{"id":523227,"date":"2010-04-11T11:39:53","date_gmt":"2010-04-11T15:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com\/?p=16223"},"modified":"2010-04-11T11:39:53","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T15:39:53","slug":"warsaw-mourns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/523227","title":{"rendered":"Warsaw Mourns"},"content":{"rendered":"

People here say much of Poland is still in shock about the tragedy that killed the country\u2019s President, and the delegation accompanying him to a solemn ceremony in Katyn Forest.\u00a0 The President and delegates had intended to commemorate the 70th<\/sup> anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which more than 22,000 Polish officers, intelligentsia and others were killed by the Soviets, in an act that Moscow blamed the Nazis for, until the last decade of the last century.<\/p>\n

The streets leading to the Presidential Palace are jammed with traffic, uncharacteristic for a Sunday, as people move to seek news and share grief.\u00a0 The area outside the Palace is a sea of people, lighting candles, laying flowers, writing notes.\u00a0 It is difficult to physically maneuver anywhere near the Palace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

People carry flags.\u00a0 There is a sense of a nation seeking unity and the comfort of others at a time of intense national loss.<\/span><\/p>\n

The country observed two minutes of silence in honor of the dead, at midday.\u00a0 The Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Acting President Bronislaw Komorowski and other government officials marked the silence outside the Parliament building.<\/span><\/p>\n

Seeing the photographs of the dead lined up outside the Parliament is moving.\u00a0 They are mostly official portraits of those who died, some smiling, some looking powerful, some hopeful, others just looking straight out., towards the lens. Men and women.\u00a0 Young and old.\u00a0 Looking at each individual picture really registers the magnitude of the catastrophe, and humanizes it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I spoke with Waldemar Strzalkowski, an aide to the Acting President. \u00a0He organized the delegation from the Parliament that traveled on the tragic flight to Smolensk, Russia, near Katyn.<\/span><\/p>\n

He describe his sorrow and the great loss to Poland, as so many\u00a0 millions of people had cast votes for those who died.\u00a0 He called the Poles a spiritual people, and said he expected them to come together now, and during the upcoming elections, brought forward by the tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

More than one person here has said that Russia\u2019s response to the catastrophe has been admirable, including Prime Minister Putin\u2019s expressions of shared grief.\u00a0 There was some speculation that the fact that the plane crashed in Russia, near a place where Soviets massacred Poles 70 years ago, would spark suspicions or reverse some of the work toward reconciliation that had been done.\u00a0 That appears to have not happened at all.\u00a0 Someone even said Polish-Russian relations were always shaped by the Katyn Massacre, in a very negative way.\u00a0 This tragedy at Katyn and the Russian response to it may, in some way, shape Polish-Russian relations going forward, in a positive light, as two countries together share sorrow.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People here say much of Poland is still in shock about the tragedy that killed the country\u2019s President, and the delegation accompanying him to a solemn ceremony in Katyn Forest.\u00a0 The President and delegates had intended to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which more than 22,000 Polish officers, intelligentsia and others […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}