How the Poles Saved Civilization, Part I

Crisis Magazine ^ | 5/28/12 | M.D. Aeschliman

[marshmallow]

On a June evening in 1979 I was having a drink on a small balcony outside a sixth-floor apartment in downtown Warsaw with a very civilized, elderly Polish intellectual, a retired mathematics professor who had taken a degree at Cambridge between the two world wars and spoke a refined, witty, patrician English. Inside the apartment about a dozen much younger Poles, twenty-five to forty-five years old, were having a secret meeting, their voices inaudible due to the classical music being played so as to hide or muffle their discourse in case the apartment was bugged. They had each arrived separately, by pre-arrangement, from different parts of the city. The elderly professor, whom I will call Professor X, had discreetly let them into the apartment, then offered me a drink and retired with me to the balcony, apparently either uninterested in their conversation or prudent enough not to want to know its content. (As a non-Polish speaker, I could not follow it anyway.)

Among the young men in the apartment were several figures who would later become known for their prominent participation in the underground Polish anti-Communist movement and some who already were, including my friend Pawel B., a meteorologist who had brought me along by a circuitous route that required our rapid and sudden exit from a tram-car, the immediate flight to two hidden bicycles, and a fast ride across a large urban park, measures designed, successfully, to elude the two Polish secret service agents who had clearly been following us both, and one of whom was apparently assigned to watch his apartment full time. (It was an apartment that Pawel and his family shared with another family, where in the single bathroom the only toilet paper consisted of successive pages torn out of a stack of the Polish-language edition........

[bboop]

The Battle of Vienna was a hard-fought war with an uncertain outcome. The Turks nearly conquered the city. All that saved Europe was the arrival of a relief force headed by Polish King Jan Sobieski. Jan Sobieski and his troops won a major victory against the Turkish forces on September 11, 1683. The victory was so compete that Polish King Jan Sobieski purportedly described the windfall in a letter to his wife as follows:

“Ours are treasures unheard of ... tents, sheep, cattle and no small number of camels ... it is victory as nobody ever knew of, the enemy now completely ruined, everything lost for them. They must run for their sheer lives . . .”[1]

from Islam Watch (blog), Andrew Stunich, 09.11.2008

[Fiji Hill]

The short story “Taras Bulba” was published in 1835 and revised in 1842 after it ran into trouble with the czarist censors.

[DariusBane]

I have never heard this important story before. I guess the story didn’t fit with the anti-colonial post World War One storyline we are spoon fed.

[kearnyirish2]

When Poland was re-created after WWI, they tried to take part of Russia while they were fighting their civil war. The Bolsheviks stopped them; apparently the Polish defense of the Russian counter-attack was to protect the countries that DIDN’T attack Russia.

Poland has a long & proud history; they should be proud of their defense in 1920, but probably not of the attack which brought it about. In fairness to Poland, US and allied troops were fighting against the Bolsheviks in the north of Russia, unsuccessfully trying to keep supplies that had been sent to support the Tsar’s WWI war effort from falling into Bolshevik hands.

The Bolsheviks had their revenge in 1939; unlike the Germans, the Soviet Union didn’t have war declared on them when they divided Poland (in cooperation with Hitler) and killed their officer dorps.