isthatu wrote:
I would hope you feel the same way about say palestinain women and children forced out of their homes by the IDF
I think you're shooting yourself in the foot here. The "Polish Committee of National Liberation" (PKWN) as it was known, was a bunch of Soviet puppets. Polish government in exile was still recognized by the UK and US at the time until July 6, 1945, so untill then the de facto government of Poland was not PKWN.
Expulsions were decided at Cecilienhof (aka Potsdam Conference). No Polish representatives were not invited to the conference. You could blame Soviets, British, Americans but I see no grounds for blaming Poles for the expulsions of Germans. No representative of Polish government, communist or not, had any say in this.
isthatu wrote:
like it or not,by the time of the expulsions the "Lublin" govt was the de facto govt of Poland
C'mon, I thought we had a deal to be serious. You can't honestly compare Palestinians to Germans.
isthatu wrote:
I think,the point would seem to be to show that nobody "wins" that even the innocent suffer . I am always reminded of an old boy I met at work once,his father was German but had lived in Poland all his life so in 1939 joined up with the Polish army and was killed defending his homeland,as he saw Poland,after the war the family were forced to leave and ended up in Britain as,although the Polish govt saw them as germans
I agree with that, and I hope you won’t take it as a condescending comment when I say nothing is news to me here. I haven't mentioned much about that experience but, since you shift somewhat to the human/individual dimension, I will tell you that those stories while not personally mine (I’m 45), are a part of my closest family’s experience. Lots of stories, photographs, documents that I did not have to search among the pages of learned books. They are in our family albums. I know these stories from my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles (my mom was too young to remember much). Still, I played with some spoils of war when I was a kid - rusty Schmeisser machine guns, a bent CKM (heavy machine gun) and various similar pieces from WW2. There were quite a few of those in the village where my mom comes from and where Germans, and later Soviets, stationed on and off.
An exactly the same story as you described is a part of my family’s experience. An uncle of mine escaped from a transport to Siberia in 1945. He evaded search dogs by spending a night laying in piles of human sh.it. He lived under a false name until 1956. His "crime" was that he had been an AK soldier. He fought against Germans but was not pro-communist.
That’s just one personal story. One of millions that touched virtually every family in Poland and just one of many that touched mine.
Then there was an aunt who is an Auschwitz survivor, and two uncles who were prisoners in two other concentration camps, later transferred to Germany as slave laborers. There was an uncle who fought in BCh (Peasants Battalions), and a grandfather who was killed as underground soldier, another grandfather who took part in… well, pogroms. But these were not anti-Jewish pogroms. He was a part of an underground detachment who hunted down and killed nazi-collaborators in the area (Pinczów Republic). My wife’s grandfather was killed in Sachsenhausen. Her other grandparents escaped Ukrainian pogroms against Poles. An uncle of hers escaped from Poland to London (yet another AK soldier). His wife still lives in Cheswick. Another uncle was killed on the Western front. I could go on for quite a bit longer and describe more detail, some of it very interesting, some of it sad, some moving some outrageous.
I know those stories, isthatu. I know them very well but I don’t mind that you refer to them. And again, I trust you take what I wrote here as an honest account rather than just a few words I am bouncing back at you. I rarely use them in conversations on open forums like this one, even though some of them could easily be used as potent arguments in our little debates. I also hope that you realize that when I say I understand what you write about WW2 that means I really do.
southern wrote:
Lots of railway engineers were needed to clear the land for the rails.
Lots is relative for starters.
And then, they didn't "waste" too many engineers on those jobs. They used slave laborers for them. It was actually a policy since using Polish laborers meant the partisans were less likely to hit the repair crew and thus the Geman who oversaw the work.
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