The plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski on Saturday gutted a nation’s leadership and silenced some of the most potent human symbols of its tragic and tumultuous history.

It was, in a sense, a nation colliding with its past: The aircraft ran aground on a patch of earth that has symbolized the Soviet-era repressions that shaped much of the 20th century, near the remote Russian forest glade called Katyn where thousands of Polish prisoners of war were killed and dumped in unmarked graves by Soviet secret police in 1940.

The toll cut a swath through Poland’s elite. The 97 dead included the army chief of staff, the head of the National Security Bureau, the national bank president, the deputy foreign minister, the deputy parliament speaker, the civil rights commissioner and other members of parliament.