Edward Reid

In Memory of Rościsław Plewa (1920–1941)

On this day, we remember Rościsław Plewa, a young Polish student who was murdered by
Germans at the age of twenty in Auschwitz. Imprisoned for nine months and six days, he was not a soldier or a politician, but a student with hopes, dreams, and a future that should have been his.

The N***s reduced him to a prisoner number, but history restores his name. Behind every victim was a human being—a son, a friend, a classmate, a life of immeasurable worth.

May we remember Rościsław Plewa not for how he died, but for the life he was denied, and may his memory endure long after those who sought to erase it.

Eternal memory. 🕯️🇵🇱

Editing by John Cocker.

In Memory of Richard Augustin (1918-1942)

Richard Augustin was twenty-four years old when he was murdered in Auschwitz. Before the camp reduced him to prisoner number 26891, he was a baker's assistant, a young Polish man with a life, a family, and a future.

His story is a reminder that German terror did not consume only political leaders or members of the intelligentsia. While intellectuals were often targeted, Auschwitz and other camps were filled with ordinary people whose only crime was falling afoul of a regime that recognized no limits to its cruelty.

Richard's life was cut short after just two months and twenty-one days in Auschwitz. Today, we remember him not as a number, but as a human being murdered by the very system that claimed to act in the name of the German people

Editing by John Cocker.

In Memory of Jan Olszak (1911–1942)

On this day in 1942, Jan Olszak, a 30-year-old Polish accountant, perished in Auschwitz after only 45 days of imprisonment.

The Germans sought to erase his identity, but they failed. Today, we remember not a prisoner number, but a man, a fellow human being whose life was cut short by hatred and tyranny.

May Jan Olszak be remembered, and may his memory be a blessing.

Editing by John Cocker.

On this day in 1942, Marian Wojciechowski, a 31-year-old Polish carpenter was murdered in Auschwitz after 8 months and 7 days of imprisonment.

Before the camp, he built with his hands. In Auschwitz, he was reduced to a prisoner number, but he never ceased to be a man with a name, a family, and a life of value.

Today we remember Marian, not as a statistic, but as a human being whose future was stolen by N**i Germany.

Marian Wojciechowski (1910–1942)
May his memory endure.

Editing by John Cocker.

🇵🇱 125 Years Ago Today: Remembering Mieczysław Fogg

On May 30, 1901, Mieczysław Fogg was born in Warsaw. More than a singer, he became one of the enduring symbols of twentieth-century Poland—a man whose life reflected both the cultural richness and the tragedies of his homeland.

Fogg first served his country as a young soldier during the Polish-Soviet War. Decades later, when Poland again found itself fighting for survival during the Second World War, he joined the struggle through the Polish underground and continued to perform despite the dangers of German occupation. During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, his songs brought comfort and hope to soldiers and civilians living amid destruction and loss.

Yet his legacy extends beyond music and patriotism. During the occupation, Fogg risked his own life to help rescue Jews targeted by N**i Germany. Among those he sheltered was the Polish-Jewish composer Ivo Wesby and his family. For his efforts, he was later recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

His voice became part of Poland’s national memory, but it was his courage, compassion, and sense of duty that made him truly remarkable. In an era when doing the right thing often carried the highest cost, Mieczysław Fogg chose humanity over fear.

Today, 125 years after his birth, we remember not only one of Poland’s greatest artists, but also a soldier, rescuer, and patriot whose life reminds us that true greatness is measured not only by talent, but by character.

On this day in 1942, Henryk Wyzner was murdered in Auschwitz.

He was forty-two years old. Before the German occupation shattered his life, he worked as a clerk, an ordinary man with a name, a profession, and a future. After only thirty-seven days in Auschwitz, that future was taken from him.

The camp sought to reduce human beings to numbers, but Henryk Wyzner was more than a prisoner number. He was a son, perhaps a husband, a friend, a neighbor, and a fellow citizen of occupied Poland. His life carried meaning long before the camp gates closed behind him.

Today we remember Henryk not as a statistic, but as a man. May his name endure, and may the memory of what was done to him serve as a warning against hatred, tyranny, and indifference.

Henryk Wyzner (1900–1942)
Remembered. Named. Not forgotten.

Photo editing by John Cocker.

