Last night I drove down to Books & Books in Coral Gables to attend my first post-pandemic book reading. John Pomfret, former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, talked about his new book From Warsaw with Love: Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance. There were about 20 people in attendance, many with connections to Poland. (The event was sponsored by Miami’s American Institute of Polish Culture.) And most of the questions were not about the subject of the book, intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Poland with regard to Iraq, but about the current situation in Poland and Ukraine. Afterwards, I spoke with a young woman from Rzeszow, who said her parents have been helping refugees. “But they all want to go to the big cities,” she said. “We’re in the countryside, and there’s no work for them there.”
Polish assistance to Ukraine has been extensive, including, not surprisingly, jokes.
Putin visits a fortune teller, who says she sees him in a car going past waving, cheering crowds.
"Do I wave back?" Putin asks.
"No," the fortune teller says. "It's a closed casket."
Ukraine has me thinking of the old Polish hymn A Prayer for Victory:
We don't ask for blood, to conquer is not our plea,
We don't want killing, for pillage we have no gift,
We want only to regain our fatherland,
Only to be free.
Poland has closed its airspace to Russian airlines. The Polish national anthem begins: “Poland is not yet lost, as long as we are living.” There’s something about being a neighbor of Russia that makes for plangent and defiant anthems.
My Wall Street Journal story generated some nice emails, including one from a former Marine who served at the U.S. embassy in Warsaw in the late ’60s. I used to feel sorry for the Marines, whom I would greet on my way into the embassy library, as they seemed cut off from the country and its people. The letter writer said that he had fond memories of his time in Poland – he wrote of his certainty, from his experience with Poles, that they would eventually attain independence – and occasionally met to reminisce with fellow Marines from his posting. I was both surprised and delighted by this news.
Memories of Polish Christmases past (from today's Wall Street Journal):