I am in shock. So incredibly and frighteningly awful.

When I learned where the crash occurred I got a terrible sick feeling in my stomach.

““It is a damned place,” former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “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.”

Former president Lech Walesa, who presided over Poland’s transition from communism, cast the crash in similarly historic terms.

“This is the second disaster after Katyn,” he said. “They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished. Regardless of the differences, the intellectual class of those on the plane was truly great.”