On 5/25/2016 4:31 AM, Kresy-Siberia@... wrote:
I still encounter this ex-Communist amnesia from mainland Poles who come to Toronto and seem to know nothing about the Polish 2nd Corps and often who will insist that we are not "true Poles" but merely foreigners of distant Polish ancestry, which is so very, very irritating.
Not quite the same thing, but I had an experience of lost memory last month, in Florence. The clerk at our hotel was a pretty girl with striking blue eyes and handsome cheeks. I asked her if she were Swedish. No, she was Polish. Where from? "Oh, a place you have never heard of--Lublin."
I insisted it was quite famous, and begin to talk about the "London Poles" and the "Lublin Poles" in 1945 and all that they portended for the future of Poland, not to mention Europe and indeed the world. Her eyes glazed over. "Well, you know more about it than I do," she said.
To the young, everything that went before is ancient history.
-- Dan Ford USA
