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Post by Jaga on Aug 26, 2006 7:32:14 GMT -7
Nancy, Piwo,
any progress with putting the article about Polish chapels online?
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Post by pieter on Aug 26, 2006 11:09:15 GMT -7
The overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years 1940-1945 is estimated at between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people. The majority of them, and above all the mass transports of Jews who arrived beginning in 1942, died in the gas chambers.Exactly. And imagine my surprise when in the beginning of 90s I learned the truth about Jewish Auschwitz. I had read books about the camp, novels and documentaries. The Jewish tragedy was ignored, the books focused on Polish patriots in Auschwitz. Most Poles thought like that.... Pawian, That is amazing, because outside Poland the attention was focussed on the majority of jews that died in Auschwitz, because it became the symbol of the destruction of European Judaism by the German (atheist, biological) Nazi anti-semitism. Every year when we remember the dead in Holland on May the 4th, when everybody (or nearly everybody) is silence for two minutes from 20.00 hours to 20.02 hours, we remember the 100.000 Dutch jews, resistance fighters, political prisoners and militrairy that died in combat or in the Nazi concentrationcamps, mass executions or Gestapo prisons. I was teached that in Auschwitz and other camps, Poles, Jews, Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, political prisoners from all over Europe (most social-democrats and Communists) and homosexuals were tortured, starved and killed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_the_dead_-_The_NetherlandsI saw the one sided documentry Shoa, saw other documentries and movies, and most important for me read Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski who had been in the camp, and wrote how it really was. You should read them Pawian if you really want to know how it was. I was fascinated by the books and how people survive in hellish conditions. Unfortunately there is less known about the brutalities in the east where the Russian NKVD, red militia and probably special read army units had their terror regime between 1939 and 1941. Unfortunately I know from my family that in some cases families lost familiymebers due to both the early Sovjet terror and the Nazi terror afterwards. Pieter P.S.- May the 5th is the Liberation day in the Netherlands, and on that day everybody parties, there are Liberty concerts in many places, and in some places Veterans drive around in old second world war militairy vehicles (mostly of the " Keep em Rolling" organisation, people who repair and maintain old American, British and Canadian material). Older people and people with a historical sense remember that they or their parents or grandparents were liberated due to the effort of the Canadians, Americans, Britishs, Polish and Dutch soldiers who gave their lives for our country. I did not forget it and that's why I like Canadians, Americans, Poles, Brits and the few good Dutch blokes that risked or gave their lives as soldiers or resistance fighters. For years and years I have seen British and Polish veterans walking around here in Arnhem, and I never get enough of it. I know who they are and what they did. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_5,_Liberation_day The Oosterbeek war cemetry is a place I visit regulary, it lies beautifully in the woods between Arnhem and Oosterbeek, where Poles fought very hard after they crossed the Rhine river at Driel. bedandbreakfast.bbnl.nl/airborne/airborne-war-cemetery.html
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Post by Jaga on Aug 26, 2006 19:13:49 GMT -7
Pawian,
yes, Pieter is right, the attention in Poland was on Polish victims but everywhere else in the world the attention was focused on Jewish holocaust. So there are really two different pictures in history depending from what site we look.
Pieter,
+++The Oosterbeek war cemetry is a place I visit regulary, it lies beautifully in the woods between Arnhem and Oosterbeek, where Poles fought very hard after they crossed the Rhine river at Driel.+++
how interesting!
I also agree on Primo Levi and Borowski! I did not read any books of Levi until a friend in America showed it to me, very interesting. As for Borowski - nobody wrote better and more fascinating as him about the war and camps.
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nancy
European
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Post by nancy on Aug 26, 2006 19:38:51 GMT -7
Nancy, Piwo, any progress with putting the article about Polish chapels online? Jaga, I have not even started the article ... but I have not forgotten about it! I have some good pictures, also.
