step up to the mike...

"Impartiality is not neutrality. It is partiality for justice." - Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)

 

From Sunday Times
Those Who Trespass Against Us by Karolina Lanckoronska
REVIEWED BY JOHN CAREY
 
THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US: One Woman’s War against the Nazis
by Karolina Lanckoronska
translated by Noel Clark
 
Pimlico £14.99 pp366
 
Most accounts of Nazi atrocities in the second world war focus on the persecution of the Jews. But this memoir, written in 1946, and never before published in English, tells a different story. Its subject is the suffering of the Polish people and the dismemberment of their nation. An ardent patriot and devout Christian, Countess Karolina Lanckoronska was also Poland’s first woman professor of art history. She could have escaped to Switzerland when the Russians overran eastern Poland in 1939, but she chose to stay with her students, joined the Polish underground resistance — the ZWZ — and witnessed the mass deportation of Poles to slave labour in Russia, amid scenes of bestial cruelty.

When her ZWZ cell was infiltrated by an informer, she managed to reach German-occupied Poland, where she joined the Polish Red Cross as a nursing volunteer, and was then put in charge of the distribution of food to the prisons in the German zone. The local Gestapo commanders, whose co-operation she requested, and usually got, do not seem to have known what to make of her. They respected her courage and natural authority, but could not understand why an aristocrat with an Austrian mother, and a perfect command of German, should pride herself on being a Pole. For her part, she was puzzled by their combination of high culture and brutality. From her experience in the east she regarded the Russians as barbarians, unused to the basic norms of civilised life. The Soviet officer who requisitioned her flat thought that the lavatory was for washing his hair in, and threatened to shoot her maid because, when he pulled the chain, the water stopped flowing before he had time to rinse it. But the Germans, she reasoned, were different, and could not be excused as merely backward. Their distinguishing marks, she came to feel, were efficiency and rapacity. When news reached her of the Katyn massacre (the execution of 4,000 Polish officers in a forest near Smolensk) she knew at once that the Russians, not the Germans, were responsible, because the murdered men were buried in full uniform and many articles of value were found on the bodies. The Germans would never have allowed such waste.

While working at prison relief she continued to pass on information to the ZWZ and, on May 12, 1942, she was arrested and interrogated by Hans Kruger, the Gestapo chief in southeast Poland. When he asked her, “Are you an enemy of the German Reich?” she calmly replied, “Yes, obviously.” She felt sure, from his manner, that he had already condemned her to death, and her reply put it beyond doubt. Thanks to a powerful international network of friends and relatives, however, her case reached the desks of Himmler and, ultimately, Hitler. Kruger had boasted to her, during her interrogation, that he had murdered 25 leading academics from her native city, and his betrayal of this “professional secret” appalled the Nazi high command. He was demoted, and she spent several months in prison, on starvation rations, and in hourly expectation of death. She describes the silence that would fall when an SS officer arrived to read out the names of those who were to be shot, and the looks on the faces of the doomed women. Eventually, she was summoned to Berlin for further questioning and, when she refused to withdraw her charge against Kruger, was sent to the SS concentration camp for women at Ravensbrück.

Many accounts of life in Ravensbrück have survived, but Lanckoronska’s is singular in several respects. Schooled in self-restraint and ideals of nobility, she maintains a dispassionate tone, and her captors’ treatment of her provides insights denied to most prisoners. The instructions that arrived from Berlin seem to have been contradictory. On one occasion she was transferred, without explanation, from a hideously overcrowded, lice-infested barrack to a luxurious single apartment with fresh flowers. She found this discrimination humiliating, and went on hunger strike until she was reunited with the other Polish women. But the German wardresses remained vaguely aware of her special status and seem to have relaxed in her company. Names that have become infamous in Ravensbrück lore appear in her account almost as human beings. Gerda Querenheim, the terror of the sickbay, who threw newborn infants into the central-heating boiler, comes across, in conversation, as a “gentle and well-mannered” German girl. Dorothea Binz, executed after the war for her crimes, arrives “all sweetness and smiles” for a chat, while the shrieks of the women she has been torturing can still be heard in the background.

