On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 09:24:36PM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
Hello all,
I think that Helga is a bad soul in Wikipedia and she should be counter-acted.
It is very well to voice your own point-of-view but after all it must be NPOV. There's a lot of effort put into reconcilitation between Polish and German people. Younger generations are trying to move away from the past and build on peaceful future in the common Europe.
I can see in my country that the Communist propaganda poisoned minds of so many people. I only hope that the majority of Germans think differently than Helga.
We witnessed in the Balkans what hatred and prejudice can do with longtime good neighbours. Helga constant proclaiming that it was the German people who were persecuted and driven away from their homelands is making no good. The Polish communities in the east also where told by the Russians and the Polish Communists to take what they could carry and go westwards. There was no coming back. We, the Polish, also have our Displaced Generation. It can be compared with the recent examples of ethnic cleansing.
I do not deny that thousands of Germans can have the feeling of a loss but one can not weigh the tragedies of the both sides.
Hello,
I'm a German, my father is from Silesia (,,Schlesien''). He was forced to move away at the age of 8. He and his family went to a place in western germany that is protestantic. As Silesians they were catholic. So nearly every member of the church I grew up in was a displaced person or child of a DP.
In the time of uproar against the communist regim in Poland ( Walesa, Solidarnosc, mid of the 1980s I think, ...) our church sent food pakets to a Polish church. Many pakets were prepared by DPs, sending them also in the regions of Poland they came from. They did the same the Americans have done to Germany 35 years before.
Later, after the Iron Curtain was fallen, some of the older DPs went to Poland to visit the place of their youth. They were glad to see the church still standing, and sad that some other places do not exist any more. Time's changing. After a week or two of holiday and sightseeing, all of them came back.
Many of them would have the money to just buy back their old houses. They don't do it. They're at home where they were living the last 40 years. And they know it was against human rights to displace them. And it would be the same crime to roll back history, to displace the Polish people living in ,,their'' villages. Most of them also know that it was the Communist Regime in Poland and mainly in Russia that is res- ponsible for those actions and not the Polish people.
Many of the older people are in refugee associations (,,Fluechtlings- verbaende''). They go there to see old friends they know from school. They go there to talk in their Silesian dialect. And they go there to see their old dances and dresses. Yes, there are some officials there, and they say stupid things like "Silesian is ours". But they are only a few, and many of their own people do not believe what those say.
The younger generation is seeing Poland in a different light. They see it as a country that is on it's way into the European Union. It's a country with a lot of economic difficulties, many of them still being caused by the 40 years of communism in Poland, a situation very similar to that in Eastern Germany (the former GDR).
If one would ask people on the street, where Danzig is, I think the results would be something like 95% saying "Poland" and 5% "unsure" (yes, even in Germany there are people who would not find their own hometown on a map ...). I'm sure noone would say that it's in Prussia. There is no Prussia today.
So no, I don't think Germans think the way Helga does.
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Hmm, I did just want to write 3 or 4 lines to say that Germans are not like Helga is. Now it became a small essay already. I think I should stop now before it becomes a book.
Best regards,
jens frank
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BTW, the most interesting thing about Helga IMHO is that she is not living in Germany or in her beloved Prussia but in the US.