A solidarity rally will be held at 8 p.m. Monday on the Main Square (Rynek Główny) in Kraków, where participants will honor the memory of the victims of Saturday’s attack, Kraków Mayor Łukasz Gibała announced on social media. He stressed that Kraków will always be a proud, hospitable and open city.
“Ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow at 8 p.m. we are meeting at the corner of the Main Square and Sławkowska Street to honor the memory of the victims. In this difficult time, let us show solidarity and show that Kraków will always be a proud city, but also a hospitable and open one,” Gibała wrote.
The gathering is planned for the corner of the Main Square and Sławkowska Street. Its purpose will be to commemorate those who died in Saturday’s attack and to express solidarity with the injured and their loved ones.
Earlier, Gibała said he had requested the urgent conferral of the title of Honorary Citizen of the Royal Capital City of Kraków on two police officers, Artur Morański and Jakub Kulik, who subdued the perpetrator of Saturday’s attack in the city center. Both officers, senior constables, are in the hospital.
Gibała also declared a period of mourning in Kraków that will last through Nov. 11. National mourning across the country, ordered by the president of Poland, began Sunday and will also continue Monday.
The shooting took place Saturday shortly after 3 p.m. A masked 24-year-old drove a car onto the paved area of Kraków’s Main Square and opened fire on random people. Six people were killed and 16 were injured, including two police officers. The perpetrator was shot and detained near the intersection of Dietla and Stradomska streets. (PAP)
Kraków: Voivodeship Office Thanks “Unsung Heroes” of Main Square Response
“We managed to act instantly and pass the information on to the appropriate services,” Edyta Klimowska-Bobula of the Małopolska Voivodeship Office said of the medical response by 112 emergency line operators. Dominik Wilk of the Medical Dispatch Center at the Voivodeship Office stressed that the way rescuers’ actions were organized in the first minutes reduced the number of fatalities.
Edyta Klimowska-Bobula, director of the Emergency Notification Department at the Małopolska Voivodeship Office, expressed appreciation for the “unsung heroes,” meaning employees of the department: emergency number operators, medical dispatchers and the voivodeship coordinator of emergency medical services, who in her assessment “instantly established cooperation with hospitals.” She noted that the facilities were placed on heightened alert. “The hospitals organized themselves very quickly, and staff came in for additional shifts. We were able to act comprehensively,” she said.
“Thirteen basic ambulance teams, one specialist ambulance and one Medical Air Rescue team were dispatched to the scene. The first report of this tragic incident reached us at around 3 p.m. A big thank-you to the dispatchers who took the calls and gathered information directly from the scene. Injured people were spread out across different parts of the Kraków square,” said Dominik Wilk, chief dispatcher at the Voivodeship Office’s Medical Dispatch Center. He thanked Przemysław Janik, who led the medical operation for the emergency medical team. “The contact, and the way he triaged those patients, helped directly before other teams arrived. It contributed directly to reducing the number of fatalities,” Wilk said.
On Saturday, a man driving a car on Kraków’s Main Square began shooting at random people. Six people were killed and 16 were injured, including police officers. The perpetrator was shot and detained. (PAP)