Consorting with these monsters required all Lanckoronska’s self-control, but was worthwhile for the information she could worm out of them. Her Christian faith was vital for her survival, and for her sense of community. Once, when it seemed she was being led to execution, a fellow-prisoner pressed into her hand a miniature figure of Christ on the cross, carved from a toothbrush handle. The words from the Lord’s Prayer quoted in her title gave her trouble, because forgiveness for what was happening seemed impossible, and she decided to omit them from her version. Later she told a priest of this, and he replied, “A lot of people did the same”. The courage of Polish women was another source of strength. Condemned to death, they would seek out a professional hairdresser and demand a really attractive hairdo. The SS execution squads told how they refused to be blindfolded, and died shouting “Long live Poland”.

Culture flourished in Ravensbrück. Prisoners wrote poems and plays, improvised theatre and music, and took a wide range of educational courses. Lanckoronska lectured on art history and classical literature, and her audience took notes assiduously, although they were likely to be dead in a few days. Among her most eager students were the so-called “rabbits”. These were young women, mainly Polish, who had been the subject of medical experiments, intended to simulate the battlefield wounds of German soldiers, and carried out by Karl Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician and the director general of the German Red Cross. Her hope, as she lectured, was that intellectual interests would give her audience a chance to tear themselves away from the moral and physical squalor surrounding them, and even blot out for a time the suffocating stench of burning hair and flesh from the camp crematorium.

She was released from Ravensbrück in April 1945, thanks chiefly to the intervention of Carl Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross. After a life dedicated to the service of Polish learning and culture, she died in Rome, aged 104, in August 2002. She wrote this memoir for publication in English. But when she submitted it to two British publishers, shortly after the war, they rejected it as “too anti-Russian”. A few years later, two other British publishers turned it down as “too anti-German”. Great works of art are often said to be “monuments to the human spirit”. But this remarkable book reinforces the feeling that the concentration camps were a more accurate monument to the human spirit, both in their negative and in their positive aspects. No reader will ever forget it.

SURVIVOR’S GUILT

When Karolina Lanckoronska was released from Ravensbrück, thanks to the efforts of her friend Carl Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross, she had great difficulty in readjusting to ordinary life. In particular, her feelings of guilt about her own survival and the fate of her former campmates caused her much distress. “I had emerged alone,” she wrote, “without my sisters, into a Swiss wonderland that had not known war. I needed to go and buy a dress, shoes, a hat (!) and to eat in a restaurant. All of that seemed not only ridiculous, but monstrous, while others ‘over there’ might be going to their death.”

posted by: Oborski at 18:28 | link | comments |

Essential reading I think!

Those Who Trespass Against Us: One Woman's War Against the Nazis 
Karolina Lanckoronska

Karolina Lanckoronska was an aristocrat and art historian who taught at the University of Lwow, then part of Poland. When the Soviets came to occupy Lwow, Lanckoronska became active in the Polish resistance and moved to Krakow. She was arrested by the Germans in Kolomyya in 1942, imprisoned and later sentenced to death; incarcerated first in Stanislau, then in Lwow and Berlin before being placed in the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp for women. As a countess, Lanckoronska was subjected to varying treatment, suffering near starvation at times only to receive extra food and medical care at others according to the fluctuating and often conflicting orders from the authorities in Berlin. With the intervention of some influential friends and the honourable actions of one Nazi, she was saved from death on several occasions. Thanks to efforts by the Swiss diplomat, scholar and International Red Cross President Carl J Burckhardt (whose correspondence with Heinrich Himmler was found among Lanckoronska's personal belongings) she was finally released in April, 1945. Throughout her imprisonment, Lanckoronska remained defiantly resilient, loyal to Poland and committed to her fellow prisoners, including women used by Nazi doctors as guinea pigs for horrific medical experiments. Her magnetic personality and superb story-telling makes this a powerful narrative and sustains our interest through harrowing reading. Her ability to view her own horrific situation with objectivity gives us insight into the motives and behaviour of the Soviets and the Germans not simply as oppressors, but as human beings. Hers is an extraordinary story of courage and will.

