After a mass celebrated by cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, the Metropolitan Bishop of Warsaw, the remains of Ryszard Kaczorowski, Poland's last president-in-exile, were interred in the Pantheon of Prominent Poles.
Ryszard Kaczorowski was one of ninety six victims of the plane crash in Russia in April 2010, in which President Lech Kaczynski was also killed.
Last month it was revealed that as a result of a mistake in the identification of the bodies of the victims, the body that had been buried in the Temple of Divide Province in 2010 was not that of President Kaczorowski.
His remains were mixed up with the body of another victim, buried at Warsaw’s Powązki cemetery. The two exhumations were carried last month.
The re-burial follows a similar mix-up over the remains of Anna Walentynowicz – one of the initiators of the 1980 Solidarity strikes – who also died in the Smolensk disaster.
The Royal Sigismund Bell, which hangs from the tower of the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, tolled during the ceremony on Saturday. Regarded as one of Poland’s national symbols, the bell tolls on religious and national holidays, as well as on very special occasions.
Among those attending the re-burial ceremony, apart from the late President’s family, were the First Lady Anna Komorowska and the Head of the Presidential Chancellery Jacek Michalowski.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk expressed his deepest sympathies for those who had to endure such dramatic and sorrowful moments in connecetion with the necessity for exhumations and reburials. An apology was also made by Jacek Najder, former deputy foreign minister, who was directly responsible for the wrong identification of Ryszard Kaczorowski’s body.
Ryszard Kaczorowski was born in 1919. In 1940 he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD police and sentenced to death for his activities in the Polish Scouting Association. The sentence was later changed to ten years in a concentration camp in Siberia.
Following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of 1941, Kaczorowski was set free and joined the General Anders’s Army and fought in most battles of the Polish Second Corps, including the Battle of Monte Casino.
After the war, he settled in Britain as a political émigré.
In July 1989, he was appointed Poland’s president-in-exile and held the post for seventeen months.
On 22 December 1990 he handed over the insignia of the presidential power to Lech Wałęsa, the first democratically elected president after World War Two.
Saturday 3 November 2012
http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/117302,Last-presidentinexile-reburial-after-botched-remains-identification
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