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Poland Quotes

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Poland Quotes

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”

HistoryHonestyRacismPrejudiceBraveryRussiaHolocaustUkraineAccuracyNazismPolandJewsMassacreAntisemitismStalinismBerlin WallHistoriansNational SocialismYale UniversityBelarus1989Slavic PeoplesPolish JewsOperation ReinhardTimothy D Snyder
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky.”

GodStudentsIsraelColonialismPalestineGunsPolandReligious ExtremismJewsIsraeli Palestinian ConflictPalestiniansArabsSquattersBelarusZionistsHebronGush EmunimYeshivas
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Mocniej przywarł do jej kolan - czuła przy sobie jego pierś,która opadała i wznosiła się w rytm przyspieszonego oddechu. A później jeszcze bardziej przybliżył się do jej twarzy. Jego oddech i usta spoczęły na mokrym policzku. Powoli scałowywał jej łzy. Najpierw delikatnie, łagodnie, ale z każdą minutą obsypywał ją pocałunkami coraz zachłanniej, namiętniej. Oddała się tej pieszczocie bez reszty, a wtedy ujął jej twarz w obie dłonie a na wargach poczuła jego miękkie ciepło. Całował ją zapamiętale, niemal boleśnie, jakby zaraz świat miał się skończyć, jakby za moment wszystko miało zmienić się w proch. Nieznane dotąd zniecierpliwienie wypełniło jej drobne ciało.”

LoveWarOccupationTouchingPoland
Book:Ty jesteś moje imię
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“Everyone was always hungry. The poorer you were, the hungrier you were, and with the hunger came weakness and irritability. It became difficult to think clearly and you needed to think clearly to work out how to survive the next day, how to get food. You were sure you could still work if you could find work, and you could look for it if only you could eat. But how were you going to get food, for yourself, for your children, for your wife or husband, for your parents? There were simply too many people within those walls for the calories that were let in. How were you to get food when there just wasn't enough of it? What were you going to have to do? With hunger of this severity came fatigue, a weakness that transcended tiredness and permeated your sinews and bones. As your limbs got ever lighter, they felt progressively heavier with each new day.”

FoodHungerStarvationGhettoWorld War 2PolandJews
Book:The Street Sweeper
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“Europeans the Poles or Balts coming in here … we brought here knowledge with us and our culture with us, but we assimilated … assimilated is not one way, it’s a two-way street. - Fred Ritzkowski, German”

WarHistorySecurityInspiredUkrainePolandTrue LifeSerbiaCzechoslovakiaCroatia
Book:Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66
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“What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.”

WarRevengeGenocideWorld War IiHolocaustNazismPolandEthnic CleansingJewsAntisemitismStalinismStalinGermansEastern EuropeanErnest Gellner
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Za „marne” niby prawo zgromadzania się, już dotąd setki ludzi poginęły od kul; za prawo wolnej prasy, więzienia przepełnione, za wolność stowarzyszeń tyle samo więźniów i męczenników da lud… A przecież na tych zgromadzeniach będą mowy, na które poeci i „piękne duchy” będą kręcili nosami, a w „wolnej prasie” rozsiądzie się kurierkowy blagier lub sprzedajny pismak, a w wielu stowarzyszeniach będą głupcy nudzili się z głupcami!… Czyżby lud się omylił? O nie! i tysiąckroć nie! Lud się nie omylił wołając o prawa człowieka, nie omylił się znosząc pańszczyznę i burząc Bastylię, nie omylił się nawet, wołając o konstytuanty i parlamenty burżuazyjne. To było konieczne i to musiało przyjść. I nie mylił się zrzucając z siebie obce najezdnicze jarzmo, ustanawiając własnych urzędników, biorąc w posiadanie pozór bodaj swojej zwierzchniczej władzy w państwach konstytucyjnych. I nie omyli się również i polski lud, walcząc o polską republikę demokratyczną.”

