Posted on 08/03/2008 11:18:21 AM PDT by Grzegorz 246
My great-grandfather didn't leave his home in the hope of finding a better life - just a life
On Tuesday we buried my great-uncle Gus. Most of the service was in Hebrew and I spent it, as I always do at these occasions, glancing at the prayerbooks of the men around me, trying to guess...
(...)
Twenty-three years later, standing at the funeral of his last surviving son, the women on one side, men on the other, Gus in a box in front of us with a cloth over it bearing the Star of David, I thought how interesting it was, at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we were all still here - dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in 1903 - more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to visit.
That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn't leave in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore. My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
today immigrants come here to steal from us and send home to strengthen their own.
they are parasites. they are not part of the american dream.
“today immigrants come here to steal from us and send home to strengthen their own.”
Half non-sense. There always have been and always will be two types of imigrants.... those who come for opportunity and those who come for a free ride. The tradgedy is that the latter are visible so the former get tarred with the same brush...
Take the Irish - I am from Irish stock, half came to Liverpool and ‘stole from the English to strengthen their own’ some went home, some stayed. I’m now a third generation Englishman and a massive tax contributer to the country. One generation earlier my aunt left Liverpool for the US, where she would have been seen as a local as someone who “come here to steal from us and send home to strengthen their own.”. Sure a chunk of earning came back to the UK for twenty years but now she has two American kids who pay good taxes and one of whom is a cop so conributing in a differnt way.
Not all immigration is leeching.... even if at first glance it appears to be...
ping
Another bastard trying to hang the holocaust on the Poles, and spreading "the black legend." Since England is the source of the Spanish "black legend" I'm sure he will find symphathizers.
Why the Times would publish such bigotry is beyond me.
Read the whole article. This little b-tch is slavophobic excrement.
And he’s got good reason to be. My family fled the Ukraine for the same d*mn reason... in the 1900s.
With roots almost 400 years old in America, my grandaughter is English, Scot, Welsh, Irish, German, Portuguese, Serbian, Czech ancestry in that relative order. The point is, at some point, they have no “home country” to return to. They become true Americans.
My grandfather came here from Poland in the early 1900’s. He became a “true Americans” when he took his Oath of Allegiance. And he meant every word of it! My grandfather insisted that his children learn english. He left the old country behind. He was American, and America was his home.
My mom said he didn’t want to talk about the old country. He died proud to be American.
You don't see me whining about how EVIL CONTEMPORARY Russians and Prussians are, due to their oppression of ancestors, to say nothing of the tenant farmer system (with much of the land owned by the Church) pushed on my maternal ancestors by the RCC.
If the author has been oppressed by Poles or Lithuanians in the present day, then I would have some sympathy. Otherwise, he is a whiny little schmekel who probably lost his girlfriend to a Polish construction worker.
“Why the Times would publish such bigotry is beyond me.”
The Times will regret that. That’s all I’m going to say about this shit.
Only illegal immigration. I'd prefer to send out invitations.
My apologies. This article came at the same time as another where the Karuk tribal members were quoted as calling Americans of European ancestry “visitors to this land.” Guess it framed my comments regarding “true Americans.” It was meant in the continental context, not the loyalty one.
Oh no no! No apologies. I wasn’t irritated or mad! LOL! I guess it came across that way! I understand fully what you mean. Thank God for the generations who came here centuries ago and their descendent’s still live here today fighting the good fight (albeit a different kind of fight!)
My apologies for the misunderstanding. I guess I just wanted to say how proud my grandad was for being here - even if it wasn’t as long!
"We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it."
The 1902 Pogroms were Czarist policy and were largely carried out by Cossaks and Ruthenians, not Poles.
The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore
Poland existed as a region, not as a national identity, not as a nation-state in 1903. It was split between Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary.
If he is talking about Jewish life in Poland, then yes, it was largely destroyed. But this was true for most of Eastern Europe, and for the Netherlands too. The Nazis, not the Poles, were the killers. (This is not to say that many Poles did not cooperate or benefit from the Holocaust. Many also died protecting Jews and other targeted peoples) However, 6 million Poles died in World War 2, 20% of the population. Of these, only half were Jewish Poles.
y this week a Radio 4 programme revealed plans by the Lithuanian state prosecutor (with the full support of Lithuania's Deputy Foreign Minister, Jaroslavas Neverovicas) to charge former members of the Jewish resistance in Lithuania - escapees from the ghetto, who were fighting for their lives - with war crimes. As state-sponsored anti-Semitism, it makes Jörg Haider (remember him?), with his mild nostalgia for shiny leather boots and concentration camps, seem terribly innocuous.
Nasty time. Some Jewish partisans were essentially agents of the Soviets and took part in some very nasty raids. In other cases, locals who had benefited from or co-operated with the SS and Lithuanian police in rounding up Jews were targetted.
Depending on the crime involved, it may have been justified, or may have been a war crime. I won't prejudge.
Lithuania - which was part of the same state as Poland until 1795 and, like Poland, but unlike Germany, has never gone through any process of recrimination for, or even fully acknowledged, its role in the Holocaust - had an impressive war record, wiping out 95 per cent of its Jewish population, 200,000 people, with very little help from the invaders.
I get thefeeling that the author has never been de-Sovietized.
Since then it has shown no interest in prosecuting its own war criminals. And now it's decided that it was all the Jews' fault - again. Don't expect Poland not to follow suit.
I'm all for prosecuting war criminals. I'd like to see Israel prosecute some of the atheist antisemites who fled to Israel from Eastern Europe, discovering their "Jewishness" only upon prospect of being prosecuted for communist crimes.
Yes, but Morel is already in hell.
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