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Post by pieter on Aug 30, 2006 6:49:55 GMT -7
Pawian, yes, Pieter is right, the attention in Poland was on Polish victims but everywhere else in the world the attention was focused on Jewish holocaust. So there are really two different pictures in history depending from what site we look. Pieter, +++The Oosterbeek war cemetry is a place I visit regulary, it lies beautifully in the woods between Arnhem and Oosterbeek, where Poles fought very hard after they crossed the Rhine river at Driel.+++ how interesting! I also agree on Primo Levi and Borowski! I did not read any books of Levi until a friend in America showed it to me, very interesting. As for Borowski - nobody wrote better and more fascinating as him about the war and camps. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Study Guide by Tadeusz BorowskiIn his introduction to the English translation of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, Jan Kott writes of Tadeusz Borowski' s decision to render his Auschwitz stories in the first person: " The identification of the author with the narrator was the moral decision of a prisoner who had lived through Auschwitz—an acceptance of mutual responsibility, mutual participation, and mutual guilt for the concentration camp." Indeed, in a review for another author's book about the concentration camps, Borowski stated, " It is impossible to write about Auschwitz impersonally." He defined as the " first duty of Auschwitzers ... to make clear just what camp is." " It is where survival depended on a prisoner's taking part in the murder and degradation of their fellow victims. " But write that you, you were the ones who did this," Borowski intoned. " That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well." In the collection's title story, Borowski squarely fulfills his obligation. Seen through the eyes of a Polish gentile prisoner, as Borowski himself was, " This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman" describes a typical day at Auschwitz. The narrator joins in the task of unloading thousands of Jews from the cattle cars and sending them to their death in the gas chamber, all to acquire food and maybe a pair of shoes. Subject matter aside, Borowski's story is chilling and unforgettable in the success with which the narrator distances himself from his actions. As readers grow to understand that the narrator is forced to this extreme in order to continue to perform the work that guarantees his own existence, they become implicated themselves— they become part of the community of the concentration camp. Source: www.bookrags.com/studyguide-ladiesgentlemen/About Borowski: pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Borowski
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Post by pieter on Aug 30, 2006 6:58:03 GMT -7
Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was a Polish writer and journalist, and a Holocaust survivor. Tadeusz Borowski was born in 1922 into the Polish community in Zhytomir, Ukraine, then part of the USSR. His parents became victims of the USSR spy-hunting psychosis. In 1926, his father, whose bookstore had been nationalized by the communists, was sent to a gulag in Karelia. His mother was arrested later the same year and sent to a gulag in Siberia, on the shores of the Yenisey river. In 1932 Borowski and his brother were repatriated from the USSR to Poland thanks to the efforts of the Polish Red Cross. They settled in Warsaw. Their father was freed in a prisoner exchange with communists arrested in Poland, and their mother was released in 1934. In 1940 he finished his secondary schooling in a secret underground lyceum in German-occupired Poland, and then began studies at the underground Warsaw University (Polish language and literature). He also became involved in several underground newspapers and started to publish his poems and short novels in the monthly Droga, all the while working in a warehouse as a night watchman. It was during this period that he wrote most of his wartime poetry, and he clandestinely published his first collection, titled Gdziekolwiek Ziemia (Wherever the Earth). In 1943 he was arrested by the Germans and sent to a series of concentration camps: first to Auschwitz, then to Natzweiler-Dautmergel, and finally to Dachau. Forced into slave labor in extremely harsh conditions, Borowski later reflected this experience in his writing. He also worked in a railway ramp, where he witnessed new inmates first being told to leave their personal property behind, and then being transferred directly from the trains to the gas chambers. While a prisoner at Auschwitz, Borowski caught pneumonia; afterwards, he was put to work as a helper in a Nazi medical experiment "hospital." After Poland's liberation by the Red Army in 1945 he moved for a short time to Munich, and on May 31, 1946 he returned to Poland. At this time he found out that his wartime fiancée, with whom he had lost all contact when she herself was arrested in 1943, had actually survived the camps and had also returned to Poland. Borowski turned to prose after the war, believing that what he had to say could no longer be expressed in verse. His work was published as a series of short stories titled Pozegnanie z Maria (Farewell to Maria, English title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen). He joined the communist puppet Polish Workers' Party (PZPR)and wrote political tracts as well. At first he believed that communism was the only political force truly capable of preventing any future Auschwitz from happening. In 1950 he received the National Literary Prize, Second Degree. However, soon after a close friend of his was imprisoned and tortured by the Communists, and because of this Borowski became completely disillusioned with the regime. If the communists were not capable of preventing "future Auschwitzes" then, perhaps, they would inevitably happen again. He committed suicide at the age of 28 by breathing in gas from a gas stove on July 1, 1951. His books are recognized as a classic of Polish post-war literature and had much influence in Central European society. In 2002, Imre Kertész, while receiving the Nobel Prize stated that all his works were written because of his own fascination with Borowski's prose.
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Pawian
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Posts: 3,266
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Post by Pawian on Sept 15, 2006 13:55:40 GMT -7
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Post by Jaga on Sept 15, 2006 15:06:29 GMT -7
Pawian,
this is of course Poland but not Krakow since the streetcars (trams) are red.
Krakow has blue
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Post by pieter on Sept 15, 2006 17:42:51 GMT -7
Pawian,
Thank for the pictures, it could be the Polish country, or the Slowak or Czech republics?
Pieter
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Pawian
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Post by Pawian on Sept 15, 2006 22:14:05 GMT -7
Pawian, this is of course Poland but not Krakow since the streetcars (trams) are red. Krakow has blue hahahahahahaha
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Pawian
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Post by Pawian on Sept 15, 2006 22:15:48 GMT -7
Pawian, Thank for the pictures, it could be the Polish country, or the Slowak or Czech republics? Pieter hihihihihihihi (means stiffled chuckle).
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Post by Jaga on Sept 16, 2006 9:42:08 GMT -7
Pieter,
the tall residential houses should be really in Poland, Slovakia or Eastern Germany, but the villages look Polish. You need to remember that Polish villages look differently than everywhere else in the East Block since our agriculture was still kept private. Every farmer has usually its house and its field.
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Post by pieter on Sept 16, 2006 11:29:53 GMT -7
Pieter, the tall residential houses should be really in Poland, Slovakia or Eastern Germany, but the villages look Polish. You need to remember that Polish villages look differently than everywhere else in the East Block since our agriculture was still kept private. Every farmer has usually its house and its field. Jaga, Thank you for your information, I know that the agriculture in other Warsaw pact and Comecon countries were more collectivised than Poland. (In Poland only a small minority, from whom Lepper is the representative). But in Southern-Bohemia I also saw quite some private farms stil, who looked a little bit simular to the Polish villages I remebered from my youth. Ofcourse I saw the large empty spaces and ugly concrete buildings of the collective farms to, but I saw both. In general I liked the POlish landscapes better, because there are more trees in the parts of Poland I saw (which is ofcourse mainly the Western part of it). I don't know if Poland was as heavy polluted as the Czech Republic and Eastern-Germany (exept from Nowa Huta). For a Westerner it might be more difficult, than for a Pole to destinguish between a Polish, Czech, Slowak or Hungarian village or town. I have been in Czech republic, Hungary and Poland, they together form a Central-European memory, with a Post-Communist and Habsburg flavor. Now I started to doubt and looked at the vague number plates, I think the photo's are taken in Poland too. Polish and Czech cities have the same kind of buildings. Pieter
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Pawian
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Post by Pawian on Sept 16, 2006 11:56:12 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Sept 16, 2006 12:15:54 GMT -7
Pawian,
Nice snapshots taken from the car, it reminds me of one of my favorite German night programs in the ninetees. As a student I had two black and white television on top of eachother in my former depressive flat on the 9th floor of a building in Arnhem South. I had no cable, and so with iron wire I had made my own attena system, connected to the iron posts on my balcony. I could only watch German television very well back then, because we are near the German border here. This German night program was a car with a camera constructed in it, which drove through the German country, on country roads with agrarian fields, rows of trees, villages, towns, an occasional city, it drove on and on, night after night, and I watched it with my own New Wave (Siouxsie and the Ban Shees) music add to that. It was a sort of personal roadmovie experiance. I wrote a lot in that time, if I was not in my studio, so seeing that landscapes passing beye, in combination with the music was relaxing.
Pieter
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