PoliticsIndependenceFreedom Of SpeechPoland
Author:Ignacy Daszyński
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“[On kneeling down at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument during his 1970 state visit to Poland:] "Es war eine ungewöhnliche Last, die ich auf meinem Weg nach Warschau mitnahm. Nirgends hatte das Volk, hatten die Menschen so gelitten wie in Polen. Die maschinelle Vernichtung der polnischen Judenheit stellte eine Steigerung der Mordlust dar, die niemand für möglich gehalten hatte. [...] Ich hatte nichts geplant, aber Schloß Wilanow, wo ich untergebracht war, in dem Gefühl verlassen, die Besonderheit des Gedenkens am Ghetto-Monument zum Ausdruck bringen zu müssen. Am Abgrund der deutschen Geschichte und unter der Last der Millionen Ermordeten tat ich, was Menschen tun, wenn die Sprache versagt. Ich weiß es auch nach zwanzig Jahren nicht besser als jener Berichterstatter, der festhielt: 'Dann kniet er, der das nicht nötig hat, für alle, die es nötig haben, aber nicht knien – weil sie es nicht wagen oder nicht können oder nicht wagen können.'" ("I took an extraordinary burden to Warsaw. Nowhere else had a people suffered as much as in Poland. The robotic mass annihilation of the Polish Jews had brought human blood lust to a climax which nobody had considered possible. [...] Although I had made no plans, I left my accommodations at Wilanow Castle feeling that I was called upon to mark in some way the special moment of commemoration at the Ghetto Monument. At the abyss of German history and burdened by millions of murdered humans, I acted in the way of those whom language fails. Even twenty years later, I wouldn't know better than the journalist who recorded the moment by saying, 'Then he, who would not need to do this, kneels down in lieu of all those who should, but who do not kneel down – because they do not dare, cannot kneel, or cannot dare to kneel.'") [Note: The quotation used by Brandt is from the article Ein Stück Heimkehr [A Partial Homecoming] (Hermann Schreiber/ Der Spiegel No. 51/1970, Dec. 14, 1970]”

RegretSorrowRacismReconciliationRetributionPolandJewsNazisKneelingMass MurderShoahWarsaw GhettoGenuflection
Book:Erinnerungen
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“You can do anything you put your mind to doing.”

GermanyWorld War IiWomanhoodFemininityWorld HistoryWwiiFolklorePolandWorld ViewWw2AustriaGertrudeAdolf HitlerNational SocialismGreenwichHitler YouthRobertSandorCtNsdapBdmBund Der ArtamanenBund Deutscher MaedelCountry Service CampFarmers HarvestGiersdorfGuardian Of The CountryHirschbergJelenia GóraJmJungmaedelJungmaedeldienstKasperleKerschnerKleinzellLandjahr LagerLeague Of German GirlsLinzLower Silesian VoivodeshipNeiderschlesienNeo PaganOdal RunePodgórzynReisalpeWalpurgis NightWandervőgelWeltanschauung
Author:Gertrude Kerschner
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“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”

HistoryIsraelRevengeIdeologyCommunismPolandJewsNazisEastern EuropeHungaryAntisemitismStalinCzechoslovakiaEast GermanySecret PoliceCamusRed ArmyGermansJewish DiasporaDavid Szmulevski
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“It sometimes happens that a section of the population of a large nation gathers around language, reinforced by religion, as an expression of individuality. The struggle between the French-speaking Alpine Walloons and the Nordic Flemings of Low Dutch tongue in Belgium is an example of two competing languages in an artificial nation which was formed originally around religion. On the other hand, the Irish National movement centres chiefly around religion reinforced by myths of ancient grandeur. The French Canadians and the Poles use both religion and language to hold together what they consider a political unit. None of these so-called nationalities are founded on race.”

RacismCanadaNationalismIrelandPolandBelgiumRace Nationalism
Book:The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History
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“katolicyzm w Polsce jest zaledwie w jakich 20% religią, a w 80% przemysłem, znakomicie zorganizowanym przedsięwzięciem finansowym. Aparat działa z drapieżną precyzją, ale zarazem z poczuciem, że wszystko to wspiera się na ciemnocie i na zastraszeniu i że wystarczyłoby trochę światła i powietrza, aby podciąć ten przemysł, uprawiany w mroku i zaduchu.”

Catholic ChurchPolandBackwardnessAnticlericalism
Book:Nasi okupanci
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“It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution.”

