The War Started

70 years ago today the World War II started with a German surprise attack on Wielun (by air) and Westerplatte (from the sea). Uncomfortably sandwiched between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, Poland was for the fourth time in its history, partitioned by its occupying forces and, effectively, wiped out of the world maps. On September 17th, the Soviet Union, acting on its secret attachment to Ribbentrov-Molotov pact, attacked Poland from the east, taking its officers hostage and dashing all the hopes for resistance against now two aggressors. What followed were six years of hostile occupation, persecution, annihilation of Polish cities and its most valuable people in German concentration camps (where Europe's Jews were being methodically exterminated) and Russian mass murders, especially in Katyń. On top of that, what followed in 1945, when the war ended, was an imposed period of communism and Poland's stealth inclusion in the Soviet sphere of interest until 1989.

I was sorry to see in the last days how Russia's media and Russia's authorities reacted in the build-up to the celebrations of the Westerplatte attack, with their publications of dubious documents on Poland's war-time politicians and defamatory documentaries. And I was disappointed by Wladimir Putin's letter to Gazeta Wyborcza, where - among careful and wise words - he belittled the Soviet wrongs and likened them to Poland's incomparably smaller faults. Well, it just doesn't bode well for the future to muddle the waters of history and casts a shadow not just over Russia's intentions, but over its ability to confess sins, atone and reach out to its smaller, anxious neighbours.

A great imaginary speech by Putin from The Economist here.