Succesful Polish statecraft

 

Letter to Editor of The Spectator

Dear Sirs,

I am sorry to witness my fellow Polish countryman wallowing in his masochistic hatefest towards his own country of origin (Letters to Editor, March 26th), as it was not a pretty spectacle. Also it was historically inaccurate. The Polish kingdom in the 11th and early 12th century, and again, following a period of dynastic divisions, in the 14th century and 15th centuries, was a formidable well run political unit that offered peace and prosperity to its citizens and protected them against German and Tartar invaders and eventually defeated the Teutonic Knights. In the next two centuries it offered the sophisticated model of a parliamentary multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that tolerated many religions, at a time when Europe was riven with religious wars, and Poland's formidable army defeated the Turkish Empire and protected a vast territory, the largest in Europe, which ensured the supply of wheat and timber to the continent. When, following the greed and corruption of its leading nobles, Poland temporarily became a failed state in the eighteenth century and was dismembered by three powerful neighbours, it was able to sustain a struggle to retain its culture and national spirit for a hundred years in order to rise again like a phoenix at the end of the First World War and set up a strong state combining three regions with different administrative traditions and holding back the Soviets for 20 years. Again when it regained its independence after 1990 it set up a secular well administered democracy that was the only country in Europe not to undergo recession in the last 20 years. Every country can have its ups and downs over a long span of a thousand years but there is absolutely no reason to share Mr Kowalczyk's bleak assessment.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

Contaminated evidence of The August Trials

Letter to Editor of the Jewish Chronicle (but not published)

Dear Sirs,

With regard to Mark Glanville’s harsh assessment of Poland’s treatment of Jews in his review of “The August Trials” by Andrew Kornbluth (TheJC 19^th March 2021), we again have that sad case of two narratives, one Polish and one Jewish, running in a parallel universe that finds difficulty in coming together into one objective channel of history. Glanville’s opening sentence about a series of trials of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators beginning in August 1944 is, in itself, jarring to Poles, to whom August 1944 means only one thing, the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans which led to the betrayal by the Red Army, the death of over 250,000 Polish citizens and the wholesale destruction of Poland’s capital city. The trials lasted more than 6 years, but the very name August Trials was originally part of the Communists’ propaganda to downplay the searing significance of August as the month in which to commemorate the Uprising each year.

While this does not take away from the courage and sense of civic duty with which some individual judges and prosecutors took up their task of investigating wartime collaboration, this does not apply to all of their zealous Communist colleagues seeking to take revenge on Poland’s pre-war elites. It also left them open to being considered by many of their countrymen as collaborators with the new oppressors. However useful the detailed information and accusations about Nazi collaboration and murder supplied in those courts, they will remain suspect to historians as evidence because of the toxic atmosphere of Red terror in which post-war justice was conducted.

I must take issue too with the suggestion that “butchery” of Jews had been taking place in the countryside since 1935. There was undoubted deep-seated antagonism towards the Jewish population in many rural areas, partly because of primitive religious beliefs, and partly because of distrust of an alternative culture that rarely spoke Polish and had little sense of loyalty to the newly emergent Polish state. But without Hitler’s invasion in 1939 and subsequent brutal occupation of Poland, there would have been no holocaust, and no wartime battle for survival by two nations in one country but at different levels of humiliation and extermination.

Obviously I have not read Andrew Kornbluth’s book as it has not yet been published, but I hope that in its detailed examination of the trails of accused collaborators more will emerge to help understand the complexities and the tragedy of Polish-Jewish relations during and after the Second World War.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

author of "Hello I'm Your Polish Neighbour"

Nord Stream letter in The Observer

 

Dear Sirs,

Further to the article by Simon Tisdall "Biden must punish Putin's cyber-attacks" (21.03.2021) in relation to the ineffectiveness of current sanctions against Russia over the Nord-Stream 2 pipeline project, the geopolitical debate in Germany has been muddied by the insertion of a moral dimension. President Walther Steinmeier has declared that German support for the dual pipeline, which circumvents Poland and Ukraine and supplies gas directly under the Baltic Sea to Germany, is dictated by the need to atone for wartime German crimes against Russia. Of course, Germany should display a sense of guilt towards Russia for these crimes, but not as a justification for isolating Poland and Ukraine to whom Germany has a similar, if not an even greater, moral debt, because they lost far more lives per head of population in the Second World War than Russia proper and, unlike Russia, they are not a current threat to Germany's security and democracy. It is time that the UK took a similar stand to the U.S. government on sanctions over this pipeline. 

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Spokesman Federation of Poles in Great Britain

tel 07786471833

working address Flat 88 isambard Court Brentford TE8 8FP

Published in The Observer 28th March 2021