Chopin, Revolutionary Etude op. 10 No 12 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski –piano, HMV c.1930
NOTE: Today passes the 71st anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising of the 1st of August 1944. It was the general rebel of Polish clandestine army together with the citizens of Warsaw, against the German occupation of Poland – which lasted between Sept 1939 until May 1945. To say “occupation” is not enough, for the German invasion on Poland followed by installation of the German regime on the seized Polish territory, meant 6 years of unbelievable cruelty, organized homicide of the citizens of the once independent Polish state, and immeasurable destruction of Polish material heritage. The capital of Poland, Warsaw was totally annihilated and majority of its inhabitants were murdered or transported to the German concentration camps. While the Soviet Red Army was waiting on the other bank of the Vistula River until the burning city bleeds to death – the German troops were carrying on the massacre of the citizens of Warsaw and of the insurgents, with the cruelty and delight by the act of the mass assassination, nobody ever expected from the nation which gave the world Schiller, Goethe and Beethoven. It is estimated, that during and after the uprising Germans expelled from their homes from 500 to 550 thousand inhabitants of Warsaw and about 100 thousand people from villages near Warsaw. About 90 thousand Warsawians were sent to forced labor in the Reich, 100 thousand were sent to concentration camps, the rest, that is 300 to 350 thousand people were forced to leave the ruins of the city in the cattle cars and were thrown out in the random places without any means of livelihood.
After 1945, many survivors returned to the remnants of their city, and in spite of Stalin’s plane to recreate Warsaw as a typical Soviet moloch, old Warsaw was partly rebuilt after the war, although the whole city lost its prewar charme and metropolitan beauty forever. Even worse though, was loss of the nation’s elite – almost all the generation of the best of the Polish youth of the 1930s and 1940s was murdered in Warsaw and that terrible loss can’t be “rebuilt” in less than in the pass of next thousand years.
That unimaginable crime has forever cast a dark shadow over German and Soviet history – the felony that can’t be redeemed in any other way, than eternal penance, as it seems. Unfortunately, as time goes by and blurs the human memory, rather than regret we hear more and more words of nonsensical allegations, that during the 2nd World War the Poles were “accomplices of Hitler”. For unknown reasons, especially the American and British press often writes also about the “Polish concentration camps” – and the protests of Polish minorities or the Polish embassies, that such camps were purely a German “invention”, usually meet a hypocritical answer that “they have been installed on the Polish territory, after all” (– although, Poland as a free state did not exist then). These accusations are often targeted by the successors of the environements who have in 1939-45 stained themselves with their pro-Nazi collaboration, which in Poland never took place. These are sad manipulations, for we live in a time when truth becomes part of the game – a one more tricky play with the reality, when everything becomes arbitrary.
Let the wonderful music of Chopin played by Ignacy Jan Paderewski – the greatest genius in the history of the piano – take us for a moment into the elapsed times of courage and truth – when it was still the truth, and nothing but the truth…
nie mam gdzie wkliec bo za wolne lacze (11KB/sek) ale zajrzyjcie prosze do http://alfa.com.hel.neon24.pl/post/124585,boze-cos-polske-zawyly-syreny