international press, radio & tv journalist

Chicago Poles Mourn Local Artist Killed In Crash

Polish President Lech Kaczynski, Wife Were En Route To Ceremonial Event When Plane Went Down In Russia.

Watch filming report on CBS 2 Chicago

Poland is in a state of shock. But so is Chicago’s large Polish population after an aging Russian airliner carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, along with other top officials, crashed Saturday morning in Russia.

The presidential plane went down while attempting to land in thick fog. Ninety-seven people were on board; they were on their way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet Secret Police.

No one survived the crash.

The dead include an activist with deep ties to Chicago, Poland-born Wojciech Seweryn. He designed a monument in Niles ment in Niles that commemorates the massacre.

Pawel Strojny said it was significant to be mourning at the Niles monument Saturday because it was such a “difficult day.”

“Difficult day, for everybody, I think. Not only in Poland,” he said.

A monument at St. Adalbert’s Cemetery, where Strojny and his family left flowers, was built to honor the victims of the Katyn massacre. Those aboard the flight were heading to Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of that moment in history.

Ivo Widlak of the Polish Cultural Institute said the world is looking at that event in light of the recent tragedy which took place on the anniversaryof Katyn.

“For so many years, nobody was speaking about the Katyn massacre,” Widlak said. “Now the whole world is looking at this event.”

In 1940, Soviet secret police killed 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and priests. Among the officers executed, was the father of Wojciech Seweryn. Seweryn, a Polish-born Chicagoan, was on board the Tu-154 that crashed.

“He didn’t even know his father because he was so young,” said Zygmunt Matynia, the Consul General of Poland in Chicago.

Matynia said he knew Seweryn well.

“Actually I think, every Pole in Chicago knew him,” he said. “Thanks to him, that monument is in place.

Seweryn helped to raise $300,000 to get it constructed and put in some of his own money.

“That monument was his child,” Matynia said.

On Saturday, mourners covered Seweryn’s sculpture with flowers, Polish flags and candles.

The artist, who once worked in a Chicago-area auto body shop to make ends meet, was remembered as a loving family man. He was also known for helping several churches design sculptures and displays.

The loss is particularly great for St. Hyacinth Basilica. Seweryn was a member of their congregation, and back in 2006, President Kaczynski visited the church. He was expected to make another visit next month.

Saturday night, thousands gathered for a special Mass to remember both men and the 95 others who died.

As the names of all 97 victims were read many fought back tears over the loss of their beloved president. After he visited the church in 2006, many felt Kaczynski was more than the leader of their country. The 5,000 in the parish were looking forward to his second visit, just weeks away.

“I feel like I lose the best brother and father of our land,” mourner Stanislaw Grochal.

Another name on that list that rang louder than the others was that of Seweryn. The sculptor’s daughter, Anna Wojtowicz, was among those attending tonight’s service. She said he was looking forward to attending the Katyn commemoration in Russia.

“Oh, my God, he was so excited yesterday,” she said. “I talked to him around 5 o’clock. … He said they are treating him like a king. He was so happy.”

Saturday morning, Anna learned of the crash from her mother, who had been too sick to travel to Russia. The artist’s daughter said the family takes some comfort that Seweryn died near Katyn, the site of his father’s death.

“I think he’s happy with his father — he is together with him,” Anna Wojtowicz said. “This was his whole life. I think he died as a hero.”

Near the Polish Triangle on Chicago’s North Side — once the heart of the city’s Polish population — the day started with a moment of silence.

Nearly 200 students from Polish schools across the city toured the Polish Museum, but they first stopped to pray for those killed.

“It’s a very, very dramatic situation for us,” said Malgorzata Kot, a librarian at the museum. “We lost friends.”

Outside the Polish Consulate, mourners placed flowers at the base of a flagpole where the Polish flag, flies at half staff. Inside the consulate, well wishers gathered to sign a condolence book. Among those the comforting Consul General was U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin.

“I’m sure Poland will come through this,” Durbin said. “It is a strong nation, strong democracy and strong friend of America, but at this moment we pause and join them in this grief.”

Poles wept before their televisions, lowered flags to half-staff and taped black ribbons in their windows after hearing that the upper echelons of the establishment lay dead in woods a short drive from the site of the Katyn forest massacre, one of Poland’s greatest national traumas.

Thousands of people, many in tears, placed candles and flowers at the presidential palace in central Warsaw. Twenty monks rang the Zygmunt bell at Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral — the burial spot of Polish kings — a tolling reserved for times of profound importance or grief.

The consul general of Poland also lost two other dear friends. One he went to university with, the other, was the undersecretary at the president’s chancellory, Mariuz Handzlik. The consul general was supposed to pick Handzlik up at the airport in Chicago Sunday. Handzlik was coming to prepare for the Polish president’s visit, later this month, to Chicago. The consul general says people can go to the Polish Consulate  Sunday and throughout the week, to sign the condolence book.

