Perhaps it was a bandage sent by you that saved a life?

Several generations have been raised with the subtle dilemma of what a man born by the Vistula River should do with his Polish identity, which he did not ask for but which is a burden to him. Yet there is a grain of logic in this question, which is necessarily narrowed down to focus on our country. After all, when the great nations of Western Europe all around us have once again dipped their hands in the muck of collaboration with the new totalitarianism, and we – combining the realism of keeping the Muscovites at bay with the romanticism of personal sacrifice for Ukraine – have once again ” done the right thing”, what should we do with our Polish identity?

Who knows, maybe if we, too, had grandparents in the Wehrmacht we would now be looking with a more favourable eye at Chancellor Sholz, as he is giving a wink to the leader of 21st century Nazism – Vladimir Putin?

Perhaps if our ancestors had gone so low as to cooperate with Marshal Petain and Prime Minister Laval, and had supplied Hitler with Jews at his every beck and call, perhaps we too would be trivialising the Russian invasion? Might that be why the US, Britain and Poland do not grace the genocidaires of the Kremlin, because they used to fight the genocidaires of Berlin without any compromise?

The pedagogy of shame assumed that if a person was born here and did not choose his or her nationality, he or she could (and even should) abandon it, yet the nation – apart from, ironically, the ‘nationalists’ – is helping refugees by the millions, accepting families into their homes, sending aid to the East, but also its emissaries – with products, with weapons or even to fight at the very front. The Polish nation stood up to the task with vigour and unquestionable merit – again; in a few decades, some neo-Gross and some neo-Grabowskie will have to invent new methodologies to somehow minimise our contribution to the fight against evil.

When discussing geopolitics or international relations, the main emphasis is put on objective, quantifiable factors – population numbers, GDP, army size – while the cultural code, national mythologies, history and social emotions are treated with a certain positivist neglect. Meanwhile, it was the latter that prevailed in the defence of Ukraine, which, according to all the experts of the world, stood no chance in the war against Russia.

We can move down from these macro-scale reflections to the micro-examples. In a hospital in Slavyansk, now less bombarded by worn-out Russian artillery, in the food storeroom you can see at first glance that half the products come from Poland. Perhaps it was your canned food that the frontline doctors had for breakfast today; perhaps it was your tea that they offered to the wounded soldier? Maybe it was a bandage you had sent that saved a Ukrainian soldier’s life? Every gift and every commitment reaps its harvest somewhere in the East. Will we be able to live with the conviction of how much good we have done and what a dignified nation we have turned out to be – again?

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