We’ll be hanging our unmentionables on the Siegfried Line.
Last week, at the E.U. summit, Poland complained that it should have more votes in Europe. Because, said president Kaczynski, if Germany hadn’t started World War ll, there would have been many more Poles today.
It was a perfect Fawlty Towers (’Don’t mention the war‘) moment. Newspapers and TV journalists all over Europe mentioned the faux pas in, what you could almost describe as a certain awe.
All the European newspapers but the Polish ones. They kept their powder dry and only started to comment on the summit, when they deemed the Polish delegation had not been unfriendly enough to Germany.
Still, there was a bit of good news for Poland as well this week. The UN has accepted their request to rename Auschwitz, to make it clear that the concentration camp was run by Germans and not Poles.
Poland, of course, had been the innocent victim of German’s foul aggression. Poland was one of the good guys, right?
Well, actually, no. Not even close. While it’s true that the Germans were responsible for running Auschwitz, the Poles were not exactly Snow White to the Nazis’ evil witch, when it comes to antisemitism:
One might have thought that if anything could have cured Poland of its anti-Semitism, it was World War II. Polish Jews and Christians were bonded, as never before, by unimaginable suffering at the hands of a common foe. One might also have thought there’d have been pity for the Jewish survivors, most of whom had lost nearly everything: their homes, their youth, their hope, their entire families. Besides, there were so few of them left to hate: only 200,000 or so in a population of 20 million.
Instead, returning Polish Jews encountered an anti-Semitism of terrible fury and brutality. Small wonder, then, that nearly as soon as they set foot on Polish soil, most fled all over again. Many went westward, to a place that, oddly enough, had suddenly become an oasis of tranquillity and safety by comparison: Germany. Far from being celebrated, those Poles who had sheltered Jews during the war — and there were many — begged them to say nothing, lest their neighbors deride them as “Jew lovers,” or beat them, or break into their homes (searching for the money the Jews had surely left behind) or kill them.
That was right after World War ll – but in a way this was just a pale shadow of what happened right after World War l, when Poland became a sovereign state again. Following Poland’s rebirth, a reign of terror against the Jews began.
So, no, Poland was not responsible for Auschwitz but it might consider being a bit less self-righteous about their own, quite recent, atrocious behaviour towards Jews.
Well, not just towards Jews. There were others who died in Germany’s death camps. The Romani, for instance. I’m sure the Poles would hasten to assure us that they weren’t responsible for these deaths either.
Which would be true enough but again, the Poles are very good at imitating Nazis:
On Friday July 3rd, 1998, the community centre for Roma in Lodz (Poland) was broken into and vandalised. The perpetrators have not yet been identified; they daubed swastikas on the walls along with slogans like “Send Gypsies to the gas chambers” and “Lynch all gypsies”.
The so-called “Narodowe Odrozenie Polski” —NOP—(Polish National Renewal) has claimed responsiblity for the attack. Although this organistation has it headquarters barely two streets away, according to the Lodz police P.R. rep Jadwiga Kosiak, there is no reason to press charges against the extremist NOP.
Quite.
Ah, but wait. There was yet another group of people that ended up in the death camps. Indeed, homosexuals. We’re innocent, guv, we ain’t done nothing!, Poland will cry out. Yeah well, again, that’s true, up to a point. Still, the new leaders of Poland would have felt quite at home at any Nazi do:
Only last year, Poland’s state prosecutor announced a government investigation of all Polish gay groups for illegal financing, criminal connections, and pedophilia.
“Every police office will confirm that homosexuals are a circle that is nearly 100 percent identical to the circle of pedophiles. It is a fact that does not require any research,” Wierzejski declared, according to the English-language newspaper Warsaw Independent.
And two years ago,
in Poznan the police cordoned off the hundreds of lgbt activists who’d gathered together in the heart of the city, at a rally, organized by the Green party. Homophobic skinheads swarmed around, pelted eggs and shouted at the activists: “Fags to gas,” “We’ll do to you what Hitler did to Jews.”
The police stormed the gay and lesbian demonstrators. Sixty-five activists were arrested. Many of them were beaten. The activists were arrested and face the penalty of fine or imprisonment.
Jews, check.
Romani, check.
Homosexuals, check.
You know, it would be ever so nice if we’d, oh, let’s say, for the next two or three centuries, not hear anything from self-pitying Polish politicos about their evil German neighbours, or any more fucking sob stories about the war, or - well, quite frankly, any bloody thing at all.
One more pathetic bleat from those evil little Kaczynski trolls and I will personally organize a prayer group, which will only make this one request: that global warming not just destroy the North & South Poles but that smaller Polish blot on Europe’s landscape as well.
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