In My Time - Dick Cheney [226]
AFTER SPENDING CHRISTMAS IN Wyoming with our family, Lynne and I left the United States again, this time for Krakow, Poland. I led the U.S. delegation to the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. The Polish government had invited a number of world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, to Krakow for the commemoration ceremonies.
As I sat in a meeting with Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski in Wawel Castle the evening before the ceremonies began, a member of his staff brought in a note. Kwasniewski read it and then translated it for me. President Putin, who was scheduled to meet with Kwasniewski within the hour, had not yet left Moscow. He wouldn’t be making the meeting, it seemed.
Putin’s rudeness was thought by many to be calculated. The Poles were charting an independent course, and Moscow was not happy about it. Among the errors of the Poles, as Moscow saw it, was supporting the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which had come about when the Moscow-backed candidate for the presidency of Ukraine had tried to steal the election. Crowds in Kiev’s Independence Square had forced a new vote, and reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko had emerged triumphant. I had long believed that the United States should play a more active role in integrating Ukraine and other former Soviet states into the West, and I took the opportunity in Krakow to meet privately with Yushchenko, whose face still bore the scars of an assassination attempt, in which someone—rumors were it was the Russians—had poisoned him with dioxin.
The next day, as we gathered in the ornate nineteenth-century Juliusz Slowacki Theater in Krakow’s old town for the first event commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, Putin still had not arrived. He still wasn’t there when his turn came to speak. The Poles gave his slot to Yushchenko, and the program continued, speeches interspersed with memorial readings and music. Forty-five minutes or so into the event, there was a commotion at the side door of the theater. Burly Russian security agents burst in, followed by President Putin, who strode up the side aisle and immediately onto the stage. Ignoring the fact that someone else was speaking, he began delivering his remarks, seemingly intent on showing our Polish hosts how little regard he had for them. Watching his behavior that day reminded me why Russia’s leaders are still so disliked by their neighbors and why we were right to expand NATO and offer membership to former Soviet client states like Poland and Romania.
My ten-year-old granddaughter, Kate, had asked to come with us on this trip. We explained to her that coming face-to-face with the evil of the Holocaust would be very difficult, but she said she knew that and wanted to come. In the theater that day in Krakow, there were many Holocaust survivors. Kate was one of the few children. Before the ceremony a woman spotted Kate sitting with our daughter Liz. She walked across the theater, introduced herself, and asked Kate how old she was. Then she pulled a black-and-white photo from her purse. It showed young children in the striped pajamas of Auschwitz prisoners. “This little girl is me, when I was ten,” she said, pointing to one of the children in the photo. She wanted to bear witness, to impress the tragedy of the Holocaust on someone young so that it will not be forgotten. And Kate will never forget.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, we were at our home in Jackson, Wyoming, when Hurricane