What is Lost in Poles’ Memories

[polly7]

by Vadim Trukhachev / February 6th, 2015

A few days ago Polish President Bronisław Komorowski proposed a Victory Day parade on May 8 in Westerplatte – a section of Gdansk where World War II began on September 1, 1939. He was supported by Poland’s foreign minister, Grzegorz Schetyna, speaking on Radio RMF. Responding to the host’s question as to whether the Polish proposal was an attempt to undercut the celebrations in Moscow, Schetyna was frank:

It’s natural to commemorate the end of the war at the site where it began… Why are we so accustomed to the idea that Moscow is where we should honor the end of the Second World War, instead of London or Berlin?”

His statement came shortly after the scandal resulting from his claims that the concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated by the Ukrainians. President Komorowski had to smooth those words, while other Polish officials have brought their apologies to the Russians.

We could see even more fallout from this latest Polish initiative. The strategy to fabricate the history of WWII by presenting Nazi Germany and Soviet Union as equal “aggressors” was launched years ago. Varied distortions and demonization of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement is the cornerstone of this strategy. But the attempts to portray Poland as an innocent victim of World War II, as well as the place where the biggest events of those years were the case, do not hold up any serious argumentation.

Polish tanks enter Těšín, Czechoslovakia, on October 11, 1938

More: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/02/what-is-lost-in-poles-memories/

[Igel]

1. The shifting of Poland's borders wasn't an act of kindness.

It was to give territory as compensation to Uncle Joe.

The result was a bunch of "new dialects" in the West of Poland, as the Poles ethnically cleansed from the Soviet Union's new territorial acquisitions relocated to where the Germans, punished for their aggression, left.


The annexation of part of Silesia was territorial expansion by Poland. It was trivial to the repartition of Poland by Germany and Russia, which hasn't been all that distorted. The Red Army occupied the eastern half of Poland under the guise of "fraternal relations" and then assumed control over the military, executing officers as necessary to ensure that it controlled that territory for its own purposes. Of course, the territory just annexed by Poland was also occupied.

This was a betrayal of Poland. While nobody hides the Munich agreement, Russia (and the USSR) really insisted for a long time that Stalin's bedding Hitler with Poland was a dowry never really happened. Now they act like Poland was the bad guy in all of this. Presumably as Latvia was, when Stalin occupied it.

Again, Russia, for all the bad it did in Eastern Europe, really expects a kind of papal indulgence--it did some good stuff in WWII (although the looting of Eastern Europe, territorial gain, and the way it treated its POWs was all disgraceful), and that somehow makes the next 45 years of oppression and de facto occupation of central Europe meritorious.

[jakeXT]

2. Poland had some problems with her history during WWII

Media coverage of this short book has been so extensive as to make any summary almost superfluous. It tells, in unbearable detail, of the humiliation, systematic butchery, torture and burning alive of 1,600 Jewish men, women and children in the Polish town of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941.

This atrocity was perpetrated by their Polish neighbours who had, since June, begun to starve out the Jewish population. It did not involve any German units, though the occupiers and the Waffen SS had made no secret of their own homicidal intentions towards Polish Jews. The joyous, demented sadists of Jedwabne were Poles to a man (and woman).

Jan Gross, who stumbled on the documentary evidence by accident in a Polish archive five years ago, spares us no detail. Jewish men were forced to enact grotesque rituals before being butchered; women were raped and beheaded; babies were trampled to death; finally, more than 1,000 tortured Jews were herded into a barn, drenched with kerosene and torched. The Poles played raucous music in order to muffle their screams. They had surrounded the town to make sure that no Jew could escape (it would appear that there were, in fact, seven survivors).

The massacre at Jedwabne had been preceded by similar atrocities in the surrounding region. At Radzilow, some 1,500 were massacred; 1,200 in nearby Wsosz. In every instance, rituals of humiliation, of slow torture, of unspeakable bestiality accompanied the killings. Though encouraged and sometimes initiated by the Nazi occupiers, the actual mass murders were the work of 'local hooligans'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/08/historybooks.features

[polly7]

3. My God ......... how horrible.

Almost unimaginable that anyone who calls themselves human could do these things.

Thanks for this jakeXT, I'm going to go look up your link.

[Diclotican]

4. jakeXT

jakeXT

The sad fact on Holocaust - is that it would not have been possible, to kill so many as they did - even before the gas-chambers of Treblinka, Sorbinor, and many others was finished and ready for action - almost one million people, mainly jews was already killed by the gun - killed by german Einzatsgruppen - or by locals who under the agues of germans had been doing the dirty job of killing Men, woman and children, who was of jewish decent - and no one was spared - even kids age 5-6 was killed by this gangs who was roaming the countryside hunting down people who was of jewish origin - in the town and city's who often had a segment of the population who was jewish - they might have been relocated to a single place in the city - where they for a short while would have survived, often as work details for the german army - digging trenches, building fortifications (in gross wrong of the Geneva-convention of 1907, who Germany had signed the same year) and doing jobs for the german army, cleaning their cloths and so one - not to say making the munitions the German Army used in the eastern Europe..

