Madam, - Having read with interest the informative and well-balanced article written by my colleague and friend Ambassador V. Rakhmanin (Opinion & Analysis, May 6th), let me offer a few thoughts of the Polish Ambassador to Ireland, whose family also suffered during the second World War.
This was the most horrific war in human history. That is why it is more than appropriate and necessary to commemorate the millions of victims of those terrifying atrocities and destruction. Poland lost more than 6 million citizens in the second World War, among them over 3 million Jews and Poles of Jewish origin. Those numbers conceal the unbelievable suffering of millions of human beings. We bow our heads before those who contributed to the demise of the Nazi Third Reich so that we might live in peace, security, democracy and the rule of law.
For us the war started on September 1st, 1939 with a cruel invasion by Nazi Germany. On September 17th we faced aggression from the East by the Stalinist Soviet Union, a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact signed before the Nazi attack. My parents lived in Lwów, at that time Polish, after the war Lvov in the Soviet Union, now Lviv in Ukraine. My uncle was 16 years old when he wrote on the blackboard: "Long live free Poland".
He was detained by the Soviets and sent as a prisoner to a factory in the Urals. His last letter, in which he described his fear of death, goes back to 1943; we have never heard from him and no documentation has ever been found regarding his fate. My father's cousin died in Katyñ where thousands of Polish officers and PoWs became victims of crimes of Stalinism. Most of my family were taken to Siberia, to gulags; some of them froze there or died of hunger.
Please do not misunderstand me - we pay tribute to all the soldiers from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other nations who fought in the Red Army; we admire their heroism, enormous suffering and dedication. We grieve for those nameless victims who fought with sacrifice and no fear. But the victory of the second World War was also the work of Poles, and President Putin chose not to mention Poland, during the commemorations in Moscow, as a country having a prominent place in the anti-Nazi coalition.
Our contribution was the biggest next to the Soviet Union, the US and UK (see www.ww2.pl). Poland was the first country to actively oppose Nazi aggression; our soldiers bravely struggled on all fronts of the war. With such omissions it is difficult to "strengthen solidarity and unite our peoples". Russia should also understand that the decisions of Yalta meant for Poland years of subjugation - true liberation was postponed by almost 50 years.
As my Minister said in the UN, "reconciliation is possible only when there is mutual striving and mutual good will. . .We want reconciliation based on truth because it is only possible through truth and a common understanding of history." - Yours, etc,
WITOLD SOBKOW, Polish Ambassador, Dublin.