Conference in Vilnius

It is Sunday 18th September. I have just woken up after a strange but vivid dream where I had come back to work and found shipments that had not been shipped to China and Egypt where the letter of credit deadline for shipment had long since expired. I had no idea why that was, or whose fault it was, but I needed to explain to my anonymous "boss" what had happened. All nonsense of course, as I no longer work in a shipping company (that was in Kimpton Brothers, or even further back in M&S Shipping). But the reality was that I was lying in bed in the Pan Tadeusz Polish centre in Vilnius which doubled up as a community centre and a hotel.

I had had a good conference with a well rceived presentation on Friday on how to run a Polish lobby in the United Kingdom and had presented a well composed resolution on Saturday on the situation in Belarus, where all Polish organizations and schools have been taken over by the governemnt and closed based on information we had just been told the previous day by the delegates from the Union of Poles in Belarus. I was also bery drunk having had at least six or seven shots last night after the conference. In fact, despite my little triumphs I had been tired all day and had dozed a dozen times during the conference.

The conference was called by the World Polonia Council (RPS), an umbrella organzation od Polish community organizations from around the world. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain, which I serve as an adviser, is a member and I was one of four Federation delegates at the Conference. 

It was so long since I had attended one of these international Polonia conferences. My LOT flight from London arrived at 11pm Lithuanian time. A representative of the local Union of Poles in Lithuania met me in the airport and whisked me round to the Pan Tadeusz Hotel (Panas Tadas  in Lithuanian). 

I was concerned that, apart from the UK delegates, I wouldn't recognize anybody. However, it transpired that was not the case. Immediately I bumped into Tadeusz Pilat from Sweden, who was also chairman of the European Union of Polish Organizations, and a candidate for the presidency of the RPS. He greeted me like a long lost friend and said "At last a British face I can consider a friend," This was very embarassing. At our last zoom meeting of the Federation Executive, we were mandated to vote to re-elect the current President, Teresa Berezowski, from Canada. I had been impressed with her skills as a lobbyist for Polish organizations having problems in their home countries around the world, mainly Belarus and Lithuania, and I was happy to support her, while our leading international conference specialist Helena Miziniak had a personal grudge against Pilat for ousting her from a post elsewhere some years ago. Now she started to rake up his supposed Communist past. Funny that, as it had not stopped her from cooperating with him in the past. I had to keep quiet about our voting intentions.

I changed and went to bed in my room. Before long I was woken up by a colleague from our delegation whose Ryaniar flight had arrived at 1am. "Why is nobody collecting me," she wailed. I put some clothes on top of my pyjamas and went downstairs. One of the local members suggested she book a cab by uber as there was no driver to collect her. I repeated that to her and finally went to bed.

Next morning faces and names that I could barely remember greeted me like a long lost colleague. Of course Pilat was the first, obviously still counting on my vote. Surely he was aware that our Federation have always voted as a team, and that had been part of our strength. Soon Helena introduced me to Teresa Berezowski from Toronto, with whom I had corresponded but whom I had never met before. The breakfast room buzzed with life as past links and friendships were resuscitated and the cobwebbed corners of my memory were forcibly breached as past acquaintances invaded my reality.

The first morning session was devoted to close links of the clergy in maintaing the Polish language and traditions, particularly in the East. A film was presented by a priest from Ukraine showing the destruction caused by the war in the Chernikhov area east of Kiev, as he described the impact of the war on the lives of Polish and Ukrainian families in the war zones. The second session I attended dealt with education and Polish saturday schools. One of the speakers was from the Polish Education Society in London. She described the present status of 145 Polish saturday schools, giving the statistics on the rise and fall, and rise again, of the number of children attending these schools. She pointed out that only 15% of Polish speaking children in the UK attended saturday schools and based this on my London statistics which I had been feeding to the Polish Education Society and the Polish community at large for the past 15 years. She thanks me publicly at the meeting for my assistance in this. That was not the only praise I got at that meeting. My old friend Pilat was chairing that session and he gave us the dramatic news fom that week that Lukashenka had suddenly closed all Polish institutions and Polish language schools. Pilat had mentioned how he had raised the issue of Belarus a number of times before in statements issued by his European Union of Polish Organizations and chose to add that these statements had always been translated by me into "impeccable" English. This was an embarassing praise too  much and internally I squirmed with embarassment, but publicly I just shut my eyes.

