Polish-Dutch Connections Revisited
(Letter appearing in d.i.s. Magazine, Winter 1996 issue)
That very interesting article, based on documented facts, which you recently published [Polish-Dutch Connections, John Wine, Sr., September 1995], highlights the thousand-year-old mutually pleasant and profitable contacts between Holland and Poland. The main emphasis, however, is given to the last years of World War II.
A Polish Panzer Division (under General Maczek) and Polish Paratroopers, were very instrumental in the liberation of large parts of the Netherlands, and the honorable Dutch people expressed their gratitude to them in a special ceremony, attended by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Circa 300,000 Polish soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice in the various battlefields of that war, and two Polish War Cemeteries in the Netherlands testify to the blood that has sunk into Dutch soil. General Maczek was again honored in a military ceremony, when he joined his soldiers for eternal rest in the war cemetery in Breda.
As far as I know (besides the Dutch), only the French General de Gaulle expressed honor and respect to Polish heroism, when he dropped a bouquet of flowers on the ruins of Warsaw as his small plane flew overhead.
What a contradiction to the conduct of America and England: they betrayed Poland in Yalta, thus bearing a share of the responsibility for every last one of Communism's murders during the Russian occupation of Poland. And then they refused to permit Polish soldiers to participate in the V-E Day parade in England!
I salute the Dutch.
Waclaw Bakierowski
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Polish Government in Exile.
[Webmaster's note: Former Polish deputy defense minister Radek Sikorski published an article attesting to Allied indifference to Poland at the 50th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender in the April 26, 1995 issue of The Wall Street Journal entitled "Trust America? Ask East Europe! A Polish Lesson Relearned."]