Mayor Daley also offered his condolences. He said President Kaczynski was a committed leader who worked to promote cultural ties between Chicago and Poland and was a strong supporter of our Sister City relationship with Warsaw.

Outside of Warsaw, Poland, Chicago has the largest Polish population. By some estimates, there are around 700,000 first, second or third-generation Poles in the Chicago area.

On board the plane were the national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said. Kaczynski’s wife, Maria, also died.

“This is unbelievable — this tragic, cursed Katyn,” Kaczynski’s predecessor, Aleksander Kwasniewski, said on TVN24 television.

The Polish military suffered the deepest losses. Among the dead were the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces, who were all making the emotional trip to honor the Polish officers slain by the NKVD, the acronym for the Soviet secret police at the time of the murders in 1940.

Some on board were relatives of the officers slain in the Katyn massacre. Also among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk sparked a workers’ strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement.

“This is a great tragedy, a great shock to us all,” former president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said.

Polish Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, who became acting president, addressed his country on television: “Poland is in mourning, we have suffered a dramatically painful loss.”

He said he would announce early elections within 14 days of the president’s death, in line with the constitution. The vote must be held within another 60 days.

Russia’s Emergency Ministry said there were 97 dead, 88 in the Polish state delegation. Poland’s Foreign Ministry said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one had not shown up for the roughly 1 1/2-hour flight from Warsaw’s main airport.

Poland called for two minutes of silence across the country Sunday and declared a week of mourning. Medevedev declared Monday a day of mourning in Russia.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk flew to Smolensk from Warsaw. The president’s twin brother, former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, headed to the area in a chartered plane along with relatives, according to his party.

The deaths were not expected to directly affect the functioning of Polish government: Poland’s president is commander in chief of its armed forces but the position’s domestic duties are chiefly symbolic. No top government ministers were aboard the plane.

Polish-Russian relations had been improving recently after being poisoned for decades over the massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers in and around Katyn forest.

Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn’t invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Tusk.

Rossiya-24 showed hundreds of people around the Katyn monument, many holding Polish flags, some weeping.

Kaczynski, 60, was the first serving Polish leader to die since exiled World War II-era leader Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.

The president was a conservative and a lifelong skeptic of Russia with many detractors at home and abroad. Condolences from world leaders paid tribute to his patriotism and defense of freedom during Communist rule in Poland.

Both black boxes have been found. Preliminary data indicated that the plane hit the treetops as it was making the approach to the airport in poor visibility, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Marina Gridneva, an official with the Russian general prosecutor’s office, as saying.

Andrei Yevseyenkov, spokesman for the Smolensk regional government, said Russian dispatchers had asked the Polish crew to divert from the military airport in North Smolensk and land instead in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, or in Moscow to the east because of the fog.

While traffic controllers generally have the final word in whether it is safe for a plane to land, they can and do leave it to the pilots’ discretion. Air Force Gen. Alexander Alyoshin confirmed that the pilot disregarded instructions to fly to another airfield. The Smolensk airfield is not equipped with an instrument landing system to guide planes to the ground.

“But they continued landing, and it ended, unfortunately, with a tragedy,” Alyoshin said. He added that the pilot makes the final decision about whether to land.

The Tu-154 was the workhorse of East Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 1980s. Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country’s leaders but said they lacked the funds.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s in the past four decades, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service, largely because the planes do not meet international noise restrictions and use too much fuel.

The presidential plane was fully overhauled in December, the general director of the Aviakor aviation maintenance plant in Samara, Russia told Rossiya-24. The plant repaired the plane’s three engines, retrofitted electronic and navigation equipment and updated the interior, Alexei Gusev said. He said there could be no doubts that the plane was flightworthy.

Kacyznski became president in December 2005 after defeating Tusk in that year’s presidential vote.

The nationalist conservative had said he would seek a second term in presidential elections this fall. He was expected to face an uphill struggle against Komorowski, the candidate of Tusk’s governing Civic Platform party.

Poland has become a firm U.S. ally in the region since the fall of communism — a stance that crosses party lines.

The European Union member nation of 38 million people sent troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and recently boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to some 2,600 soldiers.

U.S. Patriot missiles are expected to be deployed in Poland this year. That was a Polish condition for a 2008 deal — backed by both Kaczynski and Tusk — to host long-range missile defense interceptors.

The deal, which was struck by the Bush administration, angered Russia and was later reconfigured under President Barack Obama’s administration.

Under the Obama plan, Poland would host a different type of missile defense interceptors as part of a more mobile system and at a later date, probably not until 2018.

CBS 2′s Suzanne Le Mignot and Mai Martinez and the Associated Press and Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this report

source: CBS 2 Chicago