The afternoon session dealt with patriotism and the Polish lobby. Helena was chairing it. I had circulated a hard printed copy of my paper to the whole meeting, on how to run a local lobby. This gave me a chance not to deliver the stodgy lecture in my printed text, but to freewheel with any comment to match the drift of the discussion at the meeting. However, a lot of the meeting was devoted to the issue of patriotism with a hard headed former Polish Euro MP called Boguslaw Rogalski on the panel, defining patriotism as a "be all and end all" moral obligation for every Pole. I was the last member of the panel to be called to speak and I suggested that patriotism was defind as civic activitism by anyone who saw themselves as a Pole, and proceeded to give examples how, with taking initiatives and working in tandem with others, one could run a succssful lobbying campaign. Also I reached back to my childhood in London to describe how my Polish patriotism was forged as a love of Poland based on the beautiful legends around a country I had never lived in or even visited (until I was twenty). Again my speech received a sustained applause. 

As the discussion developed a senior Polish civil servant from the President's Chancellery called Badowski suggested that, following the earlier campaigns by our organizations pushing for Poland to join the European Union (then the European Community) and NATO, the new big campaign we should support, concerned support for Poland's massive 1.3 trillion dollar claim against Germany for reparations. Many of the speakers were sceptical, especially a representative of a Polish organiation in Germany itself, who asked why Poles living in germany had not been consulted. Rogalski dived into the discussion pointing out that this claim against Germany was a sign of Poland finally regaining its independence and protecting itself from Germany's attempt to control all of Europe, after the UK's departure. He also quoted Pope John Paul II about patriotism being based on loving one's country, his geography, history, language and literature. I knew the quotation but he had failed to complete it properly. John Paul II had also added to his defintion of patriotism the need to respect the culture and traditions of other countries and he contrasted patriotism, of which he approved, with nationalism, which he did not.

While the cost of 1.3 trillion dollars could be a realistic assessment of Poland's war losses in relation to Germany, a large part of it being incurred by Poland's 3 million Jews, and while it also true that Poland had not been properly compensated by the settlement of 1953 approved on behalf of a subjugated Poland by the Soviet Union, the provocative way that this issue is being handled by Kaczynski and the Polish governement beggars belief. It is obvious that it is not intened to be a serious successful financial bid. Instead it was a tool of Kaczynski's myth-making about a powerful Poland. This power is based on a contempt for the liberal opposition in Poland which he had expected to show its lack of patriotism by rejecting his claim, and on a hatred of Germany whom he hopes to anatagonize by landing them with this bill while they suffer intense fuel shortages and a high inflation rates, with the intention of exposing them for their apparent anti-Polish and pro-Russian stance, as the single power which aims to run Europe. To announce this claim against an ally in the middle of the joint European confrontation with Russia, while failing all along to present a similar claim aginst Poland's true enemy, Russia, is a symptom of rank amateurism by the Polish leaders, disguised as hard headed political realism. It also suggests that Poland's war time trauma is so deep and long lasting that it even governs Poland's current foreign policy, and overrides its true foreign interests. For more than 25 years that extended trauma had been the mark of a minority in Poland as Poland's successive governments appeared on the world stage as being free of any desire to revise or undermine the post war settlement of borders and wartime reparations. It had meant that Poland was a country that supported stability and peace in world affairs. Now, no longer.  I went to bed that night deeply depressed about Poland and where it was going. Did I really need to remain a citizen of such a sick country?

Next morning we licked some of those traumatized national wounds by visiting the site of the massacre in the woods of Ponary near Vilnius, where 10,000 victims (Jewish, Polish, Belarusian) were shot or clubbed to death by German death squads aided by Lithuanian volunteers. We posed for photos in the seperate Polish enclave memorial tothose who were killed, many of whom had been identified and listed, including a large number aged between 16 and 20. I understand many of them were Polish boy scouts. Then we visited the picturesque cemetery at Rossa where Marshal Pilsudski's mother is buried along with the Marshal's own heart, which the old leader had wished to leave amidst the graves of his legionaire soldiers killed in the Polish-Soviet war. The cemetery has numerous Polish graves and a chapel dedicated to the local January uprising leaders of 1863 who were hanged by the Russians after their rebellion wa supressed. Chatting to conference colleagues I was pleased to see that most did not approve of the government's stance on reparations from Germany and largely shared my scepticism. That put me in a better mood.

We then held the conference that afternoon. There were 73 delegates participating of whom 15 were online, in particular, the delegates from Australia. The meeting went fairly smoothly with no ideological debates, but unfortunately the elections for President showed an upset. There were initially three candidates. Teresa Berezowski, Tadeusz Pilat and Jaroslaw Narkiewicz from Lithuania. Pilat, sensing he might lose, withdrew. In the final vote Narkiewicz unexpectedly defeated Berezowski by 38 votes to 34. Still do not know how this came about. The remainder of the evening was spent in carousing and banter as we let our hair down, the business of the conference being terminated succesfully. I went to bed at midnight. Others stayed up dancing and drinking until 4am (or so I have been told).