Polish Partisan Perspective

As the world tries to figure out this land of ours, and as the dollar falls in the shadow of our multi-variant deficits, I had a brief video conference with a fellow designer in Poland.





His studio is in a small apple orchid behind his house. A streambed sits 10 feet from his door and idyllic fields stretch for miles in a scene from a Bruegel painting.



It took his family a decade of waiting lists and bribes to get a phone. But today, we can have video conferences via DSL wireless broadband. He saw my daughter for the first time and waved at her.



I asked him the Polish reaction to the election. He said he expected it. He said Americans are no different from most people; they are afraid of change and when people are afraid they will always go with the leader they know, the one who seems strong.



This is the perspective from a land that lies between Germany and Russia. This country was split like a wishbone in 1939 by Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. This European country didn't exist on the map of Europe from 1773 until Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points were imposed after World War I. (The best first-hand account of this WW II partition is Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz and his memoir The Captive Mind).



My friend's grandfather, a pharmacist in the village of Sulkowice, was taken by the Nazis after the invasion, and shot for being, well, a pharmacist.



Poles, who live a nation criss-crossed with memorials to massacres, mass graves and concentration camps, probably have more in common with Iraqis than the average American. Two shared traits: Poles and Iraqis inhabit flat plains between vast empires, and they remember every invading army that crossed their borders. Those memories fuel each nation's reputation for resistance.



It must be the ultimate irony that Polish soldiers are now part of the Coalition of the Willing occupying someone else's country.

Comments

[Anonymous]

AIM IM with wodafonti

Wodafonti: I'm not sure about comparing Poland with Iraq. They are different.
They have shyits and sunnits

Alphachimp: Strange, I know, but there is a connection. Poles know that it is impossible for a foreign army to permanently occupy its country.

Wodafonti: They have kurds.
Alphachimp: They know that language and religion are a stronger bond than ideology.

Wodafonti: We arre one nation.
Alphachimp: Iraq is actually 3 nations tied together by a border created by Englishmen.

Wodafonti: Yes, that is why they are fighting like in Yugoslavia.
Alphachimp: Man, it will be a bloodbath after America... and the Poles... leave.

Wodafonti: This is kind of sad post you wrote, but I see the point. I know that is why they cannot leave now.
Alphachimp: Hey! But please put your comments on the bottom of the article. The writing is one man's perspective.

Wodafonti: The same in Kosovo.
Alphachimp: Fucked.

Wodafonti: I' don't like the picture with shooting naked Poles.
Alphachimp: Me either. But 99.9% of Americans don't know about this history at all!

Wodafonti: We were left by allies such as france england and america
Alphachimp: They think only Jews died in the camps.

Wodafonti: They won't know, they don't care
Alphachimp: They don't know that Poles were killed by Germans and Russians when we abandoned them.

Wodafonti: Jews have great PR and so do the big guys all over the world, like Wolfovitz.
Alphachimp: My wife has 50-year-old uncle who fixes trucks in a Marine base in Iraq. He is not in the military, only a working man with 3 children at home.
He works 12-hours a day in the dust, waiting for mortars to fire on the base.
Just a man trying to earn money to get out of a hole.

Wodafonti: But you cannot compare US army with nazis. They are not occupants. I know Bush Blair made the mistake but now there is no other way.
Alphachimp: Hey, I am not saying Poland = Iraq and US = Nazis. Only that when I am in peaceful Sulkowice, it is difficult to imagine the terror of 1939-45. And I remember finding the bottle, with your uncle's diploma, and the men and women who spent years living in the woods as partisans, fighting two armies.
I remember hearing someone say about the Vietnamese: "In that war, the US could never win. Because the Vietnamese had nowhere else to go. It was their home. They had to fight."

Wodafonti: I hope the civilians in Iraq are not terrorized and egzecuted by US Army.
Alphachimp: It's already happening.

Wodafonti: I know about foreign muslim solders making Iraq their battle field for the faith, exploding bombs on markets
Alphachimp: Bad news. That's why I like working at home with my baby!

[Anonymous]

from mkoniecz@indiana.edu:

"As for the elections, Poles I have talked to, both through the university
and in my neighborhood don't seem too interested. The elections and
aftermath occupied some news magazine covers and got some page 2 coverage in Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza, but honestly I don't think that this was
on people's radar screen like I expected it would be. Very few people
(maybe 2) brought it up to me and people I broached the subject with seemed
either indifferent or reticent to talk. This is quite unusual from my
experience with Poles who seem always to have opinions on
everything--especially politics--and happy to share them at length. But my
general sense is this: there is no where near the popular dissatisfaction
with Bush and the war in Poland as in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere
in western Europe. But at the same time, I think there is sense that Poles
are dying for America's agenda. It has been really hard for me to get a
handle on this though."