 

posted by: Oborski at 14:46 | link | comments |

Oh dear!

Fran is back home today after her hip replacement operation. While she is recuperating we have an aid from Community Equipment Service to raise the level of the toilet seat. The accompanying leaflet doesn't bear thinking about:-

WARNING

On no account must this equipment be used before the clinician who ordered the equipment, has called to fit and demonstrate its use.

posted by: Oborski at 19:02 | link | comments |

750,000 and rising: how Polish workers have built a home in Britain
By Terry Kirby, Chief Reporter
The Independent
Published: 11 February 2006

The number of Polish people in Britain has reached record levels after the expansion of the EU, making it the fastest-growing ethnic minority.

Although the EU said this week that the newcomers, mostly young, well-educated and sometimes highly qualified, have boosted the UK economy, relieved skills shortages and cut dole queues, the rise is causing headaches for local authorities, schools, the health service and even the long-standing British Polish community.

With hundreds of newcomers arriving every day on cheap flights, large concentrations of Polish people have built up in some towns after local companies and employment agencies launched recruitment drives in Poland.

They have found jobs as bus drivers, mechanics and in food processing - at pay rates four times what they would earn in their home country - as well as doctors, dentists and bankers. In London, the Poles have found work as plumbers and builders.

Peter Ashton, a personnel manager at Dunn Line, a bus company in Nottingham, said Polish workers now made up more than a third of its 150-strong workforce after a recruitment drive in Poland.

He said: "While I don't want to disparage our British workers, the Poles have a terrific work ethic. They are always on time, always smartly dressed, they always make the effort to go the extra mile.''

The precise size of the population is difficult to estimate. In the early Nineties, the existing community, based around Second World War servicemen and their descendants allowed to settle here after the war, was about 150,000. Although this grew after the downfall of Communism, it has risen dramatically since the EU expansion in May 2004, when British became one of only three countries to allow Poles to take jobs without restrictions.

The total registered under this scheme was 160,000 up to last September. Added to that are their families, those who have arrived since, unregistered seasonal and contract workers, as well as those in the "grey economy". According to the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, the total number of people with a "Polish connection" could be as high as 750,000, equal in size to the Pakistani community and bigger than the Caribbean population, which is about 560,000.

Over the past year, Polish delicatessens have sprung up on shopping streets. One company that imports Polish food says demand has increased five-fold.

Alexandra Podhorodecka, the president of the Polish Educational Society, which runs Saturday morning schools for Polish children and teenagers to help them study the language and history of their home country, has seen a huge influx in the numbers of children wanting to attend. "Our schools cannot cope with the increase. They have to find new premises and we have to set up new schools," she said.

A long-time British resident, Mrs Podhorodecka, 66, said attendance at Sunday mass at her Polish church in north London had increased ten-fold over the past couple of years. "We used to celebrate mass three times on a Sunday, and we were never full. Now we have six or eight services every Sunday and people are standing outside in the street."

In Crewe, Cheshire, the local council was taken by surprise when dozens of Polish children began turning up at schools last year. Poles now account for about 6 per cent of the population of 48,000, in an area where ethnic minorities were no more than 2 per cent of the community.

Claire Wilson, the community development manager, said: "We had to start from scratch, we have no experience of dealing with this, no one speaking the language, no resources.

"A lot of them have come expecting the streets to be paved with gold and not realising they are not automatically entitled to housing or benefits. I've had to go on to a few Polish websites to put them straight.''

The crisis eased when many of the seasonal workers returned home after Christmas. "But most of them have said they will return soon," Ms Wilson said. Relations between the newcomers and the older Polish communities were often strained. "I don't think the existing Polish people identify with the newcomers."

