (i.e. the Polish abbreviation) to denote the Polish Republic. The “Sejm” is the lower house of the Polish parliament (upper house = Senate).

Victims that seem to be of particular importance (in my estimation) I have put in bold. Of further note is the sheer number of dead from among Sejm deputies – imagine how many special elections need to be called now to fill those places!

OFFICIAL DELEGATION
(Namely to the ceremonies that were to take place at the Katyn forest, site of the gigantic massacre of Polish Army officers and other intelligentsia by the Soviet NKVD in 1940.)

• Lech Kaczyński, President of the Polish Republic
  
• Maria Kaczyńska, First Lady RP
  
• Ryszard Kaczorowski, last President of the RP in exile (surrendered his position in 1990 when Lech Wałęsa elected as proper Polish president)
  
• Krzysztof Putra, Vice-Marshall of the Sejm
  
• Jerzy Szmajdziński, Vice-Marshall of the Sejm
  
• Krystyna Bochenek, Vice-Marshall of the Sejm
  
• Jerzy Bahr, RP Ambassador to the Russian Federation
  
• Władysław Stasiak, Chief of Staff to the President of the RP
  
• Aleksander Szczygło, Head of the Office of National Security (equivalent to the US National Security Council)
  
• Jacek Sasin, Vice-Chief of Staff to the President
  
• Paweł Wypych, state-secretary in the Office of the President
  
• Mariusz Handzlik, under-state-secretarz in the Office of the President
  
• Andrzej Kremer, under-state-secratry at the RP Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  
• Stanisław Komorowski, under-state-secretarz at the RP Defense Ministry
  
• Tomasz Merta, under-state-secretary at the RP Ministry of Culture and National Patrimony
  
• Gen. Franciszek Gągor, Chief of the Polish General Staff
  
• Andrzej Przewoźnik, Secretary of the the RP Institute of Military History
  
• Maciej Płażyński, President of “Wspólnota Polska,” the Polish cultural organization much like the German Goethe Institute or the British Council
  
• Mariusz Kazana, Director of Protocol for the RP Ministry of Foreign Affairs

PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATIVES

• Leszek Deptuła, Sejm deputy
  
• Grzegorz Dolniak, Sejm deputy
  
• Grażyna Gęsicka, Sejm deputy
  
• Przemysław Gosiewski, Sejm deputy
  
• Sebastian Karpiniuk, Sejm deputy
  
• Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, Sejm deputy
  
• Zbigniew Wassermann, Sejm deputy
  
• Aleksandra Natalli-Swiat, Sejm deputy
  
• Arkadiusz Rybicki, Sejm deputy
  
• Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, Sejm deputy
  
• Wiesław Woda, Sejm deputy
  
• Edward Wojtas, Sejm deputy
  
• Janina Fetlińska, Senator
  
• Stanisław Zając, Senator
  

• Janusz Kochanowski, human rights advocate
  
• Sławomir Skrzypek, President National Bank of Poland
  
• Janusz Kurtyka, President of the Institute of National Memory
  
• Janusz Krupski, Head of the Office for the Rights of Combatants and Repressed Persons

RELIGIOUS REPRESENTATIVES

• Bishop Gen. Tadeusz Płoski, field chaplain of the Polish Army
  
• Archbishop Gen. Miron Chodakowski, Orthodox Church chaplain of the Polish Army
  
• Pastor (Colonel) Adam Pilch, Evangelical (= Protestant) field chaplain
  
• Father (Lieutenant-Colonel) Jan Osiński, field chaplain of the Polish Army

I’m putting this much up now in the interests of speed. Then I’ll complete it with the remainder of the names, which constitute a number of would-be ceremony-attendees with some personal connection to the Katyn Massacre, together with some rather significant military personnel.

UPDATE: Here’s the rest of the names on the RP list – go ahead and scroll down, there are still some important ones to report.

REPRESENTATIVES OF FAMILIES INVOLVED WITH THE KATYN MASSACRE AND OTHERS ACCOMPANYING THEM

• Edward Duchnowski, Secretary-General of the Siberian Association

• Father Bronisław Gostomski
• Father Jósef Joniec, President of the parish association
• Father Zdzisław Król, Chaplain to the Warsaw chapter of the association of Katyn families, 1987-2007
• Father Andrzej Kwaśnik, Chaplain of the Federation of Katyn Families
• Tadeusz Lutoborski
• Boźena Łojek, President of the Polish Katyn Foundation
• Stefan Melak, President of the Katyn Committee
• Stanisław Mikke, vice-chairman of RP Institute of Military History
• Bronisława Orawiec-Loffler
• Katarzyna Piskorska
• Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, President of the Federation of Katyn Families
• Wojciech Seweryn
• Leszek Solski
• Teresa Walewska-Przyjałkowska, Foundation “Golgotha of the East”
• Gabriela Zych
• Ewa Bąkowska, granddaughter of Brig. Gen. Mieczyslaw Smarowiński (Polish general killed at Katyn)
• Maria Borowska
• Bartosz Borowski
• Dariusz Malinowski
  

• LT Gen. Bronisław Kwatkowski, Operational Head of the Polish Armed Forces

• LT Gen. Andrzej Błasik, Head of Polish Internal [i.e. police] Forces
• Major Gen. Tadeusz Buk, Head of Polish Land Forces
• Major Gen. Włodzimierz Potasiński, Head of Polish Special Forces
• Vice-Admiral Andrzej Karweta, Head of Polish NavyBrig. Gen. Kazimierz Gilarski, Head of the Warsaw Garrison