Required viewing. Especially to shame anyone who wants to slam the doors shut on refugees.
I am all for opening borders and accepting refugees, but this gives a very incomplete and quite misleading view of how the United Kingdom treated the Polish in 1945. So, time for a little history lesson:
Poland was occupied by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. During the war, many Poles chose to continue the struggle against their occupation by fighting in excile. They travelled all the way to North Africa and from there to Scotland to serve under the British army.
Poles formed the fourth-largest Allied armed force in Europe after the Soviets, when the war ended 228,000 Polish Troops were serving under the high command of the British Army.
Now, when the war was over, most of these Poles really wanted to go home to their families and home towns, which they hadn’t seen in 6 years. But they couldn’t. Wanna know why? Because the United Kingdom and the United States had sold them out. In february 1945 at the Yalta conference Churchill agreed Stalin could keep the Soviet gains that Adolf Hitler had endorsed in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, including Kresy, and carry out Polish population transfers. He also approved Polish elections under Soviet supervision, knowing this would turn Poland into a Soviet Puppet state. So at the end of the war, when everybody celebrated freedom, Poland was effective reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Because Churchill and Roosevelt had decided to sacrifice Poland to Stalin in their postwar deal.
Now, the United Kingdom ‘generously’ allowed Poles who did not want to go back to an occupied country to settle in the United Kingdom and 200.000 Poles indeed resettled in the United Kingdom. A very large segment of them had served in the British army the entire war. You’d think they’d be treated like heroes, right? Wrong. Polish veterans were housed in camps and denied a veterans pension. Their contribution to the war effort went almost completely unrecognized and in a pretty xenophobic country, most of them ended up in badly paid factory jobs regardless of how educated they were. General Maczek, the leader of the Polish army in war time, could only find work as a bartender. General Sosabowski became a factory worker. While their British counterparts had glorious careers and statues dedicated to them, the most important Polish generals died in poverty.
The United Kingdom has nothing to be proud of when it comes to how it treated the Poles in 1945.
Recommended reading:
- Kenneth K. Koskodan, No Greater Ally: The Untold Story of Poland’s Forces in World War II
- Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War
- Evan McGilvray, Man of Steel and Honour: General Stanislaw Maczek
And actually wikipedia is pretty good on this topic too.
I would also add that these people continued to face discrimination and violence after the war, often being targeted by the local English population, despite having “built the country” with everyone else.
At some point during undergrad, I had a neighbor whose family ended up in London after they had fought with the British in the North Africa campaigns. She described the discrimination and the hardships that her parents and grandparents faced. It later turned out that her family was of Polish-Ukrainian aristocratic descent and were very highly educated (as in Paris uni educated, which was en vogue at the time), though her family ended up in hard labor in the docks and factories after the War. They had previously worked with the British security services to gather intelligence and some had even gone to the front. Her parents eventually chose to legally change their names into something more English, which helped my neighbor to become the actress she is today. Similar experiences were broadly shared by other Central and East European communities in Britain who were in the same situation.
The Polish community, like many other from the region, are still painted with a discriminatory palette. This side of the story continues to remain unrecognized, in education/schools and general "social knowledge”, as well as a highly taboo subject in academia (in Britain and Sweden at least).
We welcomed refugees in 1945. We can’t abandon them today – video
QueerAnarchism 