Poles come out in a massive show of grief

Even after midnight and despite a stiff breeze chilling the capital, Poles continued to pour into the streets as a nation in mourning showed no sign of letting up on its display of grief.

Elderly women clutching icons of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, young couples with tulips and children carrying crayon drawings of remembrance streamed through Warsaw’s squares. They placed their offerings at makeshift shrines to the victims of a plane crash that robbed their country of much of its elite.

They also laid flowers and candles at monuments to Poland’s heroes -- the romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, or Jozef Pilsudski, champion of Polish independence in 1918 -- as if looking to them for support at a time of overwhelming sorrow.

On Krakowskie Przedmiescie street, someone had laid out the newspaper headline “Katyn: a Double Tragedy,” which referred to the symbolism of the crash site -- 70 years ago, thousands of Polish army officers were massacred in the Katyn Forest on Stalin’s orders; this weekend, scores of Poland’s best died on their way there.

“Katyn was already our nation’s trauma,” said Waclaw Oszajca, a Jesuit priest who had taken the train from the southeastern city of Lublin to Warsaw to pay tribute to five friends he had lost in the crash. “Now it has reinforced itself on us again. I’m not sure what to think. It’s still a blur, and I can only think God has some other purpose that I cannot begin to understand right now.”

At sites around Pilsudski Square, the full scale of the tragedy began to emerge.

Outside the white Presidential Palace, where the Polish flag flew at half-staff, mourners twisted tulips around lampposts next to newspaper pictures of their late president, Lech Kaczynski, and his wife, Maria.

At the nearby Ministry of Culture, a carpet of roses still in their cellophane packaging lay amid a constellation of candles in red glass holders in tribute to 44-year-old Tomasz Merta, chief of Poland’s heritage conservation, another victim.

Nearby, at No. 4 Pilsudski Square, a framed portrait of 54-year-old Brig. Gen. Kazimierz Gilarski, commander of the Warsaw garrison, draped in a black ribbon, was surrounded by tulips and candles.

Across Poland, a staunchly Roman Catholic nation, prayers were said for the victims, including Anna Walentynowicz, 80, whose firing from the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in 1980 sparked a workers strike from which grew the Solidarity movement. Another victim was Piotr Nurowski, 64, head of the Polish Olympic Committee, who was to lay flowers on the graves of Polish Olympic champions killed at Katyn in 1940.

The tolling of church bells across the nation drew people from their homes, particularly the sound of the ceremonial Zygmunt Bell in Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral, which rang in a slow and sorrowful rhythm.

Singers gathered late into the night, intoning religious chants.

“It reminds me of when Pope John Paul II died, five years ago” this month, said Zofia, a bank clerk who declined to give her full name. “It makes me think April is a cruel month for Poland.”

On Sunday, special church services are to be held across the country, and at midday the nation is to observe two minutes of silence.

Connolly is a special correspondent.