POLAND

The few people who read The Republic Letters -- which in the current issue published Josez Czapski's account of Katyn -- will be able to view some (but not all) of the terrible ironies involved in the crash, at Smolensk, of a plane carrying Poland's president and much of its political leadership. My Google News, ever quick to be utterly superficial, headed its lead story with the headline that we needn't worry: the stock market would quickly recover. Well, that's nice to know.

Regardless of the lives and histories of the 97 people who died in the crash -- the political leadership in Poland is not that different from our own, consisting in equal portions of self-importance and a Faustian bargain with that elusive commodity, power -- that the crash should have taken place where and when it did is catastrophic. It re-awakens old wounds: the destruction of Poland's elites by the Soviet Union (precisely what the fatal flight was to commemorate); the criminal annihilation of Poland in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin; the miserable self-destruction of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, so ill-planned that it was doomed to failure; the utter failure of Poland's allies to meet their treaty obligations; the Soviet army encamped on the right bank of the Vistula watching Warsaw being razed to the ground; and the horrors of being so long -- from 1945 to 1989 -- relegated to a satrapy of Russia. Worst of all, the Polish tendency to hallow, internally, in its very soul, the worm of Doubt: are they the only people in Europe to be continually mocked by fate and by some inner failure?

As I wrote in a letter of condolence to my many Polish friends -- since Saul Bellow's death I have far more friends and equals in Poland than in the debased culture of the United States -- 'In Poland one does not "make" politics; one dies of it.

This is what Marek Bienczyk wrote back from Warsaw:

'The symbols flutter about us like recycled rags; it's hard not to think of them. On the other hand, I am enraged: not just a catastrophe, as you say, but yet another piece of Polish fatuity: the plane should never have tried to land in those conditions. But time pressed, the ceremony was to start in a half-hour, the pilot (perhaps urged on by the president) made his decision.

"The nation reacted y doing what it does best: candles lit, hymns, endless masses of people, priests on TV, debates: unde malum? Who's to blame? Forms of extreme masochism, the same old romantic resentment: what is bad shall be turned to good; we must be angelized, become living angels. It drives me crazy. Five minutes of thought, postpone the ceremony for three hours and not land. It was another Warsaw Uprising: doomed to failure,

"Yes, of course, I went out in the evening and lit my own candle."