It’s a doggone shame

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Ukraine’s environment minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, recently announced a six-month ban on the killing of stray dogs. The practice has gained traction of late as municipal governments try to clear streets of homeless canines ahead of the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, which will be co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine next summer. “Let us stop the deaths of these poor stray animals for half a year and build shelters together,” said Zlochevsky.

Thousands of dogs have reportedly been killed during the past year alone. Most often, they’re either poisoned or given a lethal injection. But in one remarkable case reported by the Donbass news site, authorities in Lisichansk have been paralyzing dogs with a syringe gun and burning them alive in a mobile crematorium.

It remains unclear how the ban will be enforced, or what will happen after it expires. For the sake of Ukraine’s legions of wandering mutts, let’s hope city governments heed Bob Barker’s favourite advice by having their strays spayed or neutered, rather than killed.

Rallying against Russia

By Erica Alini - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images

Since his brother, Polish president Lech Kaczynski, died last year, Jaroslaw Kaczynski has been trying to translate that personal and national tragedy into political victory. Last year, the former prime minister and current leader of Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice Party ran to fill the post left empty by his twin, who died with 95 others when a military airplane he was travelling on crashed in Russia on April 10, 2010. Jaroslaw tried to ride the spirit of national unity that had seized Poland by toning down his polarizing views and populist rants, but lost.

Now he’s aiming to reconquer the PM title—with the exact opposite strategy. Ahead of an Oct. 9 parliamentary election, the conservative leader has been rallying Poles against Russia, which he accuses of being involved in his brother’s death. He has also recruited several family members of the victims of the crash, all of them political neophytes, to run for Law and Justice. It’s unclear how well the volte-face is faring with the public, as different polls put voter support for his party as low as 20 and as high as 32 per cent, a mere four percentage points behind the leading Civic Platform party. Moscow must surely be watching closely.

Newsmakers: August 4-11, 2011

By Kate Lunau, Richard Warnica, Alex Ballingall and Emma Teitel - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

Stan Behal/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency

All grown up

Brian Mulroney’s youngest son, 25-year-old Nicolas, who was born while the Mulroneys lived at 24 Sussex, tied the knot this week at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on McCaul Street in downtown Toronto. Nicolas and Katy Carlyle Brebner, 26, are both bankers at RBC, where they met. The former prime minister told reporters the service was “very, very nice” and his son’s new bride is “a beauty.” Three hundred guests attended the afternoon service, including Nicolas’s brothers Ben and Mark, who served as best men; Mila, with Brian close behind, walked her youngest child down the aisle.

The guidettes take Italy

The bronzed, undereducated, ever-intoxicated cast of Jersey Shore returned to the small screen this week for a fourth season, this time in Italy—you know, the country with the peso for its currency, according to Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi. Although her “Italian” was limited to ciao and gracias—yes, really—Deena Cortese was in her element in the homeland, though she hates the pizza’s “thin, thin crust.” The food, in fact, was a miss for the gang from Jersey. “They didn’t even have bagels!” complained Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino, now calling himself “The Situatione.”

Not a braid out of place

Ukrainian folk hero Yulia Tymoshenko appeared in court last week, trademark braids neatly coiffed, despite having spent the previous three nights in prison. Tymoshenko was arrested for contempt of court after refusing to stand before the judge and repeatedly mocking him on Twitter. She’s made her feelings clear about the trial, which she views as an attempt to block her from running in future elections. Tymoshenko, the darling of the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution and currently a fierce opponent of President Viktor Yanukovych, faces charges of abuse of power over gas deals with Russia. Apparently unbowed after her weekend behind bars, she refused, once again, to stand before the judge on her return to court, yelling, “Glory to Ukraine!”

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Down and out in London

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

When the European Union expanded its borders eastward in 2004, more than half a million Poles took advantage of the newly opened border to pack up and move to Britain. They were joined by thousands more Czechs and Slovenians, and after the EU expanded again in 2007, migrants from Bulgaria and Romania.