Ethnic Cleansing in the Borderlands:

There are wounds in history that resist simplification because they exist at the intersection of suffering, nationalism, war, revenge, and memory. The massacre of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the Second World War remains one of those wounds. For many Poles, it is not merely a historical episode buried in archives, but a scar carried across generations, a memory preserved through silence, family testimony, abandoned villages, and graves that were often left unmarked for decades.

Between 1943 and 1945, tens of thousands of Polish civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, were murdered by elements of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as the UPA, and associated nationalist formations linked to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN. The violence unfolded primarily in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, territories inhabited by mixed populations of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians, and others for centuries. Historians continue to debate precise numbers, but the scale of the killings was immense. Entire Polish villages were erased from the map. Churches were burned with worshippers inside. Families were murdered in fields, homes, and forests with extraordinary brutality. Those who survived often carried memories too painful to describe openly, especially during the Communist era when political realities discouraged honest discussion.

To understand these massacres requires confronting the dangerous power of radical nationalism when combined with war and ethnic hatred. Ukrainian nationalism did not emerge in a vacuum. Ukrainians themselves had endured repression, political marginalization, famine under Soviet rule, and violence across generations. But suffering alone does not sanctify ideology, nor does oppression excuse the deliberate murder of civilians. Within factions of the OUN and UPA emerged the belief that an ethnically pure Ukrainian state could only be achieved through the removal of the Polish population from contested territories. What followed was not random wartime chaos, but a systematic campaign of terror intended to cleanse entire regions of Polish life.

The horror lay not only in the numbers, but in the intimacy of the violence. These were often neighboring communities. People who had traded together, worked together, and known each other for years suddenly became divided by ideology and fear. Survivors recalled hearing church bells used as signals for attacks. They remembered children killed before their parents, homes set ablaze, and desperate escapes through forests at night. In many accounts, the cruelty appears almost incomprehensible, yet genocide often depends precisely upon that collapse of ordinary moral restraint, where neighbors cease to see one another as human beings and instead become obstacles to a national vision.

Yet history also demands moral clarity without surrendering to collective hatred. The massacres committed by the UPA do not justify hatred toward Ukrainians as a people any more than German crimes justify hatred toward every German across generations. There were Ukrainians who hid and saved Poles, just as there were Poles who later protected Ukrainians during retaliatory violence. Human beings remain morally individual even within collective tragedy. This distinction matters deeply because memory can either become a warning against future barbarism or fuel for endless resentment.

For decades, the memory of these massacres existed in fragments. Communist authorities in Poland often suppressed open discussion because it complicated Soviet geopolitical narratives. Families whispered stories privately. Churches preserved names. Survivors aged and died carrying memories few outside their communities understood. Only after the fall of Communism did fuller historical investigations begin to emerge publicly through scholarship, testimony, and exhumations. In Poland today, the massacres are widely recognized as genocide, not merely because of the scale of the killings, but because the intent was the destruction of an ethnic population from a defined territory.

This subject remains politically sensitive, especially in light of modern geopolitical realities and the contemporary struggle of Ukraine against Russian aggression. Some fear that discussing these crimes may weaken diplomatic unity or be exploited cynically by hostile powers. Yet truth cannot depend entirely upon political convenience. Historical honesty is not betrayal. Nations mature morally not by hiding crimes committed in their name, but by confronting them with courage and dignity. Poland itself must face difficult chapters in its own history where individuals committed acts of cruelty or betrayal. Honest memory must apply universally or it becomes propaganda.

At the same time, remembrance must resist becoming vengeance disguised as scholarship. The dead deserve dignity, not weaponization. The purpose of historical memory should not be to perpetuate inherited hatred between modern peoples who did not commit these crimes themselves. Rather, it should serve as a warning about what happens when nationalism loses its humanity and when ethnic identity becomes more sacred than human life itself.

The abandoned villages of Volhynia speak silently even now. Beneath forests and fields lie the remains of families who once believed they would grow old in those places. Many were murdered not because of anything they had done, but simply because they were Polish. To remember them honestly is not an act of extremism. It is an act of human responsibility.

And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of all. Memory is not meant to imprison us inside the past, but to guard the future from repeating it.

Paweł Sitor was born in Kalisz on May 27, 1920, an electrical fitter with an ordinary life ahead of him before German occupation and terror consumed his country. Deported to Auschwitz, he endured more than five months inside the camp before he was murdered by the Germans on January 17, 1943, at only twenty-two years old, persecuted and killed because he was a Pole.

