Alicja Jankowska and Jagoda Kaczorowska photo: PAP/Radek Pietruszka
Ryszard Kaczorowski's daughters confirmed at a press conference in Warsaw that in spite of suggestions that their father might be interred at Krakow's Wawel Cathedral, alongside monarchs and national heroes, the president will be laid to rest in Warsaw.
The ceremony will take place at the Temple of Divine Providence, Warsaw's newly built national pantheon, where another Smolensk victim – whose identity has not been released owing to the family's wishes - was mistakenly entombed in 2010 in Kaczorowski's place.
“There, this coming Saturday, the journey of this Polish patriot will finally end ,” said Jagoda Kaczorowska.
Her sister, Alicja Jankowska, revealed that the family had been assured that it was not necessary to take part in the identification process in April 2010.
“We were ready to fly to Russia,” Jankowska said, noting that “we were informed that he had been recognised.”
“Now we find out that the person who supposedly recognized our father did not know him personally,” she said.
“This man had just seen him at ceremonies, in papers and on television,” she added, questioning why the responsibility for the identification was placed on one man's shoulders.
The identification had been carried out by the then Deputy Foreign Minister Jacek Najder (currently Poland's ambassador to Nato).
Najder apologised to the family on Tuesday, and he has also endeavoured to explain the circumstances faced by those taking part in the process.
“The conditions at the [medical] institute were very hard, and the situation we were confronted with was out of the ordinary,” he said.
“What we did was carried out in the best possible faith, and we did the best we could,”he added.
Poland's government-in-exile, of which Kaczorowski was the last leader, functioned in London during the Second World War, remaining there after a communist regime was installed in Poland.
Kaczorowski, himself a WWII veteran, was elected president in 1989, having previously served as a minister.
Nevertheless, owing to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, his term was short-lived, and he returned the presidential insignia to Poland in December 1990 in a ceremony at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
He was a regular visitor to Poland, as an honoured guest of the republic, taking part in countless events.
He was one of 96 Poles to die in the Smolensk air crash, which occurred as the delegation of President Lech Kaczynski flew to take part in 70th anniversary commemorations of the Katyn Crime (the wartime execution of over 22,000 Polish officers on Stalin's orders).
The exhumation of Kaczorowski follows the confirmation last month that two other crash victims, including the late Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz, were also buried in the wrong graves.
Seven victims of the April 2010 crash have now been exhumed, and it has been confirmed that two more exhumations are due to occur this year.
Saturday's funeral will be led by the Archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz. (nh)