(RNS) In 1989, on the first of my 10 visits to Poland on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, my host was Archbishop Henryk Muszynski, a champion of positive Catholic-Jewish relations.

It was an exciting time in Poland’s turbulent history. A native son, Karol Wojtyla, had been on the papal throne for more than a decade. The beleaguered country was slowly emerging from Communist control for the first time in half a century.

“Things look bright and hopeful for Poland,” I told the archbishop.

He shook his head.

“It’s not that easy,” he replied. “Tragedy is a part of our history and national psyche. Always remember: `Poland, so far from God, but so close to Germany and Russia.’ We have been constantly occupied and humiliated by our stronger neighbors.”

I thought of the archbishop’s words when I heard of the plane crash that killed 96 Polish leaders, including the country’s president and first lady.

The ill-fated flight was headed for Russia’s Katyn Forest where, in 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 20,000 Polish officers, including 900 Jews. Seventy years later, the Russian government invited Polish leaders to jointly commemorate the massacre. Sadly, they never reached their destination.

Among the dead were Poland’s political, military, religious, economic, and diplomatic elite, including the country’s military chiefs, the deputy foreign minister, the president of the national bank, the deputy speaker of parliament,the National Security chief, and leaders of the Institute for National Memory. The death toll also included Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last president of the anti-Communist Polish government in exile.

Slain President Lech Kaczynski had publicly recognized the long and extraordinary history of Polish Jewry; when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, one in 10 Poles were Jewish. Kaczynski supported the establishment of a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and he spoke at public events recalling the April 1943 Jewish ghetto uprising against the Germans.

Kaczynski had visited Israel and was a dialogue partner of Israeli President Shimon Peres, who was born in Poland, as was David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the greatest Jew of the 20th century.

Poland is very much a part of my life, too. My four grandparents fled Poland for Pittsburgh more than a century ago to escape the severe anti-Jewish bigotry and restrictions of daily life. For them, like millions of other immigrants, America offered freedom, and today the descendants of Polish Jews make up more than 60 percent of the American Jewish community.

My grandparents’ descriptions of their bitter anti-Semitic experiences in the “Old Country” created a negative perception of Poland. For years, it was a nation to be avoided, a country filled with Jewish blood and ashes, a place where the Germans established death camps in which millions of Jews and other innocents were murdered. The mere recitation of the camp names — Auschwitz, Belzec, Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka — remains chilling.

Yet Poland need not be enslaved by her tragic past, nor by her tragic present. One of my former students, Helise Lieberman, and her husband, Rabbi Yale Reisner, have lived in Warsaw for the past 20 years as leaders of the city’s resurgent Jewish community. In addition to Archbishop Muszynski, I recall Stanislaw Krajewski, my American Jewish Committee colleague in Warsaw, who courageously led the underground Jewish cultural and religious renaissance under Communism.

And there are three Poles I especially think of who labored to build human bridges of mutual respect and knowledge between Catholics and Jews. Like the victims of the Russian plane crash, they are no longer alive, yet their remarkable contributions endure: Jesuit priest Stanislaw Musial, a pioneer in Catholic-Jewish relations; Bronislaw Geremek, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who later became Poland’s Foreign Minister; and Georgetown University professor and Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who had warned Western leaders about the Nazis'”Final Solution.”

Because of such people, and despite the recent catastrophic calamity, I still believe that “things look bright and hopeful for Poland.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)