IsraelNationalismPolandJewishPluralismHungaryAntisemitism
Book:The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America
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“Racism will continue to thrive until we see and threat ourselves as humans. Black people stuck in Ukraine are being subjected to racism even as they attempt to flee to safety in Poland during a time of war. Black people are treated with complete and utter contempt by white supremacists all over the world. We should all be condemning this barbaric act.”

WarRacismRussiaWorld PeaceBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryPutinUkrainePolandWorld War
Author:Olawale Daniel
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“Over the course of its more than ten-thousand-year life-span," she proclaimed, "Białowieża Forest has offered shelter not only to Europe's sole surviving megafauna and the royals who legislated its exclusive use, but also to boreal owls, dwarf marsh violets, black storks, gray wolves, snakes (as we have witnessed), the world's only population of Agrilus pseudocyaneus, around two hundred types of moss, two hundred eighty-three kinds of lichens, and over eighteen hundred fungal species, of which nine hundred forty-three are classified as being at risk. Of which two hundred can be found nowhere else in Poland. I am saying that there are two hundred different kinds of fungi here in Białowieża that are, everywhere else, probably already extinct.”

ForestPolandFungiFlora And FaunaRare Species
Book:The Extinction of Irena Rey
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“When these people, my mother and people like her, came out here it was like leaving a reality; leaving a planet; turning your back. I guess we don’t appreciate it was such a big deal that they may never come back, never see their family again. – John Savić”

WarHistorySecurityUkrainePolandTrue LifeSerbiaLithuaniaPostwarMass Migration
Book:Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66
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“I like it! I liked it when man to man no matter whether he is boss or he is ordinary worker, but in meantime they go to the pub, they drink beer together and call by first name. I like that. After few years, I think that Queensland is the best place in Australia … I am Queenslander! – Alex Sucharsky, Ukranian”

HistorySecurityHistoricalUkrainePolandTrue LifeSerbiaLithuaniaPostwarMass Migration
Book:Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66
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“I never thought that it would look like this. The October of 2009 was a difficult period, and not just because of the bad weather. Attacks intensified against military units and every patrol was highly dangerous. A lot of time has passed since the first time I was fired on in the open. Suddenly, bullets fly right over my head… fraction of a second separates me from tensing my muscles and starting to shoot from a gun turret placed on top our Humvee. I know that I was lucky as hell, but as you know, normally none of us need to talk about it." (excerpt of the book Wild Heads of War)”

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Author:Artur Fidler
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“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”

ReligionAtheismSecurityIndiaSalvationIslamIraqDebateGermanyTemplesMiddle EastShakespearePolandNormalityAncestorsJewsEastern EuropeIstanbulEinsteinAntisemitismMoroccoSpinozaTunisiaPragueMarilyn MonroeBudapestJewishnessEritreaArthur MillerKurdish PeopleSynagoguesDesecrationDamascusJewish QuestionMartin AmisRabbisReligious ConversionDavid RieffAnnie NavaskyBar And Bat MitzvahBest ManRobert GoldburgSteve WassermanVictor Saul Navasky
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196”

CollaborationHolocaustNaziSoviet UnionWwiiUkraineSecond World WarPolandEastern EuropeEstoniaLithuaniaLatviaBelarusBloodlands
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“The glare of the green landscape and the air, the air that was everywhere, in us and making way for us, and we rode and were aware only of each other and ourselves for those couple of miles, and for those couple of miles I was myself, back in the neighborhood of Chacarita, where I moved with my mom after we realized my dad was never going to move out first, that we would have to leave him, and I saw on either side of me the big ugly high-rises and squat goldenrod houses and fuchsia and blue and inscrutable notes scrawled on the walls, graffiti intermingling with the shimmering, shadowing little leaves of the tipas, and as I rode I slowed at the oleander at Facultad de Medicina, those delicate pink flowers that rose over the fence in utter opulence and the lush stiff leaves that reached out through the bars that were freshly painted bright green. Then there it was: the Great Mamamushi. I slowed, and Freddie slowed. We parked our bikes. I was out of breath and all the air on Earth was in my blood, and we kissed again, and I turned around, and he put his arms around my waist, and I leaned into him, and we beheld it: a tree that was almost too much to be true, that truly was incredible, with its trunk that was almost eight meters around, a staggering circumference, glittered over by dragonflies, heavy, petite, iridescent incarnations of Irena's genius, when suddenly a flock of impossible parrots exploded out of the alders, and we looked up to see them shattering the sky. "All the oaks on this trail have their own names," I explained to Freddie. "This one is my favorite. Can you believe it's still growing?" He put his face against mine. He didn't say anything. For a while we just stood like that, together, watching the Great Mamamushi grow.”

