I was born in Poland in 1984 when the country was still occupied by Soviet Russian forces. Both of my parents were Solidarity activists. My grandmother was a partisan against the Nazis. Her mother, my great-grandmother, sheltered Jews north of Warsaw in Jabłonna. My grandfather was sent to a slave work camp by the Nazis, who also killed his previous wife, and he only survived a Nazi death squad because one of the men ordered to shoot him was his old friend from college (a German from prewar Poland). Today my cousin Maciek — my drinking and partying buddy as a teenager — and his wife Justyna are sheltering a Ukrainian family and their two small children, Sasha and Igor, despite having three small children of their own. My great-great-great grandfather was himself a refugee fleeing the Russians when he fled all the way to Argentina in 1906, establishing a branch of my family there (the de Galeckis, from the Polish Gałecki) that I personally reconnected with my Polish relatives when my wife and I traveled to Argentina and found them in 2018.
Needless to say, my heart is full of pride for the fact that my great-grandmother sheltered Polish Jews, that my cousin and friend is sheltering Ukrainians, and that Poland has accepted more Ukrainian refugees this year than any other country (equivalent to an extra 10% of our own prewar population) and given them such a warm welcome, including food and shelter, the right to work and education. I am just as proud that just as many NATO arms have moved east through Poland as refugees (mostly women and children) have fled west. If the U.S. is the arsenal of democracy, Poland is the delivery man. By writing this post I do not in any way mean to demean the contributions of our beloved allies including the Baltics, the Czechs and Slovaks, Romanians and Bulgarians and of course the brave Ukrainians themselves.
There is no question in my mind that what is happening to the direct east of Poland is an attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people and their culture. The days when we laughed at images of Ukrainian tractors hauling broken Russian tanks are long gone. Now all that is in our minds are the horrific scenes in Bucha. Putin wrote an endless essay on why he believes the Ukrainians are undeserving of nationhood; his own personal „Mein Kampf.” He describes Ukraine as an „anti-Russia” just as Hitler described the Jewish people as an „anti-Germany.” Putin’s anger is against the very existence of Ukrainians; and he has shown us — in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv and eldewhere — his preferred solution.
I know now is the hour of Ukraine and the hour of terror and glory of the Ukrainian people. The whole world marvels at the Ukrainians just as the whole world marveled at the American people in their improbable struggle against the British Empire in 1776. Then, too, the American minutemen were defending not only their independence but also the very idea of democracy, on behalf of the entire human race, against a foreign tyrant. In many ways, the Ukrainian nation is being born now, in this horrifying and painful moment. Its bonds are being forged in blood; its history and the world’s history, written also in blood, are currently one.
But I wish in this brief essay to help others understand why we the Polish nation immediately — instinctively — stood by Ukraine in this crisis. No Pole raised in Poland has grown up without being imprinted with the history of what happened to our nation in 1939, when Poland was invaded simultaneously by Hitler’s Nazi Germany from the west and by Putin’s beloved Soviet Russia from the east. Back then, we Poles managed to kill 66,000 invading Nazis and we held out for two months before being overwhelmed. The western powers officially declared war on Hitler, but sent us no real help (while America remained neutral, under the slogan „America First”). Our poor nation held out for two months and killed 66,000 Nazis but was overwhelmed. We then lived through years of unspeakable horror. To be a Polish Jew carried a death sentence during the occupation, but so did being a non-Jewish Pole, in the Nazi genocide millions of us were rounded up and murdered, the plans to wipe out the rest of us (while „Germanizing” a small minority) were already drawn up, and were only stopped because Germany lost the war.
Today, the west has learned from history and is flooding Ukraine with weapons and supplies. The Ukrainian people have shown themselves to be as brave as our Polish ancestors were in 1939; they have already held out longer than we did, they have killed some 28,000 of the invaders, and — miracle of miracles — the Russian war machine appears to be sputtering out, making this look more like 1776 than 1939. But it is the memory of both that animates Poland’s desire to help our Slavic brothers and sisters to the east, our democratic brothers and sisters, led by a Jewish comedian. Because we Slavs know that the best defense against terror is humor, specifically dark humor.
Mark Twain said that history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Let us hope that this crisis allows all our nations to show themselves in their best light, with the Ukrainian nation lighting the path for the rest of us, and let us hope that Russia’s defeat becomes its own liberation, just as Germany’s was in 1945. Let us hope.
And that is why we Poles, whose gas has already been cut off by Putin’s regime, stand with the Ukrainians. And with all the Russians who oppose this war.