Pamiętamy: the duty not to forget so that what happened to this girl is never repeated

@ElentirENG ES 3·14·2023 · 9:30 0

When I was a child I became fond of history. I have always been very curious about the events of the past and how people thought in the past.

Polish Catholics: the great forgotten when talking about the victims of the Holocaust
The lesser-known aspects of life in Poland after the German-Soviet occupation of 1939

Learning from history is a very useful thing, provided you approach it with a modicum of intellectual honesty. This serves, above all, to know what examples we should follow and what mistakes we must avoid repeating. And that implies immersing ourselves very often in some dark and unpleasant aspects of history: the crimes committed by some human beings against others.

We can all learn a lot from the history of our own country, but after Spain, if I have learned a lot about a specific country, it is from Poland. In that Slavic and traditionally Catholic country, a a tolerant culture, which allowed many Jews who had been expelled from other parts of Europe to settle there. In 1939, Poland was the country with the most Jews in the world, some 3.4 million (in Europe there were about 9.5 million).

It was then that Poland was struck simultaneously by the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century: National Socialism and Communism, which had allied themselves in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Poles, both Catholic and Jewish, were victims of terrible atrocities. Reading the history of that country during the German and Soviet occupation makes your heart sink thinking about the hardships it suffered the Polish people.

Knowing these facts has helped me to reinforce my profound rejection of totalitarianism and to understand that behind totalitarian ideologies there is an absolute evil: the one that led millions of people to be deprived of their humanity and to be treated as if they were simple insects that had to be exterminated. This extermination was suffered especially by Polish Jews, but also by millions of Catholics, as I explained here in 2019.

In that post I told you about a Polish girl named Czesława Kwoka. She was 14 years old when she was killed in Auschwitz with a phenol injection. I have saved in my memory the terrified look of that girl when they made her the photo that you can see on these lines. It is the photo that the Germans took of all the prisoners who arrived at that extermination camp.

When I think of Czesława, who was a Catholic, and millions of other Poles, both Jews and Catholics, who suffered from Nazi terror and Communist terror, I always remember one Polish word: "pamiętamy", which means "we remember". We have a moral duty not to forget those crimes, not only to avoid their repetition, but also to honor the memory of the victims.

I am writing these lines because last Saturday marked the 80th anniversary of the murder of Czesława. To keep his memory alive and that of millions of victims of totalitarianism, I once again spread the article I dedicated to him on social networks. In the last few hours I have had the unpleasant experience of reading scoundrels who mocked her and even denied her murder. For the Nazi scum, like the communist scum, it is not enough to have murdered millions of people: now they also want to trample on her memory.

The totalitarian scum has a dam on this website that will not give way as long as I have breath left. I declare myself radically intolerant of totalitarians, be they nazis or communists, because what they want is to once again steal our freedom and once again steal the human dignity of millions of people. We cannot treat as legitimate or respectable ideologies what are, in reality, a form of intellectual terrorism that has no qualms about justifying crimes of genocide, mocking the victims and denying those horrendous crimes, which are well documented.

In the face of this vileness, in the face of this tremendous lack of humanity and in the face of the vomit of evil of those totalitarians, those of us who love the good, the truth, freedom and life have the duty to remember, the duty to not to forget so that tragedies such as the one suffered by Czesława at the hands of a gang of criminals who believed themselves superior to their peers are not repeated. All totalitarians will always find a clear and firm answer on this website: pamiętamy. Contando Estrelas will continue to remember the Nazi crimes and the communist crimes, because to forget them would be to let the totalitarians win and, in addition to kill millions of people, now kill their memory too.