The tenth anniversary of the Smolensk plane crash
09.04.2020
On April 10, 2010, a special TU-154M plane with the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński and the First Lady Maria Kaczyńska on board took off from Warsaw to Smolensk. That day, at the Katyn War Cemetery the official delegation was to participate in an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the genocide committed on site. The aircraft carried 96 people, including members of supreme state authorities, representatives of civil society and Churches, high-ranking military commanders and the plane’s crew. All passengers died in the air disaster which took place during the landing at the airport near Smolensk.
The delegation heading for the Katyn celebrations on April 10, 2010 consisted of Polish elites that represented various political, social and religious beliefs. It included deputy speakers of Sejm and Senate, a group of parliamentarians, top commanders of all Polish Armed Forces, officials of the President’s Chancellery, chiefs of state institutions, clergymen, representatives of ministries, members of veterans’ and social organisations, and accompanying persons. Present on board was also a personage connecting modern Poland to the intelligentsia and tradition of the Second Republic: the last President of Poland in Exile Ryszard Kaczorowski,.
Those on the flight to Smolensk headed to Katyn in order to pay tribute to the victims of mass executions carried out in the Katyn Forest, Mednoye, Kharkiv, Bykivnia and Kuropaty by the NKVD in the Spring of 1940 under the order of the Soviet Union’s head authorities. The Katyn massacre took the lives of Polish prisoners of war, among whom were officers, academics, clergymen of all faiths, clerks and officials, representatives of free professions and entrepreneurs - members of the Second Republic’s elite.
The Katyn crime and Smolensk plane crash are two symbols of tragic events in the history of Poland. As a result of the catastrophe of the TU-154M aircraft, President Lech Kaczyński never delivered his speech prepared for the 70th anniversary of the Katyn genocide.
“Let’s make the Katyn wound finally heal and turn into a scar,” wrote the President then.
His message which was never spoken aloud on April 10, 2010, resounds today, ten years later, equally powerfully.
The events of that day shook millions of Poles, as well as the international public. The participants of that flight will always stay alive in our memory.
MFA Press Office