OPINION:
I found your Sept. 16 article about Krakow very informative and interesting (“Krakow a historic Polish city with a college-town vibe,” Weekend Life). It’s great to read about Krakow and Poland in your paper. However, I noticed the author referred to Poland as “the formerly communist country.” Poland was never a communist country.
There is a tremendously important distinction between a “communist” and a “communist-occupied” country. Poland after World War I, was forced into communist rule under Soviet occupation as agreed upon by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin during the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Poland’s fate was decided without any input from its own people.
The same distinction applies to the paragraph regarding Nowa Huta. It wasn’t built by communists but by the Polish workers under Soviet occupation.
For more than 1,000 years, Poland has shown extraordinary love for freedom and democracy. For example, unlike other European nations from the 16th through the 18th centuries, the Commonwealth of Poland chose its individual kings with free elections rather than by bloodline (similar to the presidential elections in the United States). It had a parliament run by nobility; any hereditary nobleman could vote in the parliamentary election if present.
The Commonwealth of Poland was a multicultural, multinational and multireligious state. In 1791, it became the first European nation to establish a modern constitution (second in the world after the United States).
The totalitarian communist system, with its ideology and atrocities, was foreign to the majority of Poles. In 1920, Poles fought and defeated Soviet Russia, saving the rest of Europe from communism. In 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia jointly attacked and occupied Poland, beginning World War II. During and after the war, hundreds of thousands of Poles were killed by the Soviets. At the end of the war, Russian Soviets set up an illegal communist puppet government in Poland, later faked parliamentary elections and then terrorized and controlled the nation.
Polish history is heavily marked with fights against its communist occupiers, to name just several: the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (Poles who didn’t want to live in the Soviet state fought for independence, not knowing Poland already had been sold to Soviet Russia in the Tehran Conference), then those of 1945-48, 1956, 1970 and 1976.
When the anti-communist independent workers union, Solidarity, was formed in 1980, it soon gained more than 10 million members, which translates into most of the Polish nation when taking into account member’s spouses, children and the elderly. Thanks to the Solidarity movement, communism was later abolished in Poland, followed by a collapse in other Soviet-occupied European countries. The occupying Russian-Soviet armed forces remained in Poland until 1993.
Calling Poland a formerly communist country is the equivalent of stating that France was a Nazi country during World War II rather than saying it was Nazi-occupied.
ANDREW KORZAN
Silver Spring
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