Many thrived. Suddenly traditional English pubs were staffed by servers with Eastern European accents. The new arrivals were so ubiquitous in the trades that “Polish plumber” became a catchphrase.

Inevitably, however, thousands have also floundered. Estimates vary, but a disproportionate percentage of homeless in London are from Eastern Europe, most of them Poles. And when they do stumble, they fall harder than the locals. Migrants who have not worked full-time for more than a year do not qualify for many social assistance programs, such as housing benefits. Last year, a charity worker found homeless Poles roasting rats. Continue…

Foreign aid accountability: Poland vs. Canada

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 18 Comments

Researching this story on Polish support for the democratic opposition in Belarus, I called up a contact at the Polish embassy in Ottawa. Within a couple of hours, he sent me personal cell phone numbers for the relevant deputy ministers working on the file. The Polish ambassador invited me to come by for a chat. Did I want to interview Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski? No problem.

You might find this unremarkable. Surely most ministries want to publicize the work they do. You would be wrong — at least if we’re talking about Canada and its current government. In the past five years, I’ve spoken on the record with precisely one person at Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs who wasn’t a spokesperson reciting usually banal and evasive talking points that someone else had written.

As it happens, Canada also says it is supporting democracy in Belarus. It pledged $400,000 to the cause in February. Of this, $100,000 was pegged to support Belsat, a Belarusian language television station based in Warsaw and broadcasting into Belarus. I contacted Belsat in March and was told they hadn’t received the money. Continue…

Belarusians get a little help from their Polish friends

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:08 AM - 0 Comments

Ariana Cubillos/AP

Opposition groups in Belarus hold their meetings in bugged offices amongst colleagues and friends who risk harassment, fines and unemployment simply for showing up. Often, the walls of the offices and apartments where these meetings take place are adorned with posters displaying the Polish Solidarity slogan, etched in its iconic blood-red script. The democratic revolution that toppled authoritarian Communist regimes across Eastern and Central Europe two decades ago began in Poland. Today, Belarusian democrats hoping to unseat their country’s long-entrenched dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, look to Poland and the example it set for inspiration.

Lately, they have also received concrete help. Polish aid to Belarus has almost tripled since 2006, to about $14 million a year. None of this money goes to the Belarusian government. It is spent supporting the democratic opposition through projects that pay the legal fees of detained activists, allow Belarusian students who have been kicked out of university to study in Poland, and fund Belarusian radio and television stations that are based in Poland and broadcast into Belarus. Poland has also waived visa fees for most Belarusians, while banning many regime officials from entering Poland. (Canada recently pledged $400,000 for democratic initiatives in Belarus, including $100,000 for Belsat, a Belarusian television station headquartered in Warsaw—though as of late March the station had not received the money. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs refused to say when the promised funds would be dispersed.)

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Playing the anti-Russian card in Poland

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Many Poles chuckled in 2006 when they learned that their prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, had never opened a bank account or used an ATM card. Others were less amused; they saw it as proof that the 61-year-old—who speaks no foreign languages, despises travel and lives with his mother—is too old-fashioned for the briskly modernizing country. Kaczynski lost in the 2007 general election, and then lost again last summer when he ran to replace his twin brother Lech, the Polish president who died in a plane crash in Russia last April. But now, observers say that anger over Russia’s handling of that tragedy may be so powerful that Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party could wrestle power back from Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform in this October’s election.

The crash in Smolensk that killed Lech Kaczynski and 95 other Poles could not have been more darkly symbolic. The planeload of statesmen were on their way to a memorial in the Katyn Forest, where Stalin massacred 22,000 Poles in 1940. After decades of obfuscating over those murders, Moscow had appeared to be finally adopting a softer line, and showing some recognition of Polish grief. But hopes of further reconciliation seemed to be dashed with the crash. Although experts said early on that it was likely a combination of weather, pilot error and shoddy airport facilities, the disaster prompted Polish theories that it was an assassination attempt by Russians who had somehow created the foggy conditions or tampered with the plane’s electrical systems.

