Korczak

His profound courage and his rigorous compassion held till the very end.

-- from Eva Hoffman on Janusz Korczak

David Cameron's new friends

It has now been disclosed, as Kaminski should have done to the Conservative Party when nominated for Vice-President, that he has had fascist links – he was a member of Poland's notorious fascist National Revival (NOP) – and he tried, as its MP, to cover up one of the worst anti-Jewish atrocities in wartime Europe.

On July 10, 1941, Poles rounded up hundreds of Jews and put them in a barn on the outskirts of the village of Jedwabne. Egged on by the SS, the barn was set on fire. In 2001, the then president of Poland organised a national apology, but Kaminski opposed it.

Kaminski was pictured on Polish TV in 2000 using a homophobic term which even the interviewer says is offensive: Kaminski repeats it. He caused a storm at that time by using the pre-war anti-semitic slogan, "Poland for the Poles". He denies it.

Last week, Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's quality daily, said: "Kaminski isn't officially and completely anti-Semitic or homophobic, but at some point he recognised that these things could help him politically."

-- Edward Macmillan-Scott on the rise of "respectable fascism".

Creative conflict

I do not believe that human culture can ever reach a perfect synthesis of its diversified and incompatible components. Its very richness is supported by this very incompatibility of its ingredients. And it is the conflict of values, rather than their harmony, that keeps our culture alive.

-- Leszek Kolakowski

Added 24 July, from FT obit:

One of the crucial European traditions is the ability ... to look at one’s own civilisation with the eyes of others. We should be able to look at ourselves self-critically. If we are unable to do that, our civilisation will destroy itself.

Katyń

This tenacious artist has now given his father a proper memorial and has reasserted, with power and grace, the history and identity of his nearly effaced country.

-- from David Denby's review of Katyń

Another review is here (and a little background on Wadja here).

It would be nice if this film from the country that Norman Davies called 'the first ally' had a release in Britain too.

Not yet lost

Wajda said he wanted to reach "those moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society, and not just an accidental crowd."

- from an anecdote related in Anne Applebaum's review of Katyn.

Old-new troubles

It may be ludicrous for politicians to describe plans from a pipeline to run from Russia to Berlin as a new version of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which secretly carved up half of Europe, but it’s probably true that Poland is being deliberately left out in the cold.

-- Mark Mardell (23 Oct).

P.S. 25 Oct: Tim Garton-Ash starts from the remarkable election results in Poland to write an interesting article on the strange fate of political parties across much of Europe. [It's a good piece and it seems churlish to point to small lapse: Garton-Ash writes that the new Poland "will not be driven by anachronistic, 19th-century fears of Germany". Anachronistic, maybe. But 19th-century? As Tom Lehrer sang, "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that wouldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in nineteen-eighteen, and they've hardly bothered us since then."]

Truth, murder, consequences

Setting to one side for a moment (as if!) all the politicking around a vote by US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee to recognise as genocide the 1915-17 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, it's worth recalling that what had happened to the Armenians was cited specifically when the word genocide (γένος+occidere) was coined.

Speaking in different circumstances and about different events, the 81 year old Andrzej Wajda told The World Tonight that the aim of Katyń, his film about the massacre of some 20,000 officers and intellectuals including his own father in 1940, is "to be a farewell and end to the subject... I don't want it to cause political problems...Despite the fact it was a crime I don't believe it should be followed by criminal charges against the people involved".

[P.S. 14 Oct: See David Ignatius, an Armenian-American, on The Dignity Agenda.]

Lustration

Most revolutions have two phases. First comes a struggle for freedom, then a struggle for power. The first makes the human spirit soar and brings out the best in people. Th second unleashes the worst: envy, intrigue, greed, suspicion, and the urge for revenge.

--from The Polish Witch-Hunt by Adam Michnik.