In Scotland, there are an estimated 4,000 Poles living in the Highlands area alone, working in fish processing and the tourist industry, although 25 Polish dentists have been recruited to ease a shortage in the NHS. About 400 extra children are being taught at local schools.

Jaroslaw Kozminski, a journalist on The Polish Daily, published in Britain since 1940, said the newcomers would force the paper - traditionally aimed at the older generation - to modernise.

Many had come from provincial Polish towns, he said. "They only have to ask themselves: is it better to launch your career in London or in some small Polish town?" Kozminski said. "There's only one answer."

UK's Polish community

* Estimated size of Polish community in Britain: 750,000

* Workers registered under EU expansion since May 2004: 162,870

* Number of Poles who settled in Britain after 1945: 200,000

* Since 1940, Britain has had a daily Polish language newspaper, Dziennik Polski

* There are 113 Polish community centres. The biggest, in Hammersmith, west London, boasts the largest Polish library outside Poland

* The Polish Educational Society supports 67 Polish 'Saturday schools' attended by more than 5,000 children

* There are 82 Polish Catholic churches in Britain

'I work with people who come from all over the world': Szymon Filipak, architect, 26

While working as an architect in Krakow, Poland's second city, Szymon Filipak, 26, found a job in Glasgow which he believed would offer him better career opportunities. In October last year, he relocated to Scotland after securing a job with the architectural company BDP. He had previously studied on a scholarship in Germany so was used to living and working abroad. He has settled into his job and says the transition was easy as computer technology and the architectural market are the same wherever you work. He said: "Since Poland joined the EU, young, capable Poles have found a new motivation to study, led by the knowledge they will have the opportunity to progress in the European and global market. While the older generation are sometimes reluctant to uproot, the new generation are without ties.'' Although happy with life in the UK, he is still not sure he likes the food. "I'm missing the fresh food of Poland, so I've been creating my own dishes using Scottish ingredients,'' he said. "I work in an office with people from all over the world and the projects are large-scale and challenging, so it's a great experience."

'The people are friendly and treat us very well': Michal Cyrana, mechanic, 25

In Poland Michal Cyrana, 25, trained as a mechanic but couldn't find a job and ended up working as a van driver. Two months after setting foot in Britain, he now works as a mechanic for Dunn Line transport in Nottingham, which runs bus and coach services.

He said: "Even if I could have found work [in Poland] as a mechanic the wages wouldn't have given me enough money to live and support my family."

Relocating was easy: "Now that we are part of Europe, I just needed my passport, some ID and there I was."

Mr Cyrana found his job through a Jobcentre, but Dunn Line also recruits directly from Poland. As well as helping Polish employees settle in, they offer unpaid leave to return to Poland, plus 23 days' paid leave.

Mr Cyrana said: "The people here are very friendly and they treat us very well." He feels the UK is similar to Poland but for one thing: "Polish food is more healthy. Now there are Polish food shops because there is a big Polish community here."

He would like to go back to Poland, but has no idea when. "What can I do? If I go back there finding a job is very difficult at the moment. For now I'm glad to live in England."

Interviews by Ele Walker

posted by: Oborski at 01:29 | link | comments |

THE DOVES HAVE FLOWN...

From Warsaw Voice

A Silesian, a genuine Silesian, has two passions: soccer and pigeons.

For a hundred years now, the smoke-filled, coal-dust-covered districts of Silesia's towns have been full of dovecotes. For people slogging away in the coal mines and steelworks, feeding the pigeons, letting them out into the air, following their flight was the only contact with nature and open spaces, something that people shut away in crowded company towns always longed for. The sight of a starzyk (retired miner) puffing at his pipe and busy around the dovecote in the tiny yard of his familok (miner's cottage) became a symbol of Silesia so obvious as to be boring. To comprehend why pigeon breeding became a part of the Upper Silesian lifestyle, similarly to the mining regions of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, it's enough to look at the long rows of identical little houses stretching for kilometers on end, grey, without a trace of greenery, because there's no place for vegetation in worker districts adjacent to a steelworks or a mine.

