Artur Lompart

Under Hans Frank, occupied Poland became a killing ground. Poles were dragged from their homes, tortured in prisons, shot in forests, and publicly hanged as warnings to others. Teachers, priests, professors, and ordinary civilians were systematically targeted. Entire families were destroyed. Frank chillingly contrasted German repression in the Czech lands with Poland, boasting that if he announced every seven Poles executed, there would not be enough paper in Poland’s forests to print the notices. In occupied Poland, the gallows were not merely instruments of execution. They were instruments of government. Frank was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946. There is something particularly obscene about a German mass murderer ruling from the castle of Polish kings while his regime systematically destroyed the people, culture, and civilization it represented. He occupied the castle of kings - he governed through murder and in the end, he met the very gallows he had inflicted upon countless innocent Poles.

While walking through Warsaw, last week (with the help of my friend @PrefdeZoo, I encountered this memorial at 29 Długa Street, commemorating Polish Jews deceived and subsequently murdered by Germany. Yet the plaque omits a deeply disturbing and documented aspect of this tragedy: Jewish Gestapo collaborators played an active role in facilitating the Hotel Polski affair, exploiting fellow Jews who were desperately trying to survive. Leon Skosowski and Adam Żurawin were among those implicated in the operation. They helped arrange the sale of foreign identity documents, extracting enormous sums from desperate people whose hopes of survival were ultimately shattered. This was not merely passive cooperation. It involved active collaboration with the machinery of persecution, financial exploitation, and the betrayal of people facing extermination. It’s was cruel murderous intentions. The Gestapo bears primary responsibility for the operation and the murders, but indeed those who knowingly collaborated, profited, and helped expose victims to their persecutors must also be held accountable in the historical record. Why should their involvement disappear from public remembrance? Why should documented collaborators escape scrutiny simply because they belonged to the same persecuted community as their victims? Collaboration does not become less reprehensible because of the collaborator’s identity. Betrayal does not become less monstrous because the victims and their betrayers shared an ancestry. The victims deserve remembrance, and every documented participant in their persecution deserves historical scrutiny. History must never become an exercise in selective accountability and the truth must include the collaborators as well as the principal perpetrators.

One of the things that moves me most deeply about Poland is the way its people honor their dead on All Saints’ Day. Across this beautiful country, cemeteries glow with thousands of candles. Families gather at the graves of parents, grandparents, children, and ancestors they may never have known personally. Flowers are placed, prayers are offered, and generations are remembered with a tenderness and reverence that I find profoundly moving. Having witnessed this tradition myself, I can tell you that photographs hardly capture the experience. There is something extraordinary about walking through a Polish cemetery illuminated by countless candles, seeing entire families gathered in remembrance, and realizing that this is not simply a religious observance but something deeply woven into the nation’s character. For me, it touches something profoundly personal: the realization that those who came before us are never truly absent from our lives. We carry their sacrifices, their struggles, their love, and their hopes within us. We are, in so many ways, the continuation of their stories. As an American, I cannot help but reflect on how much of this sacred connection we have lost. American society has become increasingly consumed by work, ambition, material pursuits, and the relentless distractions of modern life. We celebrate individual achievement, personal advancement, and the pursuit of happiness, yet too often neglect the generations whose sacrifices made our own lives possible. We bury our loved ones, mourn them, and are then expected to move on. Graves are visited less frequently, family histories are forgotten, and the names of those who came before us gradually disappear from memory. Of course, many Americans continue to honor their ancestors with great devotion. But I believe something important has been lost in our broader culture. We have become remarkably good at looking forward and increasingly careless about looking back. Poland offers a powerful reminder that remembrance is not simply nostalgia. It is an act of love, gratitude, and fidelity. There is something extraordinarily meaningful about a nation that pauses its daily life to honor those who are no longer here. A people who understand that death does not erase our obligations to those we have loved, and that the past is not something to be discarded simply because it no longer serves our immediate interests. I wish more Americans could experience this remarkable Polish tradition. Not merely to admire the beauty of candlelit cemeteries, but to reconsider what we owe our parents, grandparents, ancestors, and all those whose lives and sacrifices made our own existence possible. A civilization is measured not only by what it builds for future generations, but also by how faithfully it remembers the generations that built it. Poland understands something that our modern, hurried, increasingly individualistic society is in danger of forgetting - it is