Then came the official report by the report by Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee. Released on Jan. 12, it placed all of the blame on inebriated Polish commanders who pressured their pilots to attempt a landing, while omitting plausible evidence from the Polish side that Russian air traffic controllers gave incorrect flight paths and altitudes. Kaczynski was quick to call the report “a mockery of Poland”—while giving the conspiracy theories more legitimacy than ever, says Piotr Wróbel, an expert on Poland at the University of Toronto. Along with a Catholic media that is telling “the audience every day that the government are traitors who work for Russia,” says Wróbel, he is ratcheting up the anger. And if Kaczynski can rally his aging base around the anti-Russian cause, he could close the double-digit gap between him and Tusk. “This is the beginning of the electoral campaign,” says Wróbel. “The catastrophe is very easy to use.”

Indeed, older Poles remember well Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the result of a secretive deal between Berlin and Moscow. Younger Poles, meanwhile, look back to the Soviet denial of any problems in the early days of the 1989 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. With this report, says Wróbel, “the Polish came to the conclusion that the Russians lied to them again.”

Of course, younger Poles aren’t as emotional, says Wróbel. “They’re interested in business, money and the future.” If Tusk can convince Poles he’s improving the economy, he could still win in October. On the other hand, there could soon be further fuel to Kaczynski’s anti-Russian fire: Poland’s own report on the tragedy is due in February.

Extreme Chopin

By Paul Wells - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Ingolf Wunder got standing ovation. Evgeni Bozhanov won fourth prize. | Kacper Pempel/Reuters/ Bartek Sadowski/NIFC

By the third stage of the 16th Frédéric Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, the jury had winnowed the field of contestants from more than 300 to 20, and the rules now gave the survivors more rope to hang themselves. In earlier rounds they had been asked to play only a half-hour of Chopin. Now each pianist had nearly an hour to show what they knew about Poland’s greatest composer in the 200th anniversary year of his birth. If what they knew wasn’t much, there was lots of time to show that, too. It was gruelling.

The 16th pretender to the greatest crown a young pianist can win was Ingolf Wunder, a pug-nosed blond 25-year-old from Klagenfurt, Austria. On this Friday evening he followed a petite, fastidious Russian, Yulianna Avdeeva, and a Polish kid who rummaged around in Chopin’s mazes to little effect. From the first notes it was clear Wunder was another matter.

He began with rarities, a rondo and a bolero, deft where others had been turgid. His program grew more challenging, ending with the Sonata in B Minor and the Polonaise-Fantaisie, a 14-minute epic. Wunder reacted to his own playing with detached interest, nodding at a quick change of dynamics, smiling at a clever turn.
When he finished, the audience at the National Philharmonia gave him a standing ovation, something it had done for only one other pianist. A woman behind me with a laminated press pass was crying.

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A first-rate (mis)adventure writer

By Kate Fillion, Brian Bethune, Anne Kingston, Sheilagh McEvenue, Chris Sorensen - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

‘Even Silence Has An End’: Ingrid Betancourt with her sister at a concert for liberty in Paris, July, 20, 2008. Julien Hekimian/WireImage/Getty Images

EVEN SILENCE HAS AN END
Ingrid Betancourt

During a quixotic campaign for the Colombian presidency in February 2002, Ingrid Betancourt—Green Oxygen party founder, elected senator, bestselling author and anti-corruption whistle-blower—was kidnapped by FARC rebels and spirited off to the jungle. Her account of the 6½ years she spent in captivity is, even at 528 pages, riveting: there are anacondas, piranhas, food shortages, forced marches through the rainforest, sadistic captors, life-threatening illnesses—and the growing certainty that she is both too valuable a pawn for the rebels and too inconvenient an activist for the government ever to be freed.

To evade detection, FARC commanders kept hostages on the move, sometimes cramming them into tiny barracks, and other times forcing them to sleep in the open. Betancourt escaped several times but was always recaptured, and eventually chained by the neck to a tree. But as she makes clear, she was not well-liked by the other hostages, several of whom rushed to press with damning memoirs accusing her of “haughtiness” and “selfishness.”

