The pics below are just a few of the photos I took in Warsaw Poland in winter of early 2006
I was just there for a short time & just wished I had seen & enjoyed the rest of Poland
I describe what I can as to what the pics are about as they appear. So enjoy the journey
Late last week, Polish lawmakers granted initial approval to a law that has sparked grave concerns among Israeli officials and Holocaust historians.
As Ruth Eglash and Avi Selk of the Washington Post report, the controversial bill aims to make it illegal to suggest that Poland bore any responsibility for atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Under the new legislation, individuals could face fines and up to three years in jail for using phrases like “Polish death camps” (rather than “Nazi death camps”).
The so-called “death camp” bill was passed overwhelmingly by Poland’s lower legislature on Friday, the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance day; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it “miserable” timing. Before it can be enacted into law, the bill needs to be approved by the Senate and Polish President Andrzej Duda.
News of the lower legislature’s vote has provoked an international outcry. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet that they “will under no circumstances accept any attempt to rewrite history,” as Jeffrey Heller and Marcin Goettig of Retuers reports.
Poland’s deputy ambassador to Israel, Piotr Kozlowski,was summoned to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem on Sunday to account for the bill. Also on Sunday, Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki spoke on the phone and “agreed to immediately open a dialogue between staffs of the two countries, in order to try and reach an understanding over the legislation,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, according to Raphael Ahren of the Times of Israel.
Poland has long resisted acknowledging its complicity in the Holocaust. Polish lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to pass the controversial bill back in 2013, after then-President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” during a speech honoring Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski. Since then, the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party, which won a solid parliamentary majority in 2015, has been aggressive in its efforts to sanitize Poland’s historical record.
The party leaders’ refusal to acknowledge that Polish citizens played a role in the terrible crimes committed by Nazis is distressing to Holocaust historians.
During World War II, the Poles suffered a brutal occupation at the hands of the Nazis, who saw the Poles as racially inferior. At least 2.5 million non-Jewish civilians and soldiers died before the war’s end, according to the United States Holocaust Museum. However, the Nazis also “drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers.” Individual Poles, the museum writes, “often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.”
A notorious example of Polish persecution of Jews is the 1941 massacre at Jedwabne, during which Polish villagers reportedly herded hundreds of Jewish women and children in a barn and set it on fire, burning the victims alive. (Though historians maintain that locals’ involvement in the massacre was a matter of historical record, some Poles have denied Polish complicity).
In a statement, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, says it agrees with the new bill’s claims about the inaccuracy of the term “Polish death camps,” since these camps were set up by the Nazis. But the statement goes on to write, “restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people’s direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion.”
The party leaders’ refusal to acknowledge that Polish citizens played a role in the terrible crimes committed by Nazis is distressing to Holocaust historians.
During World War II, the Poles suffered a brutal occupation at the hands of the Nazis, who saw the Poles as racially inferior. At least 2.5 million non-Jewish civilians and soldiers died before the war’s end, according to the United States Holocaust Museum. However, the Nazis also “drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers.” Individual Poles, the museum writes, “often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.”
A notorious example of Polish persecution of Jews is the 1941 massacre at Jedwabne, during which Polish villagers reportedly herded hundreds of Jewish women and children in a barn and set it on fire, burning the victims alive. (Though historians maintain that locals’ involvement in the massacre was a matter of historical record, some Poles have denied Polish complicity).
In a statement, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, says it agrees with the new bill’s claims about the inaccuracy of the term “Polish death camps,” since these camps were set up by the Nazis. But the statement goes on to write, “restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people’s direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion.”
Henry Sapiecha
ARTICLE BY Karolina Goralska
There are no polar bears roaming free through snow-covered plains. It’s not freezing cold all year long. And no, we don’t all wear those ridiculous fur hats with earflaps. (Well, we didn’t before they became trendy.) Poland has a moderate climate with four properly marked seasons and summer here actually gets hot.