I can't think of a more cheerful hobby than homing pigeon breeding. There's always a gentle, warm aura around it, as far removed as possible from the tragedies that occur on Silesian soil, deep down in the mine galleries and drifts.

And such a mood of gentle cheerfulness prevailed at the pigeon exhibition in Katowice, with a band playing, good Silesian beer on tap, and the breeders saying their farewells near the end of the day, until next year. Then, on that freezing cold evening, the roof of the exhibition hall caved in. Hundreds of pigeons flew out from under the tangle of twisted metal and started to circle above the ruins, gradually settling on the edges of the wrecked hall, waiting for their owners who were buried under tons of steel and blocks of ice.

■ "God bless all you lads and lassies," Katowice Fire Chief Janusz Skulich thanked the hundreds of rescuers in the Silesian dialect.

The Katowice tragedy introduced new heroes into the collective Polish imagination. In an instant, Poles saw a hero in Chief Skulich who led the rescue operation, a calm, grey-haired man, a character taken straight from Hollywood disaster movies. Just before the catastrophe, Skulich was awaiting dismissal. The reason: though he was a professional, the rightist government doctrinaires associated him with the previous, leftist camp.

The Poles' sadness and solidarity intermingled with pride: everyone-rescuers, firefighters, police, health workers-passed their exam with flying colors. At a time of trial the Poles, who see themselves as disorderly and disorganized, turned out to be fantastically efficient. Nothing was done unnecessarily, everyone who could be saved was. For the traditionally pained Polish mentality, this was a new cure for national complexes, and for foreigners-an opportunity to shed stereotypical thinking about Poland.

Even politicians behaved as expected. The tragedy stopped their everyday bickering in mid-step, the president and the Sejm speaker declared million-zloty savings in their offices to help the victims, the minister of justice said those to blame would be ruthlessly punished, the minister of internal affairs ordered a nationwide inspection of roofs which was performed with a slightly grotesque zeal, the minister of health toured the hospitals and glowed with pride.

Everyone, from firefighters to officials, from students donating blood to the whole nation riveted to their TV sets, became one great community in the face of the Silesian disaster. It was like 10 months ago, when the Poles were united in pain and reflection after the death of John Paul II. The president's announcement of national mourning was practically superfluous-the Poles had already followed their hearts.

Once again it turned out that the Poles, the greatest individualists of Eastern Europe, possess the skill of spontaneous community building. Like the time they silently said goodbye to totalitarianism, or the time they went calmly through the cruel trial of creating a free market, they did the same during the tragedy in Silesia.

■ The disaster at the Katowice exhibition center triggered strong anti-capitalist sentiment in Poland.
"It's capitalism that kills. Money-grabbing over dead bodies," people wrote to newspapers. "They built that death trap," wrote the papers, pointing to the businesspeople who had built and operated the hall.

One has to admit that the exhibition center's owners were model candidates for the role of blood-sucking capitalists, and the international corporation stretching between Cyprus and Delhi, managed by a Levantine plutocrat from a London palace and his Polish sidekicks with their runaway eyes, whose motto was "always save money" and who didn't pay taxes-this is a living illustration of wild capitalism from Marxist economy textbooks. The night after the tragedy, the company's Polish proxy, answering questions about how the firm would help the victims, said "We are encouraging our staff to donate blood" and immediately became public enemy No. 1 for the Polish media.

The anti-capitalist tone was immediately taken up by the ministers in Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz's government. It was quite easy for them. Both Law and Justice (PiS) and even more so their parliamentary support-the League of Polish Families (LPR) and Samoobrona-are parties with a markedly populist outlook. This wasn't a rapid adaptation to the public mood, but a display of deeply rooted suspicion of people dabbling in the morally dubious practice of earning money on their own account. The doctrine of a state that shows solidarity and primarily aims to help the weak, a doctrine that is the true mainspring of the Kaczyński brothers' activities, by definition triggers huge expanses of hostility towards people of property. Especially when the ambiguous image of these people can serve to confirm populist stereotypes.