While Betancourt doesn’t address these charges directly, she writes that many hostages—who included fellow politicians and three American military contractors—were envious of the international attention her plight attracted. Certainly, meanness rather than grace emerged under pressure: cliques formed, captives began snitching on (and filching from) each other, and bitter squabbling and schadenfreude were the norm. Betancourt doesn’t pretend she was above any of this. “I, too, had run up to the stewpot in the hope of having a better piece . . . We were all alike, entangled in our ugly little pettiness.”

It’s easy to believe that in the jungle, Betancourt was a self-important pain in the ass at times. But in this surprisingly a political and tightly circumscribed memoir—there’s no discussion of her post-rescue divorce, or her ex-husband’s nasty kiss-and-tell book—she also proves herself to be a first-rate (mis)adventure writer. This jungle book is an indelible portrait of hell—which, as Sartre suggested, does turn out to be other people.
- KATE FILLION

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At war over recognition

By Michael Petrou - Monday, August 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images

“We have to throw them out,” said Wladyslaw Gomulka, deputy prime minister of Poland’s Soviet-backed provisional government, in May 1945. Gomulka was referring to ethnic Germans living on Polish land. There were millions of them. Some were colonists who had arrived during the war and took land previously belonging to now-slaughtered Poles. Some found themselves on newly Polish territory when borders were shifted west at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Most had been there for generations. Almost all were “thrown out.”

And not only from Poland, but also Czechoslovakia, Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. More than 10 million Germans were ethnically cleansed as the war on the eastern front turned against Germany, and in the months and years following the end of hostilities. Many who were not thrown out were killed—as many as 700,000 between 1943 and 1947. Those who survived arrived in Germany poor and resentful. Today, almost 70 years later, they and their descendents, who constitute a powerful political lobby in Germany, have secured government support for a documentation centre to commemorate their plight at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

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Lech Walesa mixes it up

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters

The strangest election in Poland’s post-Communist history took another wrong turn last week with the entry into the fray of famed anti-Communist Lech Walesa. The former Solidarity leader told Poles it would be a “disaster” if they elected Jaroslaw Kaczynski: identical twin of Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president killed in an April plane crash.

“Kaczynski is an irresponsible and dangerous politician,” Walesa said, shattering the sympathetic calm that had blanketed the campaign. It launched mere weeks after the tragedy, which wiped out much of the country’s political and military elite. “We could pay a high price if he wins,” he added.

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Poland: dueling superiorities

By Paul Wells - Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 9:46 PM - 20 Comments

I like a line from an academic in this account of Bronislaw Komorowski’s (narrow) (apparent) victory in today’s runoff Polish presidential election. He says the confrontation between Komorowski’s Civic Platform and Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party was a fight “between people who feel intellectually superior and people who feel morally superior.”

That’s approximate, of course: just for starters, people who feel intellectually superior tend to think their self-diagnosed wit gives them a moral edge too. But it encapsulates the differences between two centre-right parties outsiders have had a hard time distinguishing. Komorowski’s party — really the creature of its leaden but wily prime minister, Donald Tusk — is economic-conservative, limited-government, but pro-European and socially liberal. Kaczynski’s, which he co-led with his brother Lech who died in that spectacular airliner crash in Smolensk this spring, is socially conservative, obsessed with anti-communist witch hunting decades after the fact, and less interested in fiscal rigour. (I made my own best effort to distinguish the two parties in this 2007 account of an earlier election cycle.)

Komorowski was streets ahead of Kaczynski when the short campaign began, and blew most of that lead. He lost half the country, and  you can see which half in the electoral maps: the farmlands and the east, which look to Russia’s sphere of influence and don’t like it. The cities and the west, which look to Germany and the rest of Europe in a clear-eyed but broadly positive fashion, were ready to give Komorowski and Tusk a chance to work together.

Does this matter to Canada? Not much, not directly. But it will not go unnoticed in Jason Kenney’s office that those Poles who voted in Canada preferred Kaczynski.

