The crash of an aging Russian airliner ravaged the top levels of Poland's military, political and church elite April 10, killing Polish President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of other dignitaries as they traveled to a ceremony commemorating a slaughter that has divided the two nations for seven decades.

Poles wept before their televisions, lowered flags to half-staff and taped black ribbons in their windows after hearing that the upper echelons of the establishment lay dead in woods a short drive from the site of the Katyn forest massacre, one of Poland's greatest national traumas.

On board were the national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish Foreign Ministry said. Kaczynski's wife, Maria, also died.

The Polish military suffered the deepest losses. Among the dead were the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces, who were all making the emotional trip to honor the Polish officers slain by the NKVD, the acronym for the Soviet secret police at the time of the murders in 1940.

Some on board were relatives of the officers slain in the Katyn massacre. Also among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, sparked a workers' strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement.