#poland

Spring and summer 1942 was probably the worst period of internal terror in Slovakia. It was also the time of mass deportation of Slovak Jews to the extermination camps in Poland. ↗

— Alexander Dubcek

#camps #deportation #extermination #internal #jews

Roosevelt was determined to stop Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe. He thought they finally had an agreement on Poland. Before Roosevelt died, he realized that Stalin had broken his agreement. ↗

— W. Averell Harriman

#before #broken #determined #died #eastern

I was born in Poland I came to Sweden when I was eight and always wanted to act and suddenly ended up in a Bond movie which was for me at that time absolutely enormous. ↗

— Izabella Scorupco

#act #always #bond #bond movie #born

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good. ↗

— Andrzej Szczypiorski

#poland #war #world-war-ii #beauty

Here (Poland), we have more winter than summer, more ice than sunshine; and Vodka is nothing but melted ice. Every nation drinks in this way: the Italians and the French drink the gold of melted sunshine, we the ice. That’s why a Pole glides through life as if on skates, and that is why he often staggers, for he finds it slippery. The Pole’s sorrow is so hot that he finds in necessary to cool it with vodka, the sorrow of other nations, the sorrow of other nations is so cold so they have to fuel it with wine ↗

— Karol Makuszynski

#poland #life

It wasn't my choice to write this story...it was my responsibility. ↗

— Rhonda Fink-Whitman

#genocide #germany #historical-fiction #holocaust #poland

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#eastern-european #ernest-gellner #ethnic-cleansing #genocide #germans

In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It's so schizophrenic. ↗

— Jonathan Carroll

#between #conventions #crowd #different #entirely

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#camus #communism #czechoslovakia #david-szmulevski #east-germany

There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence. ↗

— Mark Shields

#agreements #broke #completely #consequence #eastern