In case you missed that moment in history, it’s been over 25 years since Poland transformed quickly and successfully from a communist regime into a Democratic republic. Our parents and grandparents experienced the severe repercussions of a failed attempt to put the noble foundations of Marx and Engels into practice by violent imposition. And so, majority of Poles actually hate as little as the mention of communism.
ARTICLE BY>>Karolina Goralska
Your dad shopped for carp days in advance before Christmas, trying to avoid crowds in shops and make sure to get a big healthy fish. You loved playing with your new pet who had to live in the tub until Christmas and you would spend hours skimming your fingers on the water surface for carp to chase.
Before bathing, you would have to catch the fish in a bucket, drain the tub, wash it, take a bath, wash the tub again, fill with water and release the carp back into it. On Christmas Eve’s morning, you heard splattering and then a heavy chop. Next thing you knew, fried bells of fish meat were served on your Christmas dinner plate.
Your Polish mom always insisted on serving you hot milk, whether in a glass, over cereal, or worst of all, made into soup with fusilli pasta. You didn’t mind the heated milk as much as you hated the skin forming on the surface. You pushed the film of fat to the edge of your plate, but it often stuck to your spoon and you tasted its mucousy texture anyways. Thinking about this gives you shivers to this day.
Uniforms weren’t and are still not required in the majority of Polish schools, but you needed to change your shoes for clean ones to walk around in the primary school building. You left you regular shoes in the cloakroom guarded by the cloakroom lady, who spotted anybody who dared not change his or her shoes. Tears still well up in your eyes thinking back about how she yelled at you that one day you forgot your clean shoes at home.
Every March 21st, you made a doll out of hay, scrapes of fabric and colored paper in class. Then, together with your teacher and classmates you went to the nearest river in the park where you recited a farewell poem dedicated to Marzanna, the doll representing winter. Your teacher set the doll on fire and threw it into the river while you and other kids cheered. This is how you would expel winter and welcome spring. The tradition is now disappearing due to obvious environmental concerns, but you hold the memory dearly, as it filled you with the expectance of warmer weather.
When you were in third grade, temperatures dropped below -20 Celsius degrees one winter and flu epidemics roamed in your city. As a result, all schools closed for two weeks. Every following winter, you hoped that it would happen again so that you could use the additional winter break weeks to stay at home and watch Cartoon Network all day long.
The name practically obliged you to eat as many spongy dough balls filled with sour cherry or strawberry jam as possible on that day. Your mum additionally made heaps of faworki the night before and you devoured on the sweet crunchy fritter when donuts ran out. Your parents didn’t worry at all about you being hyper on all the sugar.
In secondary school, instead of drowning a doll in the river, you celebrated the first day of spring by escaping from school. Your whole class agreed that none of you would show up for lessons on March 21st. Instead, you went to chill in the park altogether and enjoyed the first warmer beams of sun. Most of your teachers were aware of and accepted this tradition, but some still got mad and tested the whole class on the following day.
Every few weekends you visited your grandparents or uncles in the countryside and it was a time of complete freedom. You climbed countless trees and ate apples and cherries straight from the branch. You biked to the forest edge and searched for the best spots for poziomki (wild mini strawberries), and once you found them, you cleared all the bushes of the delicious tiny fruit. You played “police and thieves” on bikes with your cousins and neighbors’ kids, chasing each other on the dirt roads in between immense fields of wheat and barley.
When the family made a fire outside at night, you stuck sausages on the end of a long stick and grilled them over the fire until crunchy on the outside and soft inside. You inserted the sausage in between two slices of sourdough wheat bread and devoured the thing in huge bites.
When you happened to be at the Baltic Sea during summer vacation, you spent hours searching for the precious orange stone that the sea abounds in. The souvenir stands along the promenade sold heavy strings of the stone, some of them containing a fly or a small spider. You were totally possessed by the idea of encountering a piece like this. All you ever managed to find was sea glass.
