COLONEL KUKLIŃSKI AT THE SUMMIT MEETING
LIDIA DUDKIEWICZ, THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF ‘NIEDZIELA’
The NATO summit meeting finished in Warsaw is a great success of Poland. It is fulfillment of our dreams – says the foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski. We entered NATO in 1999, but for 17 years we have not been able to live till the arrival of NATO at Poland. After all, it concerned a possibility of an immediate reaction in the situation of a military conflict. At present findings give a guarantee that in case of a danger Warsaw will not be alone, in relation to stationing of allies’ armies in our country. In the opinion of the national defence minister Antoni Macierewicz, our membership of the second category, the so-called paper one, has just finished. Since the last summit meeting of NATO in Warsaw, we have been a fully-legal member of the North-Atlantic Pact.
In July 2016 at the summit meeting in Warsaw, to some extent, there was colonel Ryszard Kukliński, called the first Polish NATO officer. In the capital Saxon Garden, an exhibition was presented about his mission, undertaken to save Poland and Western Europe from the Third World War. It was just colonel Kukliński, a lonely Konrad Wallenrod of the XX century, who symbolically brought us into NATO. In the 70s of the last century he gave the army of the United States, being the basic stem of the North-Atlantic Pact, super-secret strategic plans of aggression of Soviet Russia onto Western Europe and NATO country, which prevented the war in which Poland was to become a nuclear graveyard. ‘The world would have avoided the atomic holocaust which Moscow had foreseen in its strategic plans’ – stated colonel Kukliński. During the opening ceremony of the exhibition in the Warsaw Saxon Garden a letter of the chairperson of the Law and Justice party Jarosław Kaczyński was read out in which he had reminded the words of Lech Kaczyński said in 2004 during the funeral of colonel Kukliński in the Alley of the Meritorious of the Military Graveyard on Powązki in Warsaw: ‘When he began his mission for saving Poland, the soviet empire was in attack. When it seemed that this empire would possess Europe and the world, the Colonel began his lonely fight and won a victory. If the soviet empire had invaded Europe, Poland would have stopped existing. And this is the measure of the merits of colonel Kukliński – we exist. We still have unsettled bills of wrongs, but we exist’.
We must remember that it was the sorely missed later Józef Szaniawski, the last political prisoner of communist Poland, a friend and a formal proxy of Ryszard Kukliński in Poland, personally brought his debris from America to Poland in 2004. It was him who gathered souvenirs after colonel Kukliński and organized a museum devoted to his person on the Old City in Warsaw. It was him who publicly bemoaned that Ryszard Kukliński had been sentenced to death by Polish judges – it was the last verdict like that given in communist Poland in a political process. Now Filip Frąckowiak maintains historical heritage collected by dr. Szaniawski and as a director of the Remembrance Chamber of Ryszard Kukliński he makes the mentioned exhibition available, at whose opening in the Saxon Garden there was Halina Frąckowiak, accompanying her son in such important moments. I will finish with the words from a report of the Central Intelligence Agency of William Casey, prepared on 9 February 1982 for the USA president Ronald Reagan. He wrote about colonel Kukliński in it: ‘nobody in the world has brought a harm to communism for the last 40 years like this Pole’.
AA
„Niedziela” 29/2016