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Post by Jaga on Jun 9, 2020 22:03:23 GMT -7
Kluski and lazanki is more of the Silesian and maybe Poznan's tradition where you mother came from. I remember being surprised that my schoolmates had different dishes in their houses compared to our house, just due to my mothers' Silesian upbringing. You make me hungry Jaga, My mother certainly cooked some Polish dishes like Kluski (Polish Noodles and Sauerkraut), Borscht, Pierogi and Łazanki z kapustą i grzybami. But after more than 50 years in the Netherlands her cooking style is more Dutch or Pan European, with mainly Dutch dishes, and sometimes French, Belgian, Italian (Spagetti Bolognese) and Polish kind of dishes. Next to that outside our homes (homecooking) we love and loved the food of the Chinese-Indonesian cuisine, Hungarian Goulash soup, and the Greek, Turkish, North African Berber (Couscous), Arabic/Israeli cuisine (Arabic & Israeli food is very similar and delicious. I love Fallafel and Shawarma dishes), Ashkenazi Yiddish kosher, the Kurd, Ladino Sephardic Jewish cuisine, the Japanese and Yugoslavian cuisine of the Balkan. My mother was and is a pragmatic and thus practical cooker. She made healthy and good meals. A very organized and old fashionate Polish sophisticated lady. That style merged and blended in her new identity as a Dutch woman since 1967. The fact that the Polish communist authorities took away her passport and Polish nationality grieved her. We went in via visa’s. My sister, her husband and their 3 children have a Dutch passport in South Africa and the UK. That is the difference with my mother. The Polish Peoples Republic left a scar on my mothers soul. The war and communism left some traces in my mothers mind. She dealt with that like her mother, by not speaking about it and living a Dutch life. Cheers, Pieter
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Post by Jaga on Jun 9, 2020 22:04:46 GMT -7
Karl, this video spoke to my own core and my own nostalgia for Ela to understand my culture the way I do. It was very good you presented it for all of us. Jaga My self was taken back with your reply of each with such sensativity and maturity. Jaga, you have struck the nail directly upon the head with teen children and their maturing minds beginning with their rebellion. Young people are dealing with a great many unknowns that in their youth have not the maturity as yet to understand the changes they are experiencing. This with their changing from childhood entering in to the next phase of life with entering in to adulthood. In truth, I was very hesitant with presenting this subject, but after upon the replies from each and every one of you as dear friends, my mind has been put at ease. For my self was very much taken back with each and every reply that was not only mature, but of the reality of life as we live it. For as above, I must say, this has been a learning experience through your each reply in understanding my self after all these years of regret. If we as people do not understand our selves, then how would we have the tools of experience in hope of understanding others. I do hope with trust that this was also with your selves as well. Karl
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Post by pieter on Jun 10, 2020 2:11:44 GMT -7
Jaga, My mothers place of birth and first 10 years of her life was Warsaw. But the War and Stalinism (communism) took her old Pre-War wonderful Warsaw away from her, my grandparents and my aunt, her older sister. Their neighborhood Mokotow was spared, they lived in an apartment with a view from the backside on the notorious Mokotow prison (during the war a Gestapo prison after the war a Urząd Bezpieczeństwa prison where the Stalinist terror made many victims en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokot%C3%B3w_Prison ). The neighbourhood after the war became populated by mainly Urząd Bezpieczeństwa members and members of the PZPR party. But before that my mothers family was forced to leave Warsaw by the German and Austrian SS troops there (supported by Ukrainian, Russian -The notorious Waffen-Sturm-Brigade der SS RONA (also known as the Kaminski Brigade) of Waffen-Brigadeführer and Major-General of the Waffen-SS Bronislav Kaminski, SS-Sturmbannführer Yuri Frolov and Major Ivan Denisovich- and Baltic SS forces). My grandparents experienced the for Polish citizens extremely dangerous German, Austrian and Ukrainian SS men in Mokotow. Murderers, rapists and looters. It was a miracle that the family survived that savagery in the period August-October 1944 when many massacres took place against Polish civillians. Warsaw was hell on earth. The family reunited in Poznan where a large part of my grandmothers Polish family lived (she came to Warsaw during her early twenties from Poznan, when she married my grandfather). So that Silesian dish my mother made she must have learned from my grandmother or Polish aunts or her Polish grandmother in Poznań. Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Jun 10, 2020 2:27:33 GMT -7
My mother returned to Warsaw in 1955 and lived there until 1967 when she immigrated to the Netherlands after she married my father. She was more fond of Warsaw than Poznań. For her Poznań had a Prussian (German) atmosphere due to all the Posen (Prussian occupation era) German buildings and the ‘German accent’ of the Poznań dialect. Warsaw for her was more Polish. After the war the Polish capital became more provincial. The old Warsaw intelligentsia, elite and a large part of the population was killed or went away after the destruction of Warsaw. Many Varsovians like my Polish grandparents in Poznań never returned to Warsaw. Varsovians moved to other Polish towns and cities or abroad to Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia or Israel (Varsovian jews).
Small town people, peasants and workers, people from other Polish cities moved in to rebuild Warsaw, to live and study there, to work there. And in a few generations these new Varsovian families are today Varsovians and merged with the few old Varsovian families that stayed or returned to Warsaw.
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Post by Jaga on Jun 11, 2020 23:12:35 GMT -7
Pieter, I am sometimes forgetting about Warsaw's connection of your mother. I think during the WW II both: Warsaw and Poznan were very difficult to live, but 1955-1967 might not be that bad.
