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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Apr 11, 2010 - 12:56am PT
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They must be reeling. And that's no joke. The story is a little fishy to me. Poland has quite a proud tradition of tremendous pilots. This would not have been a second string flyer, not with the President, his wife and so many top government officials on board. These pilots land in dense fog with out incident as a matter of routine. On the other hand Russian secret police have a long track record of secretly blowing up planes carrying prominent Polacks who they wanted to silence.
Is it a strange coincidence that the plane was travelling to commerate the anniversary of the Massacre at Katyn?
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/layers-of-history-and-grief-in-katyn/
excerpt;
The Polish leaders were on their way to commemorate the massacre of more than 20,000 Polish soldiers there by Soviet Union in 1940. “It’s a damned place,” former President Aleksander Kwasniewski was quoted as saying in the Times article. “It sends shivers down my spine.”
The place is Katyn Woods, in the Smolensk region of western Russia. Many of the soldiers killed there in 1940, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland, were among Poland’s military and intellectual elite.
The plane that crashed Saturday was carrying 88 members of Poland’s current elite, including from politics, military and business. President Kaczynski’s wife, Maria, also died, and The Associated Press said that her uncle had been among those killed in the Katyn massacre.
The massacre has been a thorn in Polish-Soviet relations for decades. The Soviet Union had long denied its involvement, and it took 50 years for Moscow to admit its former government had ordered the killings.
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 8, 2012 - 11:21pm PT
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from marysia:
Wedel, Kukułka and "Śliwka w czekoladzie"...mmmmmm.....:))))you must try them :)
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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I was at the Hall of Mountaineering Excellence at the American Mountaineering Center in Golden, CO last night, where Bernadette McDonald gave a presentation about the incredible record Poles hold for high mountaineering, from her book, Freedom Climbers a must read for me!
What an incredible show about some of the hardest men and women that
ever climbed!!!!
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 21, 2013 - 07:40pm PT
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Hurrah, moosedrool!
You are appreciated.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Oct 26, 2014 - 10:56am PT
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The Polish Climbers and the Mountain Path
My mother was born in America but her first language was Polish. She still speaks with a hint of an accent if you know to listen for it. I took for granted any appreciation for my Polish heritage for most of my life. When I was young, I was teased for being a “Polack,” which, I was crudely informed through jokes, were stupid people. So I conveniently hid that part of me for a while and emphasized my Hungarian, English and German heritage from my father’s side whenever national background mattered......... http://suburbanmountaineer.com/tag/wojciech-kurtyka/ |
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Gary
Social climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Oct 27, 2014 - 08:13am PT
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The pollacks are some of the toughest mo'fukers around.
You can hit em hard and they're still standing there looking at you with that WTF look.
By then you better be ready ......
Possibly, but I'd still take a Samoan over any three of anywhere else. Samoans are like cops, all I ever say to them is "Yes, sir" and "No, sir."
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Sierra Ledge Rat
Mountain climber
Old and Broken Down in Appalachia
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Oct 27, 2014 - 09:14am PT
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One of my favorite stories of all time is about a man from Poland. This is a true story of a little 10-year old boy, as told when he had grown into a old man.
The story begans in war-torn Poland immediately after World War One. The little boy's father, a Polish soldier, returned home from the Great War, determined to take his family to a place that was free from war. Poland always gets run over by armies in Europe, and his father had had enough of war.
The little boy's father had met an American soldier during the war, who had invited them to America. All that was left of the family was the man and his son, so the father spent his life savings on boat tickets from England to New York. The father and son spent a month walking across Europe from Poland to England.
The little boy's father became sick and died on the Normandy coast of France, before they had crossed to England. This 10-year old boy dug a hole and buried his father. He had no one else in his family, he was all alone. Before his father died, he made his little boy promise to finish the journey to America.
