Jestem Polakiem
Poland now has the 6th largest economy in Europe, and was the only country on the continent to escape recession in recent years. As The Countess and I walked around Warsaw and Krakow over the past few days we passed by sushi bars, pet groomers, coffee and wine bars, Indian restaurants, dance schools, and huge H&M billboards.
The most concrete evidence that we were in Eastern Europe came to our ears, not our eyes; Slavic consonants filled the air like bumblebees. But without the soundtrack, Poland appeared very much like a western European country, one that had not spent the sixty years from 1939-89 at the mercy of first Nazism and then Soviet Communism.
These are two of most evil systems people have managed to come up with, and the leaders of both made sincere attempts to wipe Poland off the maps and history books. Yet the wounds they inflicted were not mortal, and in fact were fading rapidly after only a bit more than twenty years of Poland as a free and independent country.
I got the consistent impression that Poles have made the choice to improve their future rather than dwell on the past, and that their minds and society were not animated by a sense of grievance or victimhood, or a desire to avenge wrongs either personal or historical. Instead, their goals looked familiar to this American: let’s figure out how to make our government more responsive and our companies more competitive. Let’s educate our kids. Let’s have dinner. Let’s go shopping.
This banal list becomes amazing when I look around the world and see the radically different choices made by other countries and people that have been through horrible times. But when I looked around Warsaw, a city that was destroyed and depopulated by the Nazis, I saw a huge building with the Mercedes logo on top, and a branch of the Austrian Raiffeisen cooperative bank right behind the spot where the last fighters of the Ghetto Uprising emerged from the sewers. I listened to tour guides describe what happened at Auschwitz with great skill and an absence of hatred. And I talked to Poles of all ages who espoused optimism and good cheer.
I don’t mean to romanticize the country; I’m sure that there are plenty of Polish revanchists. I just want, on Memorial Day, to record a few impressions that Poland left on me: that it’s possible to commemorate and mourn losses without being consumed by a lust to avenge them. That blood enemies can become allies, if that’s what people and their leaders want. And that the Americans and Poles who died fighting Nazis and Soviets didn’t leave this world for no good reason. I look at Poland in 2011 and see some pretty good reasons.
