Despite devastating floods, Poles still vote in snap ballot

They suffered two flood waves but residents of Wilkow, a village south-east of Warsaw, still voted Sunday in Poland's snap presidential election as they tried to rebuild their shattered lives.

"It is our duty to vote, even if my mind is competely somewhere else," farmer Henryk Boruch told AFP.

"I lost everything, nothing is left, not a piece of furniture, not a piece of clothing, nothing," said the 65-year-old who came to vote with his wife Jadwiga in a part of the village where flood waters have receded.

In May and June, his house was flooded twice to the first floor when Poland's largest river, the Vistula, broke its banks after torrential rains swelled it to record levels.

His wife was evacuated, but Henryk spent two weeks with four dogs and three cats on the flooded property.

"I couldn't abandon them. Every day, fire-fighters brought us water and food by boat," he says.

His orchards were completely destroyed. "We'll have to cut down all the trees, all of them," he said, his voice trembling.

"This place has been disinfected," reads a sign on the doorstep of polling station number one in Wilkow, located in a village council building that had also been under water.

"With what happened, we didn't really pay attention to the election campaign," Emil Rybak, 30, told AFP as he left the polling station after casting his ballot.

"I knew who I would be voting for even before the campaign," he said but refused to reveal his choice of candidate. His parents stayed away from the ballot box Sunday. "They are too traumatized by what happened," he explained.

"I don't know yet who I'll vote for, if it will be Kaczynski or Komorowski, I still have time to decide until 8:00 pm," Genowefa Szaft, 76, told AFP.

Ten candidates are running in the snap presidential ballot Sunday forced by the April 10 air crash death of president Lech Kaczynski among 96 other passengers of a Polish government jet near Smolensk, western Russia, as they arrived for ceremonies marking 70 years since a Soviet World War II massacre of Polish officers in the nearby Katyn forest.

Opinion surveys have tipped liberal candidate and interim president Bronislaw Komorowski as the frontrunner ahead of the late president's twin brother, conservative opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister.

Evacuated from her home, Szaft has been living in a school transformed into a relief centre for the last month.

Until Saturday, Szaft occupied a small classroom and was required to move her cot into the hallway Sunday to make room for voting booths.

"Nothing is left here for me," said farmer Andrzej Jackowski, 50, whose village of Zastow, near Wilkow, also suffered heavy flood damage.

Here the Vistula burst levees and spilled into the village totally destroying it. After the waters receded, homes, roads, fields and orchards were covered with a thick layer of slippery, gray foul-smelling mud.

Jackowski picks up a big bag of clothes from among a heap of relief packages provided by a charity to suffering villagers. "At least I'll have some clothes to put on my back," he quipped.

Other residents picked up drinking water, food, rubber boots, shovels and even toys for children.

"This election looks like something from another planet, but I have to go vote, more for myself than for any of the politicians," Jackowski explained.