Pedophiles on drugs

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 6 Comments

Getty Images

Poland has a new tool in its fight against pedophiles—chemical castration. A new law states that men convicted of raping a child under 15 or a close relative can be forced to take libido-lowering medication, even after their sentence has been served. The law came into effect June 8 after being passed in Poland’s parliament last September. Prime Minister Donald Tusk first raised the issue in 2008, when Poles were shocked by the case of a man who had allegedly imprisoned his daughter for six years, raping her repeatedly and fathering two children. At the time, Tusk angered human rights groups by saying, “I don’t believe that such individuals, such creatures, can be called human. In this case one can’t even argue on behalf of human rights.”

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Kaczynski, the backlash: Against him, against the entire cult of martyrdom

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 16, 2010 at 2:25 PM - 17 Comments

Two very good op-ed articles in the New York Times bring to this side of the Atlantic some of the debate that’s been stirred in Poland this week by the terrible plane crash in the Russian forest.

Wiktor Osiatynski points out, fairly gently, that Lech Kaczynski simply wasn’t a popular or well-liked president and that his chances of re-election were close to zero. This helps explain the Facebook group that sprung up to protest against the idea of burying Kaczynski at Wawel Castle, and the assorted other protests.

More broadly, and in an even better piece of writing, novelist Olga Tokarczuk critiques the very idea of romanticizing death and catastrophe — an entirely understandable reaction to Poland’s tragic history, but one she’d rather her country put behind it: “I am sick of building our common identity around funeral marches and failed uprisings. I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.”

Music: "…or was it your heart bursting?"

By Paul Wells - Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 9:05 AM - 12 Comments

By one of the odd coincidences a capital city sometimes serves up, the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra has long been scheduled to play a complete program of Polish music tomorrow night, Monday. The Polish embassy was already taking an active interest in the concert. I’ll be out of town but was already regretting the prospect of missing it. Now, given the tragic news from Smolensk, I thought I’d pass word of it on to you.

The program includes two of the most prominent Polish compositions of the 20th century — Gorecki’s Third Symphony, which has enjoyed a surprising but welcome pop notoriety since Peter Weir used it in the score for the Jeff Bridges movie Fearless; and Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra, as dramatic and imaginative as any piece I know. The third piece, which will open the concert, makes the coincidence of timing deeper, richer and eerie.

It’s the Elegia by Peter Paul Koprowski, a Polish-Canadian composer who’s been retained as one of the NAC’s composers-in-residence for the next couple of years. It’s a setting, for solo soprano voice, of the poem Elegy on a Polish Boy by Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski. He wrote it in March of 1944 and, I discovered this morning, it goes like this:

They kept you, little son, from dreams like trembling butterflies,
they wove you, little son, in dark red blood two mournful eyes,
they painted landscapes with the yellow stitch of conflagrations,
they decorated all with hangmen’s trees the flowing oceans.

They taught you, little son, to know by heart your land of birth
as you were carving out with tears of iron its many paths.
They reared you in the darkness and fed you on terror’s bread;
you traveled gropingly that shamefulest of human roads.

And then you left, my lovely son, with your black gun at midnight,
and felt the evil prickling in the sound of each new minute.
Before you fell, over the land you raised your hand in blessing.
Was it a bullet killed you, son, or was it your heart bursting?

Four and a half months after he wrote those lines, Baczynski was shot to death in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising.

A land too acquainted with grief

By Paul Wells - Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 9:39 AM - 14 Comments

The Gazeta Wyborcza “turns the rules” in mourning, publishing its website only in black to chronicle the astonishing death of the country’s president Lech Kaczynski and dozens of others in a plane crash in Russia. The great newspaper’s founder Adam Michnik, who came from the Catholic reform left and disagreed with most of everything Kaczynski was in politics to accomplish, prints a short and dignified appreciation (I’m linking to Google translations; Polish doesn’t robo-translate well to English, but you can get the gist).

