WWII

[Zbyszek]

Hello Happy Gunner,
I truly respect your drive to know more. Your answer pleased me I must say. I have to explain something. My Dutch friends were very nice but they were brought in the rural part of Holland and I do not think they were thoroughly educated. I described them partly in the Politics forum (Unemployment┘). I came there to improve my meagre finance and I met warm hearted, friendly people, ⌠klaar te hulp Polen■ [ready to help Poland, as they said]. I also noticed that Dutch people are particularly friendly for Jews.
Nice to know that your perception was wider than theirs. I also appreciate your ability to correct your statements. Sorry if I came to conclusions too quickly. My views can sometimes be read as too much personified because my parents grew at WWII times and they both have seen too much horror in their life. I was growing up in the long shadow of war and believe it or not, people in Poland hysterically bought out staples before every September 1 [anniv. of WWII beginning], long after WWII ended.
Maybe I over-appreciate Norman the Great (Davies I mean, is is info for the occasional readers) but he is really worth gold for what he has done for the East Europeans. No Pole or Ukrainian could be as credible as he was.
I was enraged by the Esmond Wright▓s History. I have no time to discuss it in detail now but I almost believe he had some kind of a hidden agenda. I only do not know what kind it was.
Happy Gunner, I have no doubt about your friendly attitude about me and Poles in general. You have shown it already. You are right, you just need to be armed with information and I am really glad I can provide it for you in this case. No doubt that in other case I will gladly get information from you. And thank you for your sensitive remarks. Prawda is annoying at times, I agree. I still hope he will be able to accept information even if it does not fit his agenda.

[Edited by Zbyszek on 26th January 2003 at 21:02]

[Halina]

Zbyszek,

You may not believe it, but I learn quite a lot from your wise, quiet, impartial and fair attitude to history and to other people. I was really saddened by Happy_Gunner's accusation that Poles somehow rejoiced in having Auschwitz on their doorstep.
You always seem to find the best in everyone.

Because I was born near this place (Auschwitz) and because of the Jagiellonian University professors, the Warsaw Uprising and the Jewish Ghettos in Poland, and the children of Zamosc - I was on the verge of tears. Graham just asked me to wave it all aside, but I could not.

I believe we should at least try and tell the truth about the past, not because I believe in some 'moral absolutism',but because a fair discussion helps clean up the atmosphere and create better, peaceful future.

This applies not only to some 'black spots' in the Ukrainian history , but also to what the Poles did in Jedwabne.
By the same token, there were people on BOTH (POLISH and UKRAINIAN) sides who risked their lives helping the Jews.

As for Auschwitz, it is too painful to talk about for me, so I will just stop here.

A quote from Norman Davies' Introduction to the afore-mentioned book by Richard C. Lukas is an adequate summary here;
'the book effectively puts to rest those most harmful stereotypes about Nazi murderers, Jewish victims and Polish bystanders. In reality, the murderers were not just Nazis; the victims were not jus Jews; and bystanding was one of the least representative of Polish wartime activities'.

[Edited by Halina on 26th January 2003 at 21:48]

[forest]

Hello Gunner Halina Zbyszec . Glad its got back to discussion again .I have not had my computer long but since I have had it I tend to do more reading, especially since I have been checking out the history and polotics threads .The Gunner is right about the English education system, especially when I was at school. Careers lessons for boys were do you want to go down the mines or bend wire in a factory to make car seats. Girls hosiery or Knitting factorys, if they were really clever Hair dressing .
Anyone East of Berlin was a Russian a Commie ,a Red, Not to be trusted . There was a camp near me Western on trent called Tara sivka a holiday place for Ukrainian kids run by Ukrainian immigrants. It was described in a national paper once as a K.G.B. TRAINING CAMP . so you can see the level of knowledge even within our Media .all the best.

