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Quotes About Poland

During that spring afternoon's jaunt in the company of one of Poland's most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld's lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.
~ William Styron
Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories.
~ William Styron
precarious tranquillity had indeed been achieved in Greece, and it seemed that a free democratic Government, founded on universal suffrage and secret ballot, might be established there within a reasonable time. But Roumania and Bulgaria had passed into the grip of Soviet military occupation, Hungary and Yugoslavia lay in the shadow of the battlefield, and Poland, though liberated from the Germans, had merely exchanged one conqueror for another.
~ Winston S. Churchill
The Polish attitude was, "With the Germans we risk losing our liberty; with the Russians our soul".
~ Winston S. Churchill
Poland! Poland! The very name carries with it sighings and groanings, nation-murder, brilliance, beauty, patriotism, splendors, self-sacrifice through generations of gallant men and exquisite women; indomitable endurance of bands of noble people carrying through world-wide exile the sacred fire of wrath against the oppressor, and uttering in every clime a cry of appeal to Humanity to rescue Poland.
~ Henryk Sienkiewicz
We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London.
~ Victor Davis Hanson
I could not imagine that we should make much of an effort to preserve remainders of natural beauty in conquered Poland.
~ Fritz Todt
Do not infer from this that either side is taken here; either that of the Emperor Nicholas against Poland, or that of Poland against the Emperor. It would be a foolish thing to slip political discussion into tales that are intended to amuse or interest
~ Honore de Balzac
There were now fourteen hundred quartered here with more arriving weekly as concentration camps in Poland, France, Belgium, Austria, as well as Holland were evacuated toward the center of Germany.
~ Corrie Ten Boom
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
~ Olga Tokarczuk
I went to Poland once, actually,' said Eleanor, pushing her plate aside now, having eaten no more than half the food upon it. 'As part of a school trip. They took us to Kraków for three days and, on the middle day, we visited Auschwitz.
~ John Boyne
one legend has it that Jews found Poland attractive because the country's name sounded like the Hebrew imperative po lin (rest here).
~ Diane Ackerman
For centuries, Poland had granted asylum to Jews fleeing persecution in England, France, Germany, and Spain. Some twelfth-century Polish coins even bear Hebrew inscriptions, and one legend has it that Jews found Poland attractive because the country's name sounded like the Hebrew imperative po lin (rest here).
~ Diane Ackerman
Cursed by its strategic location in eastern Europe, Poland had been invaded, sacked, and carved up many times, its borders ebbing and flowing; some village children learned five languages just to speak with neighbors. War wasn't something Antonina wanted to think about, especially since her last experience of war stole both of her parents, so she assured herself, as most Poles did, of their solid alliance with France, keeper of a powerful army, and Britain's sworn protection.
~ Diane Ackerman
The Nazi goal of more living space (Lebensraum) applied pointedly to Poland, where Hitler had ordered his troops to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the Lebensraum
~ Diane Ackerman
International law, I think, and very good at it. I think I might have read something about a deal with Poland or Czechoslovakia—one of those places where they eat potatoes and dress badly—but I can't remember which.
~ Donna Leon
You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.
~ Unknown
She, always dressed in gray, gentle yet stern, childlike yet mature, sweet yet uncompromising . . . the woman from Poland.
~ Lydia Davis
Unlike Churchill, FDR showed little concern about a pro-Soviet government taking control in Poland after the war. Indeed, in the spring of 1944, he told Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, that he "didn't care whether the countries bordering Russia became communized.
~ Unknown
By the war's end, Poland was the fourth largest contributor to the Allied effort in Europe, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain and its Commonwealth.
~ Unknown
Added Seymour Cocks, a Labour member of Parliament: "We are witnessing in Poland the cold-blooded and deliberate murder of a nation.
~ Unknown
Pastor Hall was not the first anti-Nazi film to be barred by the board; in the previous two years, it had prohibited at least seven other such movies from being shown. At the same time, however, it allowed the release of Feldzug in Polen, a propaganda film produced by the German government that depicted the Wehrmacht's vanquishing of Poland in 1939 and portrayed Poland as the aggressor.
~ Unknown
ONE OF THE most popular books in Poland in the summer of 1939 was Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.
~ Unknown
THE WAR OF WILLS BETWEEN HUNGARY AND POLAND ON ONE SIDE and the EU on the other is an important test of where extreme nationalism will lead.
~ Madeleine K. Albright