Job Discussion Forums

[misteradventure]

It appears that descendants may be considered Polish citizens in the event their parents never formally renounced their POLISH citizenship in front of a POLISH consular or embassy official, according to the Constitution.

Anyone familiar with this? My inlaws would be LIVID if they found out that they were not only ethnically but legally polacks as well!

[CROGO]

If your purpose here is to piss off your in-laws, they would first have to CLAIM Polish citizenship by decent from one or more Polish citizens. (Not an easy process to prove the claim. One must provide official birth records and marriage licenses and then translate them into Polish.) Even if one could claim Polish citizenship, many won�t because of concerns of military service (males) or tax obligations. The use of �citizenship� in the Polish constitution may be defined differently than you understand the term. It may be that �citizenship� refers to the right to live in Poland. Stalin involuntarily deported thousands of Poles to Russia after he and Hitler partitioned Poland to start WWII. The Poles are still rather sensitive about this. (The Poles recently demanded an investigation in Stalin�s murder of 25,700 Polish officers in 1940 in Katyn forest near Smolensk in Russia.) In recent years the Polish government has recognized citizenship claims of those involuntarily deported to Russia, and their descendents. Individuals who left Poland voluntarily, and their descendents, may not be treated as kindly.

To those actually in Poland, I would be curious if there is much talk there about the situation in Ukraine, and the issue of the Polish-Ukrainian border. The present border is that which Stalin imposed, and not the 1920 border agreed to by Lenin. The Poles never really agreed to the present border and the loss of East Galicia. Any talk of the Poles reclaiming it if Ukraine implodes?

[CROGO]

[Alex Shulgin]

I doubt that Poland will be trying to get Lvov back from Ukraine any time soon. Yes Poles do still Lvov as a Polish city but they also see Szczecin, Wroclaw, Slupsk, Koszalin, Ketrzyn etc as Polish cities (even if those were German cities for a few hundred years) and realise that they have to choose which Polish cities are inside Poland.

[CROGO]

"Yes Poles �have to choose which Polish cities are inside Poland."

Alex, as much as I appreciate your contributions to this forum, when did the Poles have a choice about which cities remained inside Poland? Who offered them this choice? Stalin?

WWII starts when the Germans invaded Poland and the Russians invaded from the other side 17 days later. (While of course the British and French armies sat on their hands and did nothing to help their treaty ally.) Stalin deported Poles from the sector of Poland that the Soviets occupied and executed Polish military officers in violation of the Geneva Convention. When the Germans invade Russia they exhume the mass grave of the Polish officers in Katyn. The Red Cross investigates and everyone knew that the Russians were responsible for the massacre. The Polish government in exile, established according to the pre-war Polish Constitution demanded an explanation from Stalin. Stalin blamed the Germans, set up a puppet communist government in Lublin, and refused to negotiate with the Polish government in exile in London.

Stalin stated that the Poles demand for an explanation for the massacre from the Russians evidenced bad faith towards Russia. (Gorbachev would later admit the truth in 1989. The Russians executed the Polish officers. The London Poles maintained a government in exile until Solidarity and Lech Walensa toppled the communist regime.) Stalin dictated Poland�s present Eastern border. The Lublin communists agreed to it, but they were never a legitimate government of Poland. Recently, in the midst of the Ukrainian Presidential turmoil the Polish government again demanded an investigation of the massacre of the Polish officers at Katyn. When the Poles speak of this, they are implicitly questioning the border.

The reality is that in 1920, the Soviets invaded Poland in order to export their revolution to the rest of Europe. The Poles beat them back badly. Lenin offered the Poles half of Ukraine, which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had previously ruled prior to the partitions of Poland. The Poles refused, in large part because they did not want a vindictive peace treaty with such a large neighbor. The 1920 border was not dictated by the Poles to the Russians as Stalin asserted. It is true that the Potsdam conference decided that Germany's border should shift, but it never ratified Stalin�s annexation of Polish land or the communist puppet government in Poland. Just as WWII started with the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Cold War started with Russian interference in Poland. After WWI plebiscites were conducted to determine where borders should be drawn. Hitler and Stalin simply deported people whose nationality was inconvenient.

Nor is the former German territory equal to that portion of Poland annexed to the USSR. Germany had started two World Wars, and lost them both. Germany deserved to lose territory. Poland fought against the Germans in both. No one fought the Germans longer than the Poles. No Pole of any stature collaborated with the Nazi�s. There was no Marshall Petain in Poland. The Polish army fought on all fronts. The the Kosciuszko Squadron of the Polish airforce fought the battle of Britain. The Polish navy fought the Germans for the entire war from allied ports. Britain�s Treaty with the Poles required that the Poles be consulted in any peace treaty. I am a historian, and to the best of my research neither the British of or American government ever recognized the Soviet annexation of Polish land.

Ukraine wants to join the EU. The Poles and Lithuanians want them to join. If Ukraine joins the EU, it must accept the jurisdiction of the EU's courts. What would happen in a descendant from Lvov demanded his land back? It would be interesting. What happened to the Poles in the after math of WWII was wrong. Harold Macmillan comments that no Englishman or American can read about what happened in Poland without feeling a sense of shame.

The only argument for the border to remain where Stalin drew it is time. But this argument does not apply to land in Berlin, why should it apply to the Polish border? I don�t think the Poles have forgot.

[Alex Shulgin]

[CROGO]