Growing up in post-communist utopian cities gave you the advantage of lots of green spaces and playgrounds in front of each apartment block. Together with other kids from the neighborhood, you spent hours after school, building “bases” in the bushes, trying front and backflips on trzepak (carpet-beating rack), doing cartwheels on the grass and rolling down the hills, playing klasy and treasure hunt or jumping rope all-afternoon-long.
Your family went to church together every Sunday morning. When you were in sixth grade, your parents started letting you go to church with your friends. You inevitably used this occasion to evade service, because the mass bored you to death at that age. You met your friends on the block’s corner, started walking towards the church, but never actually arrived to the mass. You found a great hiding spot in some park on the way and just sat and chatted for an hour and one day you even tried your first cigarette. You knew that your parents would question you about the sermon when you got back and you always prepared the perfect answers.
Henry Sapiecha
This is the big one. The Death Star of any Pole-befriending scheme you might be hatching. No one has better vodka than we do. And no one — no one — can drink more of it than us. We’re ready to prove it any time, any place, for as long as necessary, until we’re completely drunk, inebriated, plastered, pissed, sloshed, and out of it. But we’ll be the last ones standing.
Henry Sapiecha
There is no connection whatsoever between the “prom” that all American secondary school children are looking forward to and the Polish word prom, which is actually a ferry. 
Henry Sapiecha
ARTICLE BY Karolina Goralska
Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland
1. You can’t figure out how to greet other people. Your friend’s grandparents give you three kisses on the cheeks — left, right, and left again. Their father kisses you on the back of your hand in an outdated fashion while their mother gives you a flimsy handshake and their brother just says, “Cześć” from a distance.
2. When people speak, all you hear is “shhh chhh shhh chhh.”
3. You have no idea what the deal is with those ą, ę, ó, ć, ł, ś, ż, ź letters. How are you supposed to pronounce city names like Szczebrzeszyn, Łódź, Wrzeszcz or Trzcianka?
4. There is a flat voice speaking Polish over the original voices in English in movies on TV. It’s the same voice that reads the lines of all characters in the movie: men, women, and children.
5. The Polish voice in movies heavily euphemizes the language. “Get the f*** out from here, you motherf****!” is read in a monotonous intonation as “Odejdź stąd, ty szarlatanie.”
6. You are required to take your shoes off and leave them by the door when you enter someone’s house. You get guest slippers to walk around in inside.
7. Buying bread becomes a mind-boggling decision. Bakery shelves are lined with a selection of bread you have never seen before. You find round brown whole-wheat bread, oval white with crunchy crust sprinkled with poppy seeds, square sunflower seed sourdough bread, rectangular soy or flax seed loaves, as well as croissant-shaped milky rogale and different flavored buns: cheese and onion, 7 grains, pumpkin seed and Italian herbs.
8. Your breakfast is huge. You get your favorite bread, spread some butter on it and prepare open sandwiches layered with ham, cheese or cottage cheese, lettuce leaves, sliced cucumber, tomatoes, radishes and spring onions. You then sprinkle some salt and pepper over. Instead of coffee, you drink hot tea with a slice of lemon in it.
9. You are grateful for the substantiality of your breakfast, because the main meal of the day isn’t until 4pm. Around noon you get “second breakfast” — a piece of fruit, a sandwich, or a sweet pastry and a coffee.
10. All the dishes in typical restaurants contain potatoes. Boiled, mashed, fried or baked potatoes accompany any main course, but there are also kopytka (Polish gnocchi), potato pancakes, pierogi filled with potatoes and cottage cheese.
11. With your meal, you are served a drink of warm strawberry water, a few boiled pieces of fruit floating in it. You learn that it’s called kompot and that it can be made out of any fruit.
12. You eat all kinds of food made out of “rotten” ingredients. Sauerkraut is just rotten cabbage, ogórki kiszone are fermented cucumbers, traditional barszczis made out of beets that had gone bad (now vinegar is used to gives it the sour taste), żurek is a soup based on fermented yeast dough.