■ The tragedy at Katowice's Expo XXI unexpectedly gained an international context.
It's surprising, but the bad guy who should be chased from town turned out to be George W. Bush, while the good guy was Vladimir Putin.

All the leaders of the world's largest countries sent the Polish president their condolences. The exception was Poland's closest ally-the United States of America. At a time of emotional tension caused by the tragedy, this serious violation of diplomatic custom was very badly received by the Poles. "Does America not have a heart?" was the widely repeated question. Those who had complained for years about the inequality of Poland's relations with the United States gained a powerful argument for America's arrogance and instrumental treatment of the Poles.

Compared to America, Russia's President Putin was an unexpected shining example. Not only was he the first to offer his sympathy, but a few days later, during his annual press conference, he noticed a Polish TV reporter among the thousands of correspondents at the Kremlin and added many more warm expressions to his earlier words of sympathy: about the Russians and Poles being members of one common family, about their shared origins, about respect for the Polish nation. After a few years of freezing winter between Moscow and Warsaw, Putin's words were a skillful diplomatic invitation bid put forward at a time of special emotional temperature. "Putin was classy," even those Poles who are very far from any pro-Russian sympathies had to admit from between clenched teeth.

Some great German newspapers were anything but classy, seeing the Katowice tragedy as a symbol of Silesia's decline under Polish rule. No one in Poland, not even the greatest Hun-hater, thought to see the recent collapse of an indoor swimming pool in Germany as proof of the German economy's corrosion. Advising the Poles on this occasion about how they should solve the problems of Silesia-a region that was the subject of a dramatic Polish-German dispute throughout the 20th century-has to be seen as evidence of extraordinary journalistic rudeness.

n For many days, the pigeons circled above the ruined hall. Breeders say that they can return home by themselves, flying hundreds of kilometers. Today they doubt very much if the birds will ever go back to their dovecotes after the shock they've been through.

The Katowice disaster was the greatest Polish collective shock within my memory.

The Poles endured this trial with dignity.

posted by: Oborski at 09:02 | link | comments |

It's "Spoiled Cat Day"...

...and in this house it surely is!

posted by: Oborski at 17:38 | link | comments |

Three young rock 'n' roll stars have been killed in a plane crash in the United States.

Buddy Holly, 22, Jiles P Richardson - known as the Big Bopper - 28, and Ritchie Valens, 17, died in a crash shortly after take-off from Clear Lake, Iowa at 0100 local time.

The pilot of the single-engined Beechcraft Bonanza plane was also killed.

Early reports from the scene suggest the aircraft spun out of control during a light snowstorm.

Only the pilot's body was found inside the wreckage as the performers were thrown clear on impact.

Holly hired the plane after heating problems developed on his tourbus.

All three were travelling to Fargo, North Dakota, the next venue in their Winter Dance Party Tour

Holly had set up the gruelling schedule of concerts - covering 24 cities in three weeks - to make money after the break-up of his band, The Crickets, last year.

Recorded life

Born Charles Hardin Holley - changed to Holly after a misspelling on a contract - he had several hit records, including a number one, in the US and UK with That'll be the Day in 1957.

A singer and guitarist, he was inspired by Elvis Presley after seeing him at an early concert in his home town of Lubbock, Texas.

With Presley serving in the Army, some critics expected Holly to take over his crown.

Richard Valenzuela was the first Mexican American to break into mainstream music, after being discovered by record producer Bob Keane, who changed his name to Ritchie Valens.

He had made three albums and achieved a number two chart position in the US with his composition Donna - about his girlfriend - in 1958.

His rock 'n' roll re-working of the traditional Mexican song La Bamba - on the B-side of Donna - has also received acclaim.

The Big Bopper had been a record-breaking radio DJ - with a 122-hour marathon stint - and reached number six in the American charts with his record Chantilly Lace.

posted by: Oborski at 12:15 | link | comments |