Posted on 12/12/2011 7:33:20 PM PST by dfwgator
The Wujek Mine - Where Nine Miners were massacred by Communist Authorities
President Reagan's Christmas Message to the Polish People
Stan Wojenny Remembrance Thread. Come share your memories.
Poland remembers 30th anniversary of martial law declared to crush Solidarity
Bloody home assaults, people (beaten sadistically) taken out of their homes in their pyjamas to unknown (-15 deg Celsius outside) as if they were to be executed somewhere on the way...all in the eyes of their children, weeping desperately from helplessness...
Blood and tears everywhere, secret police everywhere, no place to go, no place to hide, no telephones, no communication...
No information - Free Europe and The Voice of America drowned out by a deafening noise...
Nightmare - just like “1984” by George Orwell.
The thing I remember perfectly that night was the devastating power of hatred I suddenly started to feel deep within. Although I was only 13, I swear, I could butcher every communist s.o.b. I could lay my hands on without any emotional response on my face...
Autumn 1981. Henchmen of the Communist Party get ready...
This man is just shooting dead Bogdan Wlosik. This is a unique snapshot of the moment the murderer is shooting at the head of the man with a camera. A silent witness to a crime, however, all in vain. The shooting SB-man (a secret police operative)hasn't been brought to justice up till now.
Thanks for the thread dfwgator and Matt, thanks for sharing the picture and your own recollections of that day.
Were you able to hear Reagan’s speech to the Polish People on December 23rd?
I am sure many Polish people miss that man as much as we do.
Yes, we were. Somehow, we managed to fish his words out of the deafening noise made by red stations. Free Europe, The Voice of America and BBC World Service were all we had.
We usually listened to BBC, the station the commies couldn't drown out because it was the official radio of Her Majesty's government. Had they done that, the British govt could have taken that as a hostile act, breaching international law.
So, as it was during WWII, the whole family gathered at the radio receiver at 10 pm to hear that famous voice of the native Polish speaker saying in our native Polish language with no accent, “This is London, the Polish Section of the BBC! It's nine p.m. in England, ten p.m. in Poland...” followed by the chimes of Big Ben. We were all so cheered by that.
Then, at 11 p.m., I tried to tune in to The Voice of America. The quality of the reception was worse but it was actually that we all really needed. While the BBC was rather flat and their news were, for obvious reasons, kinda official, the VoA depicted reality in an open and sometimes even a spontaneous way. That cured our broken hearts as if that was no less than Gipper himself talking to us.
And that Yankee Doodle tune at the beginning followed by a powerful female voice of Roza Nowotarska...eh, unforgettable.
I found an audio file on the Internet. It's actually the last broadcast of the Polish Section of the VOA from 2004, naturally, without Roza’s voice and that spirit of 1981. However, the beginning never changed, so, listen to that:
http://www.intervalsignals.net/files/usa-z-voa_polish_270204.m3u
(Btw, I miss the radio and especially that American speech with that wonderful powerful American accent; the British original one sounds so flat to me)
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