Day (Night) of Mourning Cont.

As promised earlier, I wanted to go back and look at the day's events in a bit more of an in-depth look. It's already Monday in Poland (they are 7 hours ahead) so obviously everything has already concluded, and tomorrow will probably seem like just another day.

However, today was quite a jam-packed day with a lot of events occurring at a lot of different places, and of course, nothing can ever get completed without controversy. I understand this is in Polish, but just by looking at the pictures you should get a very good idea of the time line of the events that had occurred today. Everything began at 6 A.M. (Polish time, 11 P.M. Saturday U.S. time) and did not end until 11 30 P.M. Polish time or 4:30 P.M. American time.


Some of the events that occurred in Smolensk, actually began on Saturday night. Family members of all the 95 members of the government that died had gathered at the scene of the crash along with another 120 some people to begin the mourning of the one-year anniversary. Also joining the families and others at the scene was current First Lady Anna Komorowska.

In Poland, the crowds in Krakow, and Warsaw had not started gathering till about 6:30 A.M. local time.By 7:30 A.M. local time a much larger crowd was already gathered in front of the Presidential Palace in the nation's capital, Warsaw.  In one of Poland's other major cities, Krakow, a large crowd had gathered to not only mourn the tragedy, but also give in some words of protests. One poster even read "Mr. Tusk, (Polish Premier) for your poor investigation skills, one could shoot oneself in the head." Along with that poster was another person with a poster criticizing the President and the fact that he nor the late President's brother had not gone to Smolensk to mourn with the others. The saddest and most shocking part as mentioned earlier was the fact that the President's own brother didn't even go to the scene of the crash! Also, choosing not to go was the former President's political party members.

Plenty of the day was also spent on talking about the switched plaque that you had read in the earlier post. Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Archbishop of Krakow, (and strange enough, my sister in-law's distant uncle) led a mass in honor of the accident in front of tens of thousands people in Krakow. In Warsaw, the President along with Jaroslaw Kaczynski (brother of former President) laid flowers down in front of a memorial placed in Poland.

Here you can find a very quick video in English that summarizes a little bit of what's going on. Mourning and protests went along for the entire day, and it seems that this event will never really quiet down. Poland is having a hard time coping with the tragedy, and even a more difficult time believing that this was just an accident and that the Russian side had no play in any of this.

This is just a small part of an entire square filled with candles and flowers in mourning of the Smolensk Crash.

10.04.2010 We Will Never Forget.