Kaczynski was a controversial figure who put a broadly-brushed xenophobia at the centre of his politics. In a country with a long history of violent dismemberment at the hands of its neighbours, most recently by the parties to the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact, xenophobia can at times be forgiven and often politically profitable. But most recent accounts suggest Poland was tiring of Kaczynski’s  assorted resentments and that he’d have trouble winning re-election this autumn. Still, Michnik gets it right: Kaczynski was courtly and warm in his personal relations with friend and foe, and his constant motive was patriotism. A cornerstone of his personal legacy is the Warsaw Rising Museum, to which Kaczynski gave the green light and his strong support while he was the city’s mayor. (In a city full of museums, if you get into a cab and say “take me to the museum,” this is where they take you.)

On the accident itself, it’s worth pointing out that for any politician, a decision about whether to land an airplane in inclement weather is an inherently political call and I’m a little surprised something like today’s tragedy doesn’t happen more often. To pick a relatively trivial example, during the stormy autumn of 1998, I rode in Quebec Liberal leader Jean Charest’s campaign plane as it made more than one reckless descent through freezing rain and high winds to get to campaign events.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk will surely cancel an Ottawa visit that was to happen this week. He and Kaczynski barely got along and had used airplanes as instruments to express stark disagreements over foreign policy before (I’m trying to track down an account of an airborne dispute between them that played out during the 2008 Georgia-Russia unpleasantness.) With a passenger list that included the country’s entire military command, its Olympic chairman, relatives of the Katyn murder victims and many politicians, the destruction of Kaczynski’s plane is tragedy on a scale Canadians can barely imagine. What makes this such a Polish catastrophe is that to many of the country’s older residents, it will all feel so familiar.

Hey look: on the insistent demands of memory

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 11:05 AM - 1 Comment

From the print edition, my column on the rather extraordinary efforts of Poland’s government, around the world, to make sure people know the death camps were the Nazis’ idea.

Sorry, Poland

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 48 Comments

And suddenly there we were in the midst of another international controversy. We have grown used to this sort of thing here at Maclean’s, whose editor once said, “If you don’t think you’ve gone too far, you haven’t gone far enough.” This can be a pretty rock ’n’ roll place to work. But just this once, the uproar wasn’t one we meant to cause. It’s worth the tale. Here’s the tale.

In our issue of Nov. 16, “Our Biggest Ever” university issue, we carried a long, thoughtful feature by Katie Engelhart about the imminent trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk, who is “charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.” Without in any way making excuses for atrocity, Katie’s four-page article managed to air some of the discomfort with trying Demjanjuk, who is 89, visibly feeble, and was not a senior figure in the Nazi mass-murder apparatus in the first place. Sensitive stuff, but Katie is a very good young reporter and that’s not where the trouble lay.

No, the trouble was in three phrases I didn’t even notice when I read the article. Engelhart wrote that Demjanjuk had been mistaken for “a notorious sadist at Poland’s Treblinka death camp.” She refers again to “Poland’s Treblinka death camp,” and notes that Demjanjuk, who was Ukrainian, “served at three Polish camps.” Well, did we ever hear from the Polish Embassy and Polish Canadians after that. The comments under the story when we published it online were furious. The letters were angrier. “This is not acceptable that you spread absurdity that slanders Poland and Polish citizens!!!!” one letter began, under the subject line PROTEST AGAINST YOUR LIE. Almost simultaneously I received a plaintive email from my friend Sylwia Domisiewicz, the press and protocol officer at the Polish Embassy in Ottawa. “I just got bombarded by emails and phone calls from the Polish-Canadian community,” she wrote. We would be getting a letter from the ambassador, she said. To whom should they send it?

I forwarded Sylwia’s email to our senior executive editor, Peeter Kopvillem, who knows a thing or two about murderous foreign occupations, being Estonian. This kicked off a correspondence between Maclean’s and the embassy, and the letter from the ambassador appears elsewhere in these pages. But I’m spending more time on this issue because it is an example of the insistent demands of horrible memory.

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Looking to Lech

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 9, 2009 at 1:29 PM - 7 Comments

On the occasion of that little anniversary in Berlin today, former Polish president Lech Walesa is once more front and centre, which is relevant to our narrow interest in that Mr. Walesa is one of Stephen Harper’s personal heroes. The two met last year when the Prime Minister visited Poland. Here, for whatever reason, is a photo of Mr. Walesa impatiently awaiting Mr. Harper’s arrival.

