Life / Cool Polish names [133]

If all goes well, and I marry and have children, I'm looking at names like Ignacy, Kazimierz, Mirosław and Bolesław (although only as a middle name, to avoid it being shortened to Bolek, which obviously sounds a bit like bolluck. I haven't thought about girl's names much; this is because the boy's names are names that I think I would have liked to be called. I quite like 'Sambor' now that I've read it. I also like 'Feliks' which is not actually my name, but the name I would probably have had if it were not for that bloody brand of cat food 'Felix' which put my Mother off the name. Instead I ended up with the same name as my Father 'Gregory/Grzesiu'. It's really annoying now that I've grown, so the two of us have similar voices. The phone rings "Is that Greg?" "This is little Greg", even though I'm the bigger Greg now. I'm considering changing my name to Feliks.

History / 1939: the road to tyranny. Is it happening again? [14]

I can quite believe it. I do not like the direction Bush's America has been heading.

News / I love Poland because... (in 10 words or less) [182]

...because it is Poland.

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.

Life / Why are Polish people cheap? [126]

I suppose I am cheap. If I had a sewing machine I would make my own clothes. Poles can get away with being cheap because we are also very imaginative and inventive.

As for breast size, Polish women may well have smaller breasts than many British women, but only because overeating has become such a problem in British society. I think Polish women do have larger noses, but they're certainly not unnatractive; Interesting and adorable would be a better description.

And finally, as for British hospitals coping with the influx of foreigners, well, if all the foreigners left it would certainly be a fatal blow to the NHS, because there would be no medical staff left.

Life / What kind of antiques are popular in Poland? [49]

My Father went to an antiques fair in Poland recently, and he bought me a WWII Polish Army dispatch satchel, in brown leather. Very stylish.

Life / You know you're Polish when... ? [111]

Scrambled Eggs. That's the one thing I will put ketchup on.

Genealogy / strange Polish mixes [116]

I'm 1/2 Polish, then roughly 3/8 English 1/8 Scottish with a little Welsh and Spanish squeezed in there somewhere (reputedly).

In my hometown in England, virtually no one was plain English. There was lot's of Irish, Italian, and a fair amount of Polish mixed in, as well as some African and Carribean. There was one exceptionally attractive girl in my upper school who was parts Black, Asian, Polish and all sorts.

I have some distant relatives who are half Polish and half Indian.

Life / You know you're Polish when... ? [111]

@Tornado2007. It translates as "But Mother knows where I am and she says I can stay another two hours."

Life / You know you're Polish when... ? [111]

I don't even own any ketchup, but every time I look in the mirror, I know I am a Polak.

Also I know I am Polish, because in a house full of Sassenachs, I am the only one who has created a complex system of washing lines in my room, and created a bedside cabinet out of a cardboard box, with the interior shelved by smaller boxes.

I think you can be sure you are Polish, if you find a piece of string and save it because it could be useful.