Reporter's Notebook
By : Juliet D. Golden
Polish writer-poet Antoni Slonimski once wrote: "If you don't know how to act, act decently." This caution came to mind while watching a newscast following a seven-car pileup on the A4 motorway that connects the Polish-German border with Wroclaw, Opole, Katowice and Krakow. As a result of the accident, one Dutch citizen died on impact and seven others were taken to the hospital, many with serious injuries.
In the melee immediately following the crash, ordinary citizens rose to the occasion: some administered first-aid to the injured while others used crowbars and sledgehammers in vain to free a driver pinched in the crushed remains of his automobile.
These individual actions contrasted sharply with the laggard reactions from the Lower Silesian emergency services. Despite the scale of the tragedy, initially only one ambulance was dispatched to the scene. It arrived 25 minutes after the accident. Bureaucratic infighting and incompetence not remoteness of the crash scene were the key reasons for the delay.
July 23, 2:40 p.m. In southwest Poland, mention the term "death highway" and most people know that you're talking about the A4 motorway. Despite this renown, the transportation artery's reputation has apparently not yet reached the emergency services in the cities and towns that flank the road in any measurable way. Despite widespread reforms introduced in the country a year and a half ago, segments of the highway are administrative no-man's-lands, where travelers of all nationalities are left to fend for themselves when worst-case scenarios happen.
The pileup involving the Dutch citizens happened at about 2:40 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, 14 kilometers outside of Wroclaw. A 70-year-old German citizen traveling east drifted out of his lane, colliding head-on with the westbound cars.
A lone ambulance equipped with one doctor arrived on the scene well after 3 p.m., 25 minutes after the first call was placed to the paramedics. The delay was reportedly caused by ambulance-service haggling in Wroclaw and the town of Olawa as to who was responsible for point 168 along A4.
Once on the scene, the emergency team summoned four other units, which arrived 15 minutes later 40 minutes after the first call was placed. One driver trapped in his car was only freed when a fully rigged rescue unit arrived more than an hour later. An emergency helicopter landed near the sprawled wreckage post facto; all the injured had already been spirited by ambulance to hospitals in Wroclaw.
Through a complicated web of contacts, I was asked to assist the relatives of the Dutch man who was killed in the pileup. For his family, the key priority was to secure the rapid transfer of his remains back to Holland so a fast burial could be arranged. When we met on Monday morning they were readied with a "to do" list supplied by the Dutch consulate.
The information proved the only method to measure progress as we sorted through the grim details that day. Without that guidepost, the eight-hour odyssey through Polish bureaucracy would have been an exercise of the blind leading the blind, where luck and serendipity played a larger role than bureaucratic predisposition and competence.
July 24, 9 a.m. The Wroclaw police station reeks of cigarette smoke and general neglect. An official summons, issued after the accident, instructed the Dutch family to appear at the station at 9 a.m. However, their punctual arrival caught the staff on duty unawares. No translator was available and the first question posed to the widow by the nervous officer was, "So your husband is in the hospital?" When informed otherwise, the shocked official admitted to being a novice in such affairs.
July 24, 12:00 The sweet odor of decaying human bodies permeates the still air of the enclosed Prussian courtyard, which leads to Wroclaw's morgue. Here, the no-man's-land where the accident occurred came back to haunt our small international delegation. Civil servants debated among themselves whether the death certificate would be issued in Wroclaw itself, in the nearby village of Zorawina or in the small town of Olawa, some 25 kilometers away. Point 168 on the A4 once again belonged to nobody, a black hole on Poland's administrative map.
July 24, 2 p.m. The last task of the day was sifting through the wreckage of the car and trailer in which the Dutch family had made their sojourn to Poland. Most important was the camera with an unfinished roll of film souvenirs of a journey and a life cut short. As the tangled search ensued, one onlooker said, "We have a buyer for the camper, are you interested?" Another man surged forward, "Ask about the car battery." Somewhat miraculously the unit had survived the impact, suspended bizarrely unscathed amid the web of green metallic and rubber bumpers.
Epilogue. Poles inspire awe for their ability to act in the face of adversity and adhere to Slonimski's admonition. But decency and basic competence was sorely lacking among many of the paid state employees in the immediate and more distant aftermath of the A4 tragedy. Recently replaying the incidents of July 23-24 in my mind, I was reminded of the flood that hit southern Poland exactly three years before. Individual actions did more to limit damage and loss of human life than any coordinated operations from any government body. Like with the flood itself, maybe this tragedy will serve as a warning light that will mobilize people in positions to act to do so. However, judging from the efforts in the years after the flood, unfortunately, I have my doubts.
Editor's note: Marek Matraszek is on vacation. "Government Watch" will return in two weeks.
