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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2010 /  Sharing in Poland's pain

by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published April 16, 2010

Robert Delaney | The Michigan Catholic Thaddeus Radzilowski, director of the Piast Institute in Hamtramck, makes adjustments to a memorial to Polish President Lech Kaczynski being prepared for the window of the institute’s building on Joseph Campau Avenue.

The tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and many of the country's other top political and military leaders shocked and saddened many local Poles and Americans of Polish heritage.

"I cried for two days," said Iris Nowakowski, a Polish immigrant who visited the impromptu memorial set up in Hamtramck's Pope John Paul II Park on Monday.

"It's really a tragedy. All we can do is just pray for them — and for Poland," said Nowakowski, a member of St. Florian Parish in Hamtramck, who had brought her 18-month-old daughter, Vanessa, to the small park at the corner of Joseph Campau and Belmont, and was trying to find words to explain it all to the toddler.

Across the intersection, Larysa Kubik, a cashier at the Polish Market, said she didn't want to believe it had happened when a friend first told her about it last Saturday. "But when I came in to work, some of my co-workers had red faces and were all teared-up," said Kubik, who came to the United States from Poland as a young girl and is a member of Our Lady Queen of Apostles Parish in Hamtramck.

"Not that many customers came to shop, but many of those who did come were sad and heartbroken as well, and I wanted to cry with them," she added.

Sebastian Poweska, a manager at Polish Market who has been in the U.S. nearly six years, said his father woke him up early last Saturday to tell him the news, but he initially thought there must be some mistake.

"I just couldn't believe it – to have the president and the heads of the army and religious leaders all die in one plane crash! This is probably going to go into history as one of the most unfortunate events in Polish history, but I don't think it is going to change the system," said Poweska, a member of Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish in Sterling Heights.

Fr. Miroslaw Krol, vice rector of SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary on the Orchard Lake Schools campus, said he voted for Kaczynski for president, and had hoped to meet him the next time he went to Warsaw.

"I wanted to meet him, to tell him I voted for him and how proud I was him, and ask if I could get a photo of myself with him to put up on my wall with the photo I have of myself with Pope John Paul II," Fr. Krol said Monday.

He called Kaczynski "a man of conscience and strong moral and political positions – I was very much with him."

Fr. Krol said the seminarians, all of whom are from Poland, set up a memorial to the crash victims in the seminary chapel, and Fr. Timothy Whalen, Orchard Lake's chancellor celebrated a Mass for the dead at 9:30 a.m. last Saturday.

Fr. Krol noted that a larger-scale memorial Mass was to be celebrated Wednesday in the Shrine Chapel of Our Lady of Orchard Lake, with Archbishop Allen Vigneron as principal celebrant.

But although it has lost a great leader, and many others in leadership positions, Fr. Krol expressed confidence that "the democracy is strong enough now to survive."

"The Polish people are united in solidarity. At the seminary we watched the coffins arriving from Russia on television. We will survive; we will be strong," he added.

Thaddeus Radzilowski, president of the Piast Institute in Hamtramck, said, "I don't think any other country in the world has ever lost so much of its leadership in one day."

And he noted the irony that so much of Poland's political, military and intellectual leadership was wiped out as they traveled to a memorial event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Forest Massacre.

Under orders from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, the predecessor of the KGB slaughtered nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals in early 1940.

"They're usually spoken of as military officers, but most of them were reserve officers who hadn't even had time to join up with their units when they were taken. So, they were largely journalists, lawyers, university professors, doctors. Stalin knew well what he was doing," Radzilowski said.

The Soviet Union tried to deny its responsibility for the Katyn Massacre, claiming it had been carried out by the Nazis. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the USSR's culpability in 1990.

Radzilowski said a cross erected in front of the former St. Albertus Church in Detroit's old Poletown district in the early 1970s was probably one of the first Katyn memorials anywhere.

He also mentioned the Katyn memorial on the Orchard Lake campus, which has done double duty in recent days, as many people have placed flowers there since the crash.

A further connection between Detroit and Katyn was the work of the late Msgr. Zdislaw Peszkowski, of the Orchard Lake faculty. Radzilowski recalled the work of Msgr. Peszkowski to establish a shrine in commemoration of the fallen at the Katyn site.

A late vocation to the priesthood, he had been a young Polish cavalry officer at the time of the massacre, and only narrowly escaped being one of its victims.