[happy_gunner]

Ironically I agree with Halina and the rest about the truth, I posted the Victims of Yalta thread for that reason - Thousands died, it was us, it was shameful and we didn't confront it.
Here are some proud exploits of my other compatriots:

http://www.geocities.com/irishafa/postwar.html
"Ireland was still using the Nazis' racial criteria to keep Jews out of the State eight years after Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker."

http://www.tcd.ie/Education/Teachers.../Racism06.html
"Returning Irish emigrants have also been responsible for importing racism into Ireland. Irish Americans have often been at the forefront of racism in the USA despite being the victims of anti-Irish racism in the USA, Britain and elsewhere. Senator McCarthy of xenophobic 'McCarthyism' and Eugene 'Bull' Conner, notorious opponent of Black civil rights, were both descendants of Irish immigrants, as was Judge Lynch, who gave his name to 'lynching.' The Boston Irish during the 1972 riots around integration in the city which coincided with the aftermath of 'Bloody Sunday' called for 'Brits out of Ireland, N!ggers out of Boston'."

http://www.tcd.ie/Education/Teachers.../Racism04.html
"In the 1880's a large number of Jews arrived in Ireland, mainly from Lithuania, a community which grew to almost four thousand in Dublin, Cork and Limerick by the early twentieth century. Early signs of racism appeared when a Limerick priest, Fr. John Creagh rallied the local Christian community against the "blood sucking" Jewish community resulting in a two year trade boycott of Jewish businesses, which was accompanied by intimidation, abuse, harassment and beatings"

http://www.limerick-leader.ie/issues.../halligan.html
CORKMAN David Marcus--whose autobiography, "Oughtobiography", is published this Friday--tells of being trapped by a ranting, pro-IRA, anti-Semitic witch in a train compartment. He wonders what she'd have thought if, after telling her he was one of her hated Jews, he had also revealed that his mother, before she married, had been a member of Cumann na mBan. "Would it have changed her mind," he muses, "or would she have preferred to learn that that Cumann na mBan member had in her teens been one of the Jewish community driven out of Limerick in the 'pogrom' of 1904, while her father, my grandfather, had escaped Russian anti-Semitism only to settle in Limerick, be hit on the head by a stone and carried to hospital by a fellow-Jew when none of the citizens watching would help him?"

A friend of mine's cousin, a child, was ripped to pieces in the Omagh bombing. There are people, not just in Ireland but in Scotland, England, the US, who still support the people who did this.
Murdering innocent people is caused by a state of mind, "the end justifies the means", "respect for authority", "I was only obeying orders" etc etc, nothing to do with one's nationality.
And the buggers are everywhere.

[Zbyszek]

New (???) facts about Auschwitz 48 years after its liberation on a frosty day 27 JANUARY, 1945

[ excerpts from the fascinating book of Norman Davies └EUROPE. A history■. ]

Concentration camps were organized at Auschwitz and Majdanek to deal with the Polish Resistance. In an act of cold-blooded genocide, the so-called AB-aktion, some 15 000 Polish intellectuals, officials and clergy were selected [in 1939] for shooting or for consignment to concentration camps. As from late 1939, Poland's large Jewish community was ordered into designated ghetto districts, which were later gradually walled, locked and totally segregated; Jewish councils, supported by a Jewish police force, were recruited to run ghettos under Nazi supervision.

