celinski: This has nothing to do with my family it has everything to do with how the Polish continued to live under communist rule.
I just happen to have this in my mailbox from today.
What stuck in my throat, and indeed the throat of my fellow watcher, was the scene in 1943 in which Winston Churchill flew to North Africa to meet General Anders of the Polish home army, who had fought like a lion for the Allies but who now was worried that if he didn’t get his troops back to Europe, the Russians might be in a position to take over Poland after the war and turn it into a communist satellite. “Don’t worry”, Churchill assured the general, affably. “We came into the war because of Poland. We will not abandon you and Poland will be happy.”
and
Happy? Well, not exactly. In fact, Poland settled down to several decades of sometimes brutal, always dreary, Russian misrule, after the British did indeed abandon, ie betray, Poland to Stalin. Or, at any rate, did no more than squeak when the brutal German occupation was replaced by an almost-as-brutal Soviet one.
But the film then interviewed aged survivors of the Warsaw uprising who, having endured these appalling acts of Nazi retribution for the uprising, were – months later – beaten, raped or shot dead by the incoming Russians, who wanted to rid their “new Poland” of any likely dissident elements.
as for this take on Britain,
Of course, I know there is not that much the British could actually have done, physically, for Poland after the war. There was no possibility of British troops getting to Warsaw, unlike Prague, which Churchill was desperate to liberate before the Russians arrived, and which the Western powers could easily have taken had not the Americans decided to hand it to Russia on a plate – Roosevelt being persuaded that Stalin could be trusted not to impose communism on all the territories he “liberated”. But still, a promise broken is a promise broken.
Throughout my journalistic career, I’ve met a lot of people who claimed the British betrayed them, from Northern Irish Protestants, complaining of being betrayed to the Republic, to Croats, betrayed to Tito in 1945, Serbs, betrayed to NATO bombs in 1999 (“after we fought with you in two world wars”, etc, etc), and various others. But many of those “betrayals” rely on a tendentious interpretation of the word, suggesting promises were broken that, in fact, were never given in the first place. But Poland really was a betrayal, and that ought to stick in all our throats. And it shows what a big-hearted nation the Poles are, that they don’t make more of it.
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