It’s Polish Army Day Today
So let’s Wehrmacht them up
The man in this sub stack’s logo is not Lemkin but my grandfather, prolific author and writer, who survived multiple concentration camps as a member of the Armia Kraków’s and went on to write pop songs throughout the Communist period. Including for the Polish army…
He even received multiple awards from the army. He didn’t get a bullet in the head unlike many of his comrades. After the fall of communism he was awarded one of Poland’s highest orders, Order Odrodzenia Polski, Order of Poland Restituta, so don’t look at me funny.
One of his songs is below, it’s called, „Oh Those Tanks.” I wasn’t joking about the pop music for the army. Communism was funny. Probably the equivalent of the Sabaton soundtrack to Ukrainian mil videos.
Now, grandfather was a patriot and his relationship with the military was complicated by his AK past, his love of the army and his brilliance as a writer. I’ve got some of the awards he received from the Polish (communist) army for songwriting. Maybe I’ll go into detail in a book in the future.
As a teenager, Grandpa already spoke and wrote fluent German, which he used to write fake newspapers for German soldiers. He was caught. The Gestapo spent two months in 1943 beating him, as a 21-year-old, to get him to give up the ‘real’ author because they thought he was just a courier. He didn’t break, which saved his life - which was a long one eventually.
Grandfather wasn’t a vengeful man. After the war, he translated Wagner, Hitler’s favourite author, including Tannhäuser.
But I wonder what he would think of this poster. The Mayor of Maków Mazowiecki invites Poles to celebrate Polish Armed Forces Day, on 15th August.
Take a look at the poster (twitter post author isn’t the author of the poster).
Wehrmacht.
Not just any Wehrmacht - but Wehrmacht from a MADE IN RUSSIA toy box. A terrible illustration by the way.
This comes out during a war in Ukraine. Where my grandmother, my grandfather’s wife, was born in Lviv (Lwów).
Grandpa would probably swear quietly under his nose and go and play solitaire.
On a tangent, in the future, I might write about the terrible state of Polish politics, where the right uses the insult “Dziadek w Wehrmacie”, “Your grandpa was in the Wehrmacht” against Donald Tusk. Grandfather Tusk was a Volksdeutsche as a Kashubian and a citizen of Danzig (Gdańsk), and like hundreds of thousands of usually patriotic Poles, he was forced to serve in the German army, in the Wehrmacht, after a period in a concentration camp. He didn’t volunteer for the SS. Given his record, he could accept conscription or almost certainly would die. Like hundreds of thousands of Poles, he would end up in Allied hands as a former German soldier. The Polish 1st Armored Division as well as the rest of the Polish Armed Forces in the West recruited exclusively from such men post 1943. Ironically, the mayor of Maków Mazowiecki, Tadeusz Ciak belong to the party that rules Poland, the virulently anti-Tusk, PiS.
(Poles in the Wehrmacht in Gen Maczek’s 1st Armored Division)
The past and history are complicated in Poland.
But let’s try and not use terrible pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers (made in Russia) for the Polish army.
PS Anniversary of the defeat of the Soviet (Russian, don’t come at me with the difference, we can debate that) Army during the Battle Warsaw.
Anniversary notes in this video by the Ukrainian chief of staff:
PPS one of grandpa’s children’s books.p
If you like this content, buy the team of Blood, Skipper and Du Cane a Ko-Fi. Its only a buck, or whatever you like. Doesn’t repeat unless you want it to.