Partial knowledge of the Nazi death-camps had been available in the West since late 1942, when the exiled Polish Government in London published information supplied by its underground couriers. As early as September 1940 a courageous officer of the Polish underground, Witold Pilecki (1901-1948), had succeeded in penetrating Auschwitz I. He spent two years organizing secret resistance cells inside the camp, before escaping. Yet the information gathered was not judged credible outside Poland. When the Polish Government in Exile in London published a report on the fate of Poland's Jews, a leading Jewish member of the Government committed suicide at the feeble response. When a Polish courier visited Washington to give an eye-witness account of the death camps, he was countered by the chilling words of Chief Justice Frankfurter:"We don't say that you are lying, but ...'. American Jews were no more spurred to action than anyone else. When the proposal was eventually made to bomb the approaches to Auschwitz, the Allied Powers found reasons to refuse.
The fate of the aerial intelligence pictures is no less instructive than their contents. The films were flown back from Italy for processing and interpretation at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. There, since the directors of the operation were only interested in the synthetic fuel factory, the last frames on the reels were not checked out. The historic photographs of 31 May and 25 August 1944 were not found thirty years later in the archives of the US Defense Intelligence Agency-unprinted.
Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army on 27 January 1945. Yet the Western Governments' urgent requests for detailed information brought no further news until an ambiguous telegram arrived from Moscow on 27 April. It mentioned 'investigations at Auschwitz' which showed that 'more than four million citizens of various countries had been killed'. This figure, as terrifying as it can be, if applied to the victims of Auschwitz alone, was not compatible with statistics produced by Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg. But it was allowed to pass into conventional wisdom. Not until the collapse of Communism in 1990 did the State museum at Oswiecim [Polish name of Auschwitz; Auschwitz was within German borders during the war] feel free to release a more credible estimate of 1.2-1.5 million victims, of whom probably c. 0.8-1.1 million were Jews [ the most of the others were members of the Polish Resistance].
Now, my comment:
Auschwitz was a terrifying symbol for the Nazi atrocities against Jews but Poles find it unfair to forget totally about the Polish victims.
I would be grateful for your comments on this text. I think that Prof. Davies reminded old facts about Oswiecim, most of them well known in Poland, but kept in obscurity outside, and particularly in the USA. Did you know them?
I think the Russian and Ukrainian readers of this forum living in communist times remember well the number 4 000 000. It was also often quoted in the communist Poland.

[Halina]

Hello Forest,

I really understand that Prawda has provoked you and believe me no one is as susceptible to provocations as myself. I simply hit the roof.., and so I am 100% sure you are an angel when compared with me..
(I wish I could hold my tongue at times).

Forest, the last thing I would think about you is that you are an anti-Semite, or you hate Poles. Even though, we know each other only in this unreal, virtual reality of the computer screen, I feel you are a VERY friendly person and extremely genuine, too.

I see very well that Prawda cannot covey his message in a subtle and respectful way (I've made such mistakes myself). However, he may be surprised to find out that his own surname has a Ukrainian origin ! Maybe then he will realise that we are all the same, in spite of our histories; tragic and painful, but also full of glory and meaningful achievements.

P.s
The compliement about eloquence is really kind, but genuine feelings are even more important in any message and this latter virtue belongs to yourself!

[Edited by Halina on 27th January 2003 at 20:17]

[Halina]

Happy_Gunner,

I really do not bear a grudge. It was just a bit hurtful what you said about Auschwitz, but I can understand what it is like to be provoked when you simply 'cannot hold your horses'. So, no worries.
Poles were very loyal allies to the British and their contribution during the Blitz is unquestionable.If I may, I would like to recommend a book by Adam Zamoyski titled 'The Forgotten Few' (Hippocrene Books, NY, 1995). It makes a rather interesting, maybe sad, but also very humorus reading. For example, there is this REAL story of how a Polish pilot had to evacuate himself by a parachute jump, when his plane was hit by a Messershmidt. He ended up in some secluded field in England, where a local farmer attacked him with a fork shouting in German 'Hande hop!' ('Hands up'), to which the Polish pilot angrily replied; '**** off'... (excuse me my French on the forum).

Anyway, there are loads and loads of moving and compelling stories about the British-Polish cooperation during WWII.

Yes, there was Jalta, but at the end of the day, remember that many Poles found their home in Britain after the war, when they could not go back to Poland occupied by the Soviets. Those who did, were mostly arrested, or killed.
I know for a fact that those Polish veterans remember with gratefulness the fact they were allowed to keep double citizenship and the UK government would not force them to give up their Polish identity - even if only in the formal sense.
The British people were good, hospitable people and they redeemed of what had remained of Jalta. There were thousands of marriages, friendships, romances (Polish officers made use of their custom to click the heels and kiss ladies' hands, you see...). But this story belongs more to my husband's grandfather than myself! He was a bomber pilot flying a Lancaster.
So there you are!
P.S
Graham has bought himself the CD with Churchill's speeches - really good!

[Edited by Halina on 27th January 2003 at 20:16]