A harrowing 20-thousand kilometer odyssey ended with an unforgettable welcome in Mexico. Piotr Piwowarczyk, who is making a film about it, tells the story.
cosmopolitanreview.com
That's my people. Polish refugees who got rounded up into gulags, then begrudgingly let go by Stalin when they partnered up with the Allies. They got moved out to Iran. Then India. Then to America. Yay, right?! Nope. They were put into a Japanese American internment camp, surrounded by barbed wire again. Then they got bounced to Mexico, where the finally found something like a home.
It always frustrates me that their story never makes it big time. They got the shaft from literally everybody involved in WW2. The Germans made their fighting-age men unwilling soldiers, at least the ones that didn't get murdered as resistance fighters during the takeover. The women were taken as breeding stock to make lots of blue-eyed and blonde-haired Aryan babies. If you weren't useful to fight or breed, you went to a concentration camp. Auschwitz was primarily a Polish camp. Then the Soviets took over and sent the survivors to gulags to die. Then FDR told Stalin, "We can't be allies and have this going on, the American public won't stand for it." But we didn't want anything to do with them because they sounded and looked German and Russian!!
I love a good Polak joke, but it's kinda sick and sad when you realize that the reason Poles got the reputation for ignorance is because Hitler killed the prominent intellectuals early on, and then basically wrote the country and the people out of the books and mandated that they had no need for an education that went beyond being able to spell their name and count. I mull over the sadness of the situation periodically while I listen to and drink some Chopin.
www.independent.co.uk