13. You are surprised to discover that none of the “rotten” foods make you sick.
14. You go for a walk in the forest and run into people picking wild mushrooms and blueberries.
15. Everyone lives off seasonal fruit in the summer. You eat jagodzianki, blueberry-filled yeast-dough sweet rolls, every day.
16. You can buy beer and vodka in a shop dedicated entirely to alcohol sales. Any time, any day.
17. You order a beer at a bar and you’re asked if you’d like raspberry syrup in it. You decide to give it a try. Your beer is served with a straw.
18. You can never have another type of vodka again after tasting how delicious Żubrówka is.
19. You discover that Polish people indeed make great use of their seasonal fruit when you try nalewki, fruity spirits. Many households produce them for own personal consumption.
20. Zapiekanka is your anti-hangover food. At the end of the night, you eat an entire 50-centimeter long baguette cut open, topped with mushrooms and cheese and grilled, then served with cabbage salad and slices of ogórki kiszone on top and lots of garlic sauce.
Henry Sapiecha
An Olga Mecking article
Yes, these words mean what you think they mean: massacre and tragedy. But they’re applied to totally different situations. For example, my husband and I went to Cracow once, and we wanted to take the last train to Warsaw, but the lady selling our tickets was rather slow. When she finally managed to print out our passes, she said, “Okay, now hurry up or there will be a tragedia.” This one’s similar to the Croatian word, katastrofa.
My favourite word to stop being questioned by my kids all day long: “Why do I have to do this?” Bo tak. “Why is the world round?” Bo tak. It’s the Polish equivalent of “because I said so.” Or simply “because yes” or “because so” — that’s what bo tak literally means.
No ba is used similarly to the English word “indeed”, even if it is way more colloquial. By itself, ba can mean “duh”, as in when someone states the obvious.
Example:
“So, did you win all that money?” “No ba!”
This little word has so many meanings. Just remember that the “o” is pronounced like in the English word “port”. Depending on the context, this word can mean yes (wanna go to the cinema? Noooo!), be used to issue a warning (no, no, no, most effective when accompanied by a waggling finger), to show sign of agreement (This film was so cool, right? Nooo!), stalling (so what do you think about this problem? No… I think it’s complicated) and many more.
This means “don’t exaggerate”.
Example:
“I am sick, I need to go to the doctor.”
“No co ty, it’s just a headache.”
It’s also used to mean “Are you insane?”
Example:
“I asked her to marry me.
“No co ty!”
Literally, “how not when yes”, this one’s used to offer encouragement: “Of course you will do this. How can you not do this, when you’re totally capable?”
I was telling myself this multiple times while writing this article.
Abbreviations of spokojnie (calmly) and w porządku (okay), they’re used in a similar way — meaning cool, all right, okay, and the like. They’re also sometimes used in the context of “not so bad”.
Example:
How was your exam? Spoko.
I don’t know how many times I use this to talk to my kids: “No nie, you made a mess again!” This one’s similar to “Oh no”. It can also be used in expressions like “No nie mów” (You don’t say) or no nie wiem (I don’t know).
These words have the same meaning, which goes along the lines of “please kindly remove yourself from this place”, but put less nicely. I really want to say this to some trolls who, without a doubt, will show up on my articles on Matador Network (including this one).
Another handy word, this one allows you to express various emotional states, from admiration to panic, surprise to helplessness. For example, when your friend tells you some unexpected happy news, you can react with a loud “Ojej!” If you come back home to find that your laptop got stolen, shake your head and say ojej (it should be pronounced like ‘oyey’). And sometimes, it’s the only appropriate response to my kids wrecking chaos on the house.
P.S. If you point out to me that I didn’t include the most concise of Polish words, also known as the Polish K-word, let me tell you that it’s because I don’t swear.
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Henry Sapiecha
A complaint is often a conversation-starter. It’s easier to make friends when you can both moan about something together. Then you move on to joyful topics.
Henry Sapiecha
They “jump at the sun with a hoe” (porywać się z motyką na słońce).
This article was originally published on March 5, 2015. Featured Photo: PolandMFA
Henry Sapiecha