I think my mother's family was quite spared since in Silesia during WW II they were considered folk Germans, but after the war it was hard there also. I am much more intuned towards South of Poland. I am not sure I could live in Warsaw, although economically it is the best place to live now and very expensive
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Post by pieter on Jun 12, 2020 2:30:19 GMT -7
Jaga,
Warsaw in the period of 1955-1967 was just after these terrible Stalinist years of 1945-1954, so it must not have been that bad for my mother to live there. But it was a fact that outside her colleagues she new few Varsovians of the past over there. Because many of them had disappeared due to the war that left the city in ruins. Her older sister lived and worked there for Polish radio (as a non communist, general employee), but she moved to the USA during the fifties. My mother told me it wasn't an easy time there. But she liked her work, she liked her vacations to the Polish Southern mountains to ski, to the Polish Masury lake district to sail and waterski and to Yugoslavia with her female colleagues (also friends), where she met my father in Dubrovnik (Croatia). My father was there with Dutch friends and my mother was there with a Polish female colleague from her work for the Urbanistic bureau (city planning) in Warsaw.
You are right that Poznań wasn't an easy place to live either, so both parts of the family in Warsaw and Poznań both must have had hard times from 1939 until early 1945 when much of the city was left in ruins after heavy fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Sovjet Red army.PoznańDuring the German occupation of 1939–1945, Poznań was incorporated into the Third Reich as the capital of Reichsgau Wartheland. Many Polish inhabitants were executed, arrested, expelled to the General Government or used as forced labour; at the same time many Germans and Volksdeutsche were settled in the city. The German population increased from around 5,000 in 1939 (some 2% of the inhabitants) to around 95,000 in 1944. The pre-war Jewish population of about 2,000 were mostly murdered in the Holocaust. A concentration camp was set up in Fort VII, one of the 19th-century perimeter forts. The camp was later moved to Żabikowo south of Poznań. The Nazi authorities significantly expanded Poznań's boundaries to include most of the present-day area of the city; these boundaries were retained after the war. Poznań was captured by the Red Army, assisted by Polish volunteers, on 23 February 1945 following the Battle of Poznań, in which the German army conducted a last-ditch defence in line with Hitler's designation of the city as a Festung.
Sadly, Poznań's city centre shared the same fate as many Polish cities in the tragic events of WWII. Nearly 90% destroyed, the city had to be painstakingly reconstructed in the postwar years. While bombings were responsible for much of the structural damage, the real nail to the coffin came in the shape of the 1945 Battle of Poznań, a month-long confrontation between the advancing Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian Soviet army supported by Polish troops on one side and the retreating German and Austrian Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, Volkssturm and paramilitary Ordnungspolizei (Nazi police) forces on the other side. The city had just been declared by Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945) to be a Festung - a stronghold where garrisons mounted last-ditch stands in the hopes of holding out behind advancing Soviet lines and disrupting supply transports and lines of communication. 40,000 and German and Austrian Nazi troops, including fortress garrison soldiers, regular Wehrmacht field soldiers, Volkssturm, Waffen SS, and Ordnungs polizei (Grüne Polizei) Police soldiers, barricaded themselves in 19th-century fortifications built during Prussian rule, including the Fort Winiary citadel. On January 24th, 100,000 Soviet forces led by the Sovjet Red Army General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (1900 – 1982) moved in and encircled the city, beginning to attack and reduce the fortifications. Systematically pushed into a smaller and smaller perimeter, by February 12th the Germans and Austrians only held the citadel. Six days later the final assault began. Faced with a deep ditch and high rampart, the Soviet troops had no better option than to use ladders to cross (in a bizarrely Medieval twist), but once they did, fire opened from the citadel’s redoubts. It took the Soviets three days to neutralise the redoubts and build an impromptu bridge, which allowed tanks and heavy machinery to cross into the main grounds on February 22nd. At that point, luck had most definitely ran out for Generalmajor der Wehrmacht Ernst Gonell (1902 - 1945) and his German & Austrian army; Gonell committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, and the remaining 12,000 German and Austrian soldiers were turned over to the victors by Wehrmacht Generalmajor Ernst Mattern (1890 - 1962). Today the Poznań Citadel Park is a historic site featuring military cemeteries, memorials, and two museums: the Museum of Armaments and the Poznań Army Museum.Generalmajor der Wehrmacht Ernst GonellSovjet Red Army General Vasily Ivanovich ChuikovWehrmacht Generalmajor Ernst MatternMarshal of Armoured Troops Mikhail Yefimovich Katukov, one of the 2 Sovjet comnmanders during the battle of Poznan next to ChuikovKnocked out Panther during battle of Poznan (Wilda district) 1945. Church and balconies make good then and now shot.Due to the expulsion and flight of German population Poznań's post-war population was almost uniformly Polish. The city again became a voivodeship capital; in 1950 the size of Poznań Voivodeship was reduced, and the city itself was given separate voivodeship status. This status was lost in the 1975 reforms, which also significantly reduced the size of Poznań Voivodeship.
Cheers, PieterSource: www.inyourpocket.com/poznan/1945-Battle-of-Poznan_74005f
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Post by pieter on Jun 12, 2020 4:01:56 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Jun 12, 2020 4:46:06 GMT -7
Poznań during the warPoznań 1939Poznań 1940Reviewing the troops in Poznań, November 1939. Greiser is on the right with Wilhelm Frick (center) and Generalmajor Walter Petzel (left)."Baltenlager" (transit camp for Baltic Germans), Poznań 1940Poznań 1941Poznań 1941Poznań 1942Poznań 1943Poznań 1943Heinrich Himmler in Poznań in 1943Volkssturm members in Poznań 1944Poznań 1944, a member of the Waffen SS Totekkopf divisionPoznań 1945
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