Mr. Walesa is a fascinating character, both historically and personally. And, should you so choose, you could likely derive all sorts of flimsy links to Mr. Harper’s own story. Here is Timothy Garton Ash’s summation for Time’s 100 most important people of the century issue.

Walesa is a phenomenon. Still mustachioed but thickset now, he stands for many values that in the West might be thought conservative. Fierce patriotism (“nationalism,” say his critics), strong Catholic views, the family. He’s a fighter, of course. But he’s also mercurial, unpredictable–and a consummate politician. He is an example of someone who was magnificent in the struggle for freedom but less so in more normal times, when freedom was won and the task was to consolidate a stable, law-abiding democracy. For all his presidential airs, he still retains something of the old Lech, the working-class wag and chancer that his friends remember from the early days. But no one can deny him his place in history.

Mr. Congeniality

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 3:51 PM - 5 Comments

Joe Biden travels to Warsaw and has the government there — which had been furious at the Obama government for amending (not cancelling) the Bush missile-defence plan without properly notifying its Polish and Czech allies — eating out of his hand. The U.S. vice-president even spent two hours chatting with Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president and a political opponent of the country’s parliamentary government. This kind of laying-on-of-hands shows, not for the first time, why Biden was a good veep pick; the fact that he had to travel to the region to address growing uncertainty there over American intentions for the region shows clumsiness at the White House. Still, a problem that can be fixed this easily is a rare luxury for any government.

"The radar will not"

By Paul Wells - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 8:59 AM - 24 Comments

Barack Obama’s decision to scrap an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, in the (Google-translated) original Polish. Repercussions discussed in English over here.

Rousseau's counsel to the Poles

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 10:46 AM - 33 Comments

“POLAND is a large state surrounded by even more considerable states which, by reason of their despotism and military discipline, have great offensive power. Herself weakened by anarchy, she is, in spite of Polish valour, exposed to all their insults. She has no strongholds to stop their incursions…

“In the present state of affairs, I can see only one way to give her the stability she lacks: it is to infuse, so to speak, the spirit of the Confederation throughout the nation; it is to establish the Republic so firmly in the hearts of the Poles that she will maintain her existence there in spite of all the efforts of her oppressors…. You may not prevent them from swallowing you up; see to it at least that they will not be able to digest you.”

— Considerations on the Government of Poland and on its Proposed Reformation, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1772

Twenty years ago tomorrow, the Polish people broke Moscow’s teeth for good. I’ll be writing more about that great moment later today.

Hitler's non-German collaborators

By Michael Petrou - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:31 PM - 6 Comments

Spiegel’s detailed and, to my mind, well crafted article about the role non-Germans played in the Holocaust is upsetting people in Poland and drawing heated response across Europe and around the world.

Snubwatch: Where did the end of the Cold War begin?

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 11:31 PM - 12 Comments

A fuss in Poland about a European Union video clip commemorating the end of the Cold War. Poland is mentioned at the beginning — Jaruzelski announcing martial law in 1981 — and that’s pretty much the end of that. No clips of Solidarnosc, no Pope. When things really start to hop in 1989, it’s portrayed as basically a Berlin thing.

I’m not well placed to judge the merits of all this. My hunch is that in other Central and East European countries, people wonder why Poles think the miracle didn’t happen in their countries too. I only note the depth of the hurt feelings here over something that, to many of us, must seem trivial — it’s a Youtube, after all — and point out the obvious reason: because what happened 20 years ago was a miracle. And it amazed everyone who lived through it. And they’d hate to see anyone forget it or overlook it.

These occasional “Snubwatch” features are funny, of course, as we look around the world (or closer to home) for groups or people who fret and worry that somebody’s disrespecting them. But try to imagine you’ve been working for something fundamental all your life. And one day, almost without warning, it happens. And everything changes. And years later you’re not sure anyone even noticed. It would be a strange feeling.