Poland's "Black Sunday"

By Robert Strybel

President Lech Kaczynski rushed to the site of the worst Polish road accident ever to occur abroad, where he was joined by his sympathetic French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy. He said a prayer and lit a votive lamp near the flame-gutted wreckage of a tour bus, in which 27 Polish pilgrims had lost their lives, before visiting the accident’s hospitalized survivors in the nearby city of Grenoble. Upon returning to Poland, the president declared three days of national mourning, and the government announced that families whose loved ones had been killed or maimed in the tragedy would each receive a $36,000 cash bereavement benefit. A special plane was also arranged to fly relatives of the crash victims to Grenoble free of charge.

The unsuspecting 50 Poles from the Szczecin area of northwestern Poland, including two drivers and three priests, had been on their way to the well-known Marian shrine of Notre-Dame de La Salette, when a brake failure suddenly prevented their speeding bus from negotiating a curve. The vehicle rammed through the roadside barrier, plunged down a 120-foot ravine, landed on a bank of the River Romanche and burst into flame. Provided by a Polish travel bureau, it lacked the special authorization the French authorities require of trucks and buses traveling that particularly steep and treacherous stretch of winding mountain roads in the French Alps.

“Hold onto your seats – the brakes are gone!” was all the driver managed to shout, according to 22-year-old pilgrim, Karolina Wachowiak. The Stargard Szczecnski resident managed to crawl out of the flaming wreckage with only a broken leg, fractured collarbone and head injuries. A dazed and injured young priest managed to contact his Church superiors in Poland with a borrowed cell phone (he had lost his own in the crash), but was so shaken he could hardly speak and began to cry.

On what the Polish media would soon be calling “czarna niedziela” (“black Sunday”), a short while later, all five passengers of a small Piper airplane were killed when it crashed in a wooded area not far the southeastern town of Lesko near Rzeszow. By the time fire-fighters managed to douse the flaming wreckage, the bodies had become charred beyond recognition, making identification difficult. “The pilot had originally intended to land at the airfield in Weremien, but for no explainable reason suddenly changed his mind and told the air controller he would continue flying over Lake Solinskie,” police spokesman Mariusz Skiba told this reporter. “The plane apparently went out of control and crashed after failing to clear hillside treetops.”

Some 175 to the west, an inter-country en route from Germany to Ukraine bus was rammed by a large truck as it was having a tire changed at the roadside in the southern region of Slask (Silesia). A 71-year-old Israeli citizen, who had stepped out to have a smoke, was killed, and his wife and son were among the half dozen injured. The passengers included Poles and Ukrainians and Poles returning from jobs in Germany as well as German tourists headed for the Black Sea resort of Crimea.

Later the same day, 26 passengers of another bus were injured when it veered off the motorway near the western city of Poznan and flipped over. And the media reported that one of three Polish mountain-climbers plunged some 600 feet to his death after climbing the Italo-Swiss Alps 15,000-tall Matterhorn which had claimed three Polish lives earlier this year. Back in Poland, the bodies of two Polish fishermen were fished out of Lake Czorsztynskie in the Tatra Mountains after their boat capsized. If we add the tornados that had ravaged the countryside around Czestochowa and Piotrkow in south-central Poland a day earlier, it may even not be too far off base to speak of this summer’s “black weekend”.