During the boat ride to New York, the little boy became worried because he did not speak English and he did not know who he was supposed to meet in America. His father had never told him the name of the America soldier. Furthermore, the American soldier would be looking for a man and his boy - not a little boy by himself.
When the little boy reached Ellis Island in New York, the America soldier found him right away. The little boy asked (through an interpreter) how he found him, since his father didn't make the journey.
The American soldier replied that his father had written to him several months ago, stating that his son would be traveling alone to America.
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Stewart
Trad climber
Courtenay, B.C.
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Oct 27, 2014 - 06:02pm PT
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Poland in World War Two:
-(Simplified, but accurate account): Provided the British with an Enigma coding machine, used by the Nazis for their secret communications. Since the Nazis figured that their code was unbreakable, they continued to use this method of communication throughout the war. Churchill stated that Allied possession of the Enigma machine shortened the war by two years.
 Smuggled a (crashed)V-2 rocket to the British, allowing Allied intelligence to obtain vital information concerning the design of Hitler's most powerful terror weapon.
Took Monte Cassino after heroic efforts by soldiers from many other Allied nations failed to do so.
Were instrumental (along with the Canadians and Yanks) in the closure of the Falaise Gap, a bitterly fought battle that spelled the end of the Nazi military presence in France.
Represented the largest and most effective non-British nationality to fight in the Battle of Britain.
Unlike almost every other nation in Europe, refused to appoint a Nazi-controlled puppet government.
Warsaw revolted against their murderous Nazi occupiers TWICE. In 1943, the Jewish prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto arose against their inevitable murder in the gas chambers with desperate courage (and few weapons). They were mercilessly crushed. In 1945, while Stalin's troops massed outside Warsaw city limits, the Poles once more rose against their tormentors and were again slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands of Poles died in both of these rebellions.
At no point during World War Two did the Allies provide anything more substantial than token gestures and empty words to assist the Poles in their struggle for freedom from tyranny.
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MH2
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 27, 2014 - 06:40pm PT
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Poland did much more than provide Britain with an Enigma machine. They had already been working on the decryption problem for 7 years before WWII began, from the mathematics of permutations to such useful insights into human behavior as guessing that the machine operators would not always bother to completely change the daily keys. The Polish work gave the Allies a big advantage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfrów
Thank you, Poland.
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Stewart
Trad climber
Courtenay, B.C.
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Oct 27, 2014 - 11:32pm PT
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Also, in spite of the spectacular and disproportionate sacrifices of the Poles to the cause of freedom in Europe during World War Two (and afterwards, for that matter), at Stalin's insistence AND with the acquiescence of Churchill and Roosevelt, the Poles were denied the respect and dignity that they had earned at such an appalling cost by being refused permission to march in the victory parades to celebrate the end of the war - the only Allied nation to be so insulted.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Mar 30, 2015 - 10:40am PT
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Piotr
Ice climber
San Diego
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Mar 30, 2015 - 12:43pm PT
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na zdrowie to all the polakos!
Freedom Climbers, good read.
Piotr
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Stewart
Trad climber
Courtenay, B.C.
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Mar 30, 2015 - 04:23pm PT
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A correction to one of my earlier posts - the second Warsaw uprising was in 1944. Hitler was so enraged by the continued defiance of the Poles against his regime that he ordered that Warsaw be destroyed. This ancient city, arguably the most beautiful in Europe, was almost literally (as opposed to metaphorically) erased from the map by Hitler's troops.
The Poles lost 6 million dead during WW II, approximately 90% of whom were civilian. This represented 20% of their pre-war population. To appreciate the scope of this nightmare, this would represent approximately 64 million dead U.S. citizens by today's numbers.
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ms55401
Trad climber
minneapolis, mn
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Mar 30, 2015 - 07:02pm PT
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with apologies to FISH, it is strongly encouraged to not take the Poles lightly, I say
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thebravecowboy
climber
Greyrock, CO
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Mar 30, 2015 - 10:46pm PT
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Zdzisław Beksiński
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