A soldier stands near a sea of candles in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw on Monday, April 12.
For all its trauma, the plane crash that killed Poland's president and top generals three days ago has paradoxically also proved a boost to the country's self confidence and a balm to its long-prickly relations with Russia.
In an apparently seamless transition, an interim president took office following the death of President Lech Kaczynski in the crash in western Russia on Saturday. Deputy commanders assumed charge of the armed forces, as the government declared a week of official mourning.
"Poland has proved it is a consolidated democracy," said Jacek Wasilewski, a political analyst and professor at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. "I'm optimistic. The Polish state is working."
The sympathetic reaction from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has also reassured Poles at a disorienting time. Mr. Putin flew in to view the wreckage almost immediately after the crash and returned the next day to kneel beside Mr. Kaczynski's coffin before it was flown home to Warsaw, "It could be a political turning point" in relations between the two countries, said Mr. Wasilewski. "On both sides, there's really a lot of goodwill that I couldn't see even a month ago."
Public mourning for Mr. Kaczynski and the others on the plane continued yesterday.
Thousands of office workers, schoolchildren and other Poles converged on the centre of Warsaw, straining for a view of the flowers and candles massed at the entrance to the presidential palace where the president's body lay in state.
Canada will mark a national day of mourning for Poland on Thursday, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper will attend a memorial mass at St. Maximilian Kolbe Roman Catholic Church in Mississauga, Ont., the Prime Minister's Office announced yesterday.
Mr. Kaczynski died on his way to a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the 1940 Soviet massacre of Polish officers and professionals at Katyn, in western Russia. His plane crashed on approach to the airport in Smolensk, not far from the site of the Second World War executions.
All 96 people on board were killed. They included the president's wife and aides, as well as priests, parliamentarians, military commanders, deputy ministers and elderly relatives of some of the 22,000 Poles killed at Katyn.
The massacre at Katyn 70 years ago was carried out by Soviet soldiers on orders from Stalin, although the official Soviet line for more than 50 years was that Nazi Germans were responsible.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Kaczynski was among the most vociferous of Polish leaders in demanding an apology for Katyn from Russia. He never got it.
But Mr. Putin's swift and personal response to the plane crash near Katyn may link the two events in a public way, said Sławomir Dębski, director of the Polish Institute of Foreign Affairs.
"There were those who expected to close the issue of the Katyn massacre in Polish-Russian relations, or to pass this matter only to the historians," he said. "Now these two tragic moments of Polish history were integrated by this accident, and I think the Russians understand that."
The Polish government's response to the devastating plane crash has also comforted many Poles.
Jaroslaw Kurski, deputy editor of Poland's leading daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, said he felt a twinge of fear when he first learned of the crash.
"The losses were unprecedented - 15 deputies, three senators, the commanders of the armed forces and so on, so of course I wondered what was going to happen," he said. "But fortunately, the constitution anticipated even this terrible scenario."
Poland's constitution, adopted only in 1997, requires that a special election be held within 60 days after the death of a sitting president. Before last weekend's crash, presidential elections were set for October. Two of the candidates - Mr. Kaczynski and the left-wing deputy speaker of parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski - died on the plane.
The campaign will be another test of Poland's surviving politicians, said Piotr Ogrodzinski, a Foreign Ministry official and former Polish ambassador to Canada.
"The parties are going to have to work out concepts of running this election," he said. "At the moment, the political reaction to this tragedy is unity and everyone repeats that we are one nation. So it's a difficult starting point, because in an election you have to stress your differences."
Special to The Globe and Mail