Poland Desecrates Monuments to Fallen Soldiers

Our special correspondent Maxim Kiselev is now in Warsaw. He looked more attentively at the processes inside the exemplary country. At the legislative level, Poland is now destroying monuments dedicated to Soviet soldiers, who died on its territory in the fight against fascism. The Polish Sejm made the decision on June 22. Here is the report.

Here, where we are walking now, there was a street back in the 70's. There was a village and it was even paved. The forest grew over the road and even the path. In the place where there was a village, 100 km to the west of Krakow, not a single brick remains, only a forest. Sometimes difficult to be passed through, it became a safe haven for a tiny obelisk with a faded star at the top. During the counter-offensive in January 1945, the Germans captured a group of Soviet soldiers. Most likely, spies. And here, they were locked in a shed and burned alive. This is the scene of the massacre, not the burial site. There is no official graveyard, only the memorial.

In Poland, it is now outlawed, like the star that Krishtof comes here to paint, hoping that the forest saves it again. I hope that since this monument is in such an inaccessible place and few people know about it, they won’t reach it, and we will save it. History here, like a guerrilla fighter, retreats into the woods. Its place is here, whether intact or broken into pieces. The red star has been preserved along with an inscription with the year 1945. There was a sign here, too. Only the star remains. The sign used to be here. I think they were made of good metal. They were taken to a scrap yard, and the monument was thrown away. What it looked like when the flowers were still lying at the pedestal can only be seen with the help of graphics. This is how it will look when they restore it and hide it behind a high fence. It is more than five meters high. This part will be there. It was found in a forest near Wroclaw, a monument to those killed in the battle for Poland, broken down into granite fragments.

There is no chance for the monument to survive in Skaryszewski Park in Warsaw. It is already damaged, the words "Red Army" were cut from the sign. And now, it’s allowed to finish it off, as almost 250 others were, which the new law forbade to remember. The monument on the site where Red Army soldiers died in January 1945 was put up by grateful inhabitants of the town of Dąbrowa. Until recently, it wasn’t in danger, the red star was not banned. But since June 22 of this year, the hammer and the sickle have been condemned. They are now considered communist propaganda, and therefore, the monument will be demolished. These shouts don't address Trump, but rather those who are trying to be different behind the police cordon, so that the others understand to whom Poland gives the right to rewrite its history. They enjoy the words about their own greatness and hold flags of his country above the Polish ones. He gives them Patriot missiles like second-hand clothing. They give thanks for this generosity with songs by the road. "We will make Poland great again." The whole world knows whose slogan was copied.

One part of Warsaw is meeting Trump as a dear guest, waving star-spangled flags. The other one has its own view of the greatness of Poland. But who in Poland now needs those who don’t want to hear the author of its new slogan? The history of Poland is the history of people who have never lost hope and never forgot who they are. Of course they don’t forget. But their memory is rather selective. 52 burning orbs barely dilute the darkness of the barracks. A terrible place near the city of Lublin behind barbed wire keeps the history of the tragedy of the prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp. Just like in Auschwitz, they were killed with Zyklon B gas here. The shelves are still filled with cans of the stuff. Crematorium ovens, gas chambers, and guard towers. To remember, but without the "unnecessary" details that modern Poland doesn't need. The fact that there is only one line in the guide book and only a half minute story about the Red Army, which entered Majdanek in July 1944, isn’t surprising. Another thing isn’t clear. How come the list of those tortured, shot, and burned here, which before the 90's amounted to 360 thousand, was reduced by four and a half times by Polish historians within a few years? And, most importantly, why? Now, they say that about 80 thousand people were killed here. And also about the fact that the camp began to be used as a prison for the NKVD after the retreat of the Germans. One part of the story without the other is the ideal foundation on which the bricks of another Greater Poland are laid, moving the former ones out of sight. This monument to Lenin stood in the town of Poronin in the Tatra Mountains. It was brought here in the early 90's. Now, it is an exhibit of Poland's communist era. Here, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, communist leaders of Poland, peasants, and miners are all together.

The museum of the town of Kozlowka is like a warehouse of the past. While the The Internationale plays in Polish, this gallery has been taking new exhibits from parks, squares, and former party buildings. Out of the sculptures that survived the purge, the small ones stand close to each other under the roof. The massive one from the squares stand in the rain in the yard. The museum workers in Kozlowka would like to accept at least a few monuments which now don’t have a place in the streets and squares of the Polish cities, even if Lenin has to make room for them. But there's a problem. These sculptures are hollow inside, that is, it’s easy to carry them. And those that are now being prepared for dismantling are monolithic, it's much easier to break them than to ship them at a high cost. But they have already been desecrated apart from this. Those that are still intact and not broken into pieces have names on them smeared in paint. Poland is unique in its mockery of the dead. Next to each monument with a star, there must be a sign, on which there is an address impossible to be seen anywhere else. "If you have information about the soldiers of the Red Army mistreating the inhabitants of the city, please call this number to contact the local museum".

The law on decommunization is too similar to the Ukrainian one, so as not to frighten those for whom history is a complete thing, in which there are no fragments unacceptable for modern times. These are to the soldiers, commanders, political workers of the Red Army from the Tula Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Just in case, historian and collector Maciej Poręba asks not to mention the address of the house, which he turned into a museum of military history. Too many red stars, banners, and Soviet symbols. All that, if desired, can be seen as a failure to comply with the law, for which Maciej has one definition. It’s stupid to remove a period just because someone doesn’t like it. There were 200 thousands Poles fighting in the Red Army. But anyway, the approach is to destroy the monuments. The decision of the Polish Sejm on June 22 is stupid. Poland seems to live with two histories. One in which rare obelisks remain on their pedestals, while the other already smashes them into dust with the boots of those with whom Warsaw now takes pictures with. Maksim Kiselev, Philip Dubrovsky, Vladislav Mirzoyants, Vesti News of the Week, Poland.