History /
Poland Betrayed in WW2 [243]
Most of my grievances are only inherited, but I still have a few. The hesitation of certain powers to get involved is something that in my mind I can easily forgive. No one thinks lightly of entering a war. The part of it that I find harder to forgive was the how Poland was not allowed a representative in the talks to redraw it's borders at the end of the war. It was decided by people who had no real Polish interest, and it ended up with the loss of Lwów, and a resettling of people from what was Eastern Poland for so much of history, to what is now Western Poland, also depriving Poland of it's borders with friendly Hungary and Romania. To be fair to the British, Churchill wanted to carry on from Berlin against Stalin, to properly liberate East Germany and Poland, but couldn't get the support he would need.
I sometimes think that it would be good if Poland were to get back Lwów and the stretch of the Karpaty that it lost, but in the end, it wouldn't be fair to the Ukrainians there today.
Those accountable for the mistakes of the past are long gone, with the past, and it isn't right to blame countries today for those mistakes, although sometimes it is difficult not to. Nasty remarks about Russians keep slipping out of my mouth, but I know that I am wrong to say such things, because the Russians of today are not the Russians who chewed up Poland.
One thing that annoys me here in Britain is the way the history is taught here implies all sorts of fictions about the role of the Polish in WWII. This leads to the idea held commonly by normal Brits that Poland fell, and mighty Britain personally liberated Poland. Many Brits of my generation don't even seem to realise that Britain too was at real risk of invasion from the Nazis; they think that Britain's involvement in the war was all out of charity. Then there is the injustice in the way the holocaust is reported and documented here in Britain. You here of the terrible persecution of the Jews but never anything about ethnic poles also in the concentration camps. I think my main point here is that it is not reported in Britain, just how much Poland sufferred during the war. Nobody has said it, but it feels like it is beeing implied that the Poles lost a nice fair game of chess against Hitler, and then everything was fine for them.
I just wish something could be done about the ignorance.