ForestCyclingPolandNatures BeautyOak TreeBuenos AiresTree Growth
Book:The Extinction of Irena Rey
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“When I look at him, I see that there are people who are born with something that I cannot find the words for, something that means that others respect them and hold them in the highest esteem. I don’t know what it is—is it posture, is it a head held high, a penetrating gaze, a way of walking? Or maybe some spirit hovering around him? An angel who keeps him company? He has only to enter any space, be it the most decrepit shed or the holiest chamber, and all eyes turn to him at once, pleasure and appreciation on everyone’s face, although he has not yet done or said a thing. ...But I also fear falling into blind love, exaggerated and unhealthy, like that Heshel, who, if he could, would lie down like a dog at his feet.”

LoveReformCharismaPoland18th CenturyJudiasmCharismatic LeaderJacob Frank
Book:The Books of Jacob
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“He had good, open features and a confident air; his blue eyes were wide and watchful, but something about them seemed to hint that in different days and different times they could twinkle and sparkle with fun and mischief. His clothing was tattered and threadbare, but there was an energy to him that did not admit of pity. Somehow, despite his ragged condition, he still looked like a man who had carried a weapon and commanded other men in the not-too-distant past.”

WarSoldierPolishWwiiPolandWarriorsOfficerWwii Poland
Book:Treasures of Darkness
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“There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always a greensward of fine spiked grass in which hornets and snakes play a great part. I remember days long back when Stanley would invite me to visit his relatives; he used to make me carry a roll of music because he wanted to show me off to these rich relatives. I remember this atmosphere well because in the presence of these smooth−tongued, overly polite, pretentious and thoroughly false Poles I always felt miserably uncomfortable. But when they spoke to one another, sometimes in French, sometimes in Polish, I sat back and watched them fascinatedly. They made strange Polish grimaces, altogether unlike our relatives who were stupid barbarians at bottom. The Poles were like standing snakes fitted up with collars of hornets. I never knew what they were talking about but it always seemed to me as if they were politely assassinating some one. They were all fitted up with sabres and broad−swords which they held in their teeth or brandished fiercely in a thundering charge. They never swerved from the path but rode rough−shod over women and children, spiking them with long pikes beribboned with blood−red pennants. All this, of course, in the drawing−room over a glass of strong tea, the men in butter−colored gloves, the women dangling their silly lorgnettes. The women were always ravishingly beautiful, the blonde houri type garnered centuries ago during the Crusades. They hissed their long polychromatic words through tiny, sensual mouths whose lips were soft as geraniums. These furious sorties with adders and rose petals made an intoxicating sort of music, a steel−stringed zithery slipper−gibber which could also register anomalous sounds like sobs and falling jets of water.”

HumorLanguagePolishPolandPolesPolish Language
Book:Sexus
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“Marzył mi się traktat o tragiczności i błazeństwie. U nas często tragizm chadza pod rękę z błazenadą. A ja w tym upatruję naszą siłę. Ja kocham to dwuznaczne pokrewieństwo, tę ryzykowną symbiozę, ten geniusz narodu zaklęty w dwóch postawach. Nasz tragizm opalizuje, mieni się niejasnymi barwami, bulgoce bezwstydem, dotyka brzegiem granic obleśności, krztusi się histerycznym chichotem. Nasze błazeństwo ma szloch w gardle, nasze błazeństwo gryzie palce do krwi, nasze błazeństwo wiąże powróz na własnej szyi.”

PolandPoles
Book:The Polish Complex
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“Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good.”

WarPeaceWorld War IiPoland
Book:The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
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