Katyn: "It is a damned place"

Poland's President Lech Kaczynski has been killed in a plane crash, with many of Poland's highest-ranking government officials, on route to the annual commemoration of the Katyn Massacre in Russia. At Katyn in 1940, Soviet secret police murdered nearly 22,000 Polish Army officers, each man shot once in the back of the head. Above, the dramatic statue at Exchange Place in Jersey City, NJ, commemorating the massacre, also see below. 

Speaking of the plane crash, former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski said:  “It is a damned place. It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”