For a while many could believe that they was speared - because they was "important" for the war effort - they should soon learn they was not - first they took the sick - the elderly - children and others who could not do the hard job they was compelled to do (by force in most cases) - and shipped to either a wood - where they was shot - or to some of the new KHZ camps - where they without mercy was killed - if they was not just stowed on train carts - and killed there... And buried in a nearby place where the trenches was already been digged - and ready for the sivilians...

We will never know how many really was part of the Holocaust - who was part of the ones who killed, murdered their nabours - their friends - or at least town-dwellers who had been living side by side for centuries often - but it was many who was part of this machinery of muder and killing of others....

And it happened all over the occupied areas, in Poland, and in the Soviet Union - where the local population in many cases was doing the job Einzatsgruppen just had the operational plans for - and in most cases it was never difficult to get voluntaries to kill jews - rather the opposite - and in many cases they was so brutal with their "cleansing" of the jews - that even SS had to step in, and stop it - not because they had some compassion with the jews - they should die - but because it should be made in order - not in the chaotic terms local killers was doing it - in fact even SS was more than one time worried about the affair - as the local murderers was far more brutal in their killing - often they just beat the life out of their former nab ours - former friends - who before the war had been god friends - from a young age - but now suddenly was their enemy - and whose hatred was extreme..

The baltic states, had even local SS divisions - made up by locals - who did most of the killing of the jews - and whose gruesome job was shocking even for hardened SS soldiers who had had their share of killings since 1939 - but even them was shocked by the hatred - and the gruesome methods locals used to kill their jews - like burning them up in a barn - or by just let them starve to death in a old prison and so one... The details is rather gruesome - and horrible if you have the stomage to read about it...

And in most cases - even after the evidence about how horrible pepole had been against their fellow men - many was never arrested - or convicted of any wrongdoing - and even for the ones who had survived the ordeal - and was coming home after the war, could discover it was not easy to get back the property they had lost - in most cases they had either to start over again - other places - or had to leave the country - to the West - who was as destroyed as the eastern part of europe - to America - often to the US - or to Palestine where in 1948 the first jewish nation for more than 2000 years was made possible again - on the ruins of the european jewish population by the way...

it was a tragedy - a horrible tragedy where humanity lost its track - and many who should have been arrested, and convicted of horrible crimes against humanity - was never convicted of anything - and where the ones who did was convicted of crimes - and was in prison for a long time - never was showing any remorse what so ever about what they had been doing - in fact most of them was proud about what they did in the war - and they claimed to their death bed - they had been doing their country and countrymen a favor - by killing the jews - that was the sentiment - not just in the baltic states - in the Soviet Union - but also in Poland...

And in Poland - antisemetism have been under the turf for all this years - and have shown its ugly face again - not just in Poland - but in most european nations... Who dosen' hold to well for the future...

Diclotican

[polly7]

5. +1,000,000

Thank you for this, Diclotican, I know it must have been hard to write. It's heartbreaking to read. The hatred in man knows no bounds, does it? I too am scared to death of this creeping mindset seeming to be exposed yet again and spread in so many countries. The whole world needs a damn shake by some universal body that can get people to see reason and tolerance again, there's so much anger and hatred for everyone it seems - by race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, status, hell .... there really doesn't even need to be a reason. I don't think I've ever seen it this bad and so widespread in my lifetime.

And, there are those deliberately fueling it. I have no doubt about that whatsoever.

[Diclotican]

6. polly7

polly7

It was even harder to read when I did it - to read about how we humans can do great evil, in our own mist if we choose to... I can understand how people who survived this horrible act of savagery kept quiet for a long while before they was even willing to start talk about what they had experienced in the war, when your best friends, who you had been playing with when you grow up - could turn on you and do their best to just burn you out of existence - everything you was - disappear into a ditch somewhere in a wood... With most of your familiy.... Or for that matter people who was there liberating the camps - and experiencing the whole thing, they had a lot of experience they was not able to express about - or even wanted to tell about what they had experienced - at least as long as they was sober - when they got a few under the belt , some of them tended to speak about it, even in general terms...

It was a horrible thing back then - and it is still a horrible thing today - it is a plague who looks like it spread from country to country all over europe - in some it is more clearly than in others - but it is there - under the cover of everything else - a hatred who spread from person to person - even people who have never experienced a person of jewish origin - can hate them...

Its bad - and it just spread itself as a illness who is easy to get - but you have to train hard to get out of your system again... I have a friend who had some past in neo-fascism - back when he was young - even though he was getting out of it early on - the illness he got there - are still there, right under the surface when he use slurs I would never use against others.... And I have told him about his own slurs many times - but he still use the words in my presentence - I doesn't like it at all..

And they are many who is fueling the hatred on purpose - because it is easy to use "the others" to deflect the problems we all face, and have been facing for some time now.... Hitler used it when he rise to power - and even used it after he was made chancellor of Germany - to turn germans against germans - to hate them - and to create accept for the issue - that the jewish population have to be killed to make room for a more purse german nation... And of course everyone else who was not on the list of approved peoples in the 3 Reich...

Diclotican