Today we remember not a number, but a human being with a name, a homeland, and a stolen future. May the memory of Paweł Sitor endure against anonymity and forgetting.

On this day in 1942, Wiesław Starzyk, a 22 year old Polish paramedic, perished in German Auschwitz after only 38 days of imprisonment. Before the war and occupation reduced him to a number stitched onto striped cloth, he had dedicated himself to saving the lives of others.

Like so many young Poles murdered under German occupation, his future was stolen before it could fully begin. Yet even now, decades later, his face, his name, and his humanity endure. He is remembered not as prisoner 31303 alone, but as Wiesław Starzyk, a son of Poland, whose life mattered.

Edited by John Cocker.

Beyond the Myth of Innocence:

The myth of the “innocent German” did not emerge in 1933. It emerged after 1945, when the ruins still smoked, the camps were opened to the world, and millions suddenly claimed ignorance. Yet Adolf Hi**er did not descend upon Germany like a storm from another planet. He was elevated by human hands, cheered in public squares, legitimized through institutions, and embraced by millions who saw in him not an aberration, but a restoration of wounded national pride.

This truth remains uncomfortable because it forces societies to confront how ordinary people become participants in extraordinary evil.

The German people did not unanimously support Hi**er, nor should all Germans be reduced to caricatures of fanaticism. There were dissidents, resisters, clergy, students, workers, and soldiers who opposed him, some paying with their lives. But the broader historical reality is that the dictatorship rested upon immense public cooperation, enthusiasm, opportunism, and silence. The N**i Party became the largest political party in Germany before Hi**er seized full dictatorial control. In the July 1932 elections, the NSDAP received over 37 percent of the vote, making it the dominant political force in the Reichstag. Hi**er was appointed Chancellor legally within the framework of the German state, and many conservative elites believed he represented the will of the nation and a bulwark against communism.

Historian Ian Kershaw famously wrote that “the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.” That indifference was not passive emptiness. It often manifested as careerism, conformity, greed, fear, or the willingness to look away while neighbors disappeared.

The image of Germany as merely another victim of Hi**er collapses under the weight of evidence. German civilians witnessed anti-Jewish boycotts in the streets, watched synagogues burn during Kristallnacht, saw political opponents dragged away, and benefited materially from dispossession and conquest. Millions of ordinary Germans participated in N**i organizations, from the Hi**er Youth to labor fronts to women’s leagues. German industry profited enormously from slave labor. German bureaucrats processed deportation lists with ordinary stamps and signatures. German railway workers transported human beings to extermination camps with timetables and efficiency.

After the war, many claimed they “did not know.” Yet entire columns of deported Jews passed through cities. Smoke from crematoria darkened skies near camps. Prison laborers marched through towns in striped uniforms and wooden clogs. Knowledge existed in fragments everywhere, though many chose not to ask questions whose answers might demand moral courage.

The historian Christopher Browning demonstrated in Ordinary Men that genocidal systems are often carried out not by monsters alone, but by average individuals shaped by conformity, authority, ideology, and gradual moral erosion. This may be the most frightening lesson of all. Evil rarely announces itself wearing horns. More often it wears a uniform, carries paperwork, kisses children goodnight, and insists it is merely doing its duty.

The postwar myth of widespread German innocence was also politically convenient. In the emerging Cold War, West Germany became an essential ally against the Soviet Union. Denazification softened. Former party members returned to positions in government, law, education, and business. Narratives shifted toward collective suffering under bombing campaigns and Soviet occupation, while discussions of German responsibility often became muted or compartmentalized., but memory demands honesty.

To acknowledge that Hi**er was supported by millions of Germans is not to condemn every German for eternity, nor to deny the existence of resistance. It is instead to recognize that democratic societies can willingly embrace barbarism when fear, humiliation, nationalism, propaganda, and hatred become normalized. Nations are not possessed by evil spirits. They are shaped by human choices.

The danger of the “innocent German” myth is that it distances ordinary people from responsibility. It transforms history into something committed only by fanatics at the margins rather than by neighbors, clerks, teachers, businessmen, policemen, and educated men who convinced themselves that cruelty was necessary, temporary, or deserved and that is why this history still matters.

Because the lesson of Germany is not that one monstrous man hypnotized an unwilling nation. The lesson is far more disturbing: that a modern, educated society willingly followed him, step by step, while millions either celebrated, accommodated, or remained silent as human beings were stripped of their dignity, their citizenship, and finally their lives.