Poland races to out-mourn itself as condolence statements flood Krakow

The Polish government ordered twenty-six crates of emergency thesauruses on Tuesday, four days after shots were fired near Krakow's Main Market Square, killing six people and wounding fifteen more.

The books are for the new Condolence Acceleration Office, a unit created over the weekend inside the Interior Ministry. Its job is to draft statements about the attack faster than other ministries draft statements about the attack.

"By the time we express our condolences, three other offices have already expressed theirs," said the unit's director, Ada Wrona, at a desk piled with drafts. "Every hour a statement sits in review is an hour somebody else's sorrow looks more sincere."

The office has issued nine statements since Saturday. Two of those are statements about the office's own statements, describing them as heartfelt and timely.

A benchmark nobody asked for

Pressure began within hours of the shooting, when the US ambassador to Poland posted a statement online that one Warsaw newspaper described as "operatic." It paired condolences with a blessing, a vow of national friendship and a description of the afternoon itself.

Polish officials read it and panicked, according to one aide who asked not to be named because she still works Sundays. "We had a two-line draft. 'Deeply saddened.' That was it," she said. "Then the Americans released a eulogy and we looked like we were shrugging at a keyboard."

"You cannot grieve in second place. The public can tell. We have polling on this."

Wrona said the office now operates in shifts around the clock. The night shift handles what staff call "dark hour wording," a reference to the ambassador's phrase about America standing with Poland. Day shift handles follow-up sorrow and, when needed, sorrow about the follow-up sorrow.

President Karol Nawrocki has said he is being kept informed and expects full clarification of the circumstances. The Condolence Acceleration Office has offered to clarify the clarification, in writing, by Thursday at the latest.

Police keep working between the statements

Meanwhile, Małopolska police continue the actual investigation. They say a Polish citizen drove a car near the square on Saturday afternoon and fired at people at random. Officers shot the man, who is in custody and in hospital, and police denied early reports of a second attacker.

A police spokesperson said the suspect wore military-style camouflage that was not a real uniform, and carried an AR-15-style rifle. Police found more weapons and ammunition in the vehicle. Two officers are among the wounded, and the interior minister said one was shot and the other was in surgery.

None of this has slowed the wording effort. If anything, it has expanded it. The office has drafted a statement of support for the officers, a statement thanking the drafters of that statement, and a holding statement for the eventual statement about the investigation.

"The country is in pain and the country is also in paragraphs," Wrona said. "We must meet both."

Local reaction

In Krakow itself, reaction has been quieter than in Warsaw. A florist near Slawkowska Street, where the shooting happened, said she had counted the official statements on her phone and found them hard to tell apart.

"Six people from this square are gone," she said. "I read the words and I cannot find the people in them."

Wrona said the florist's remarks were "off message" and would be addressed in a forthcoming statement, currently scheduled for release twenty-six minutes before whatever the Americans post next.

See reporting on the attack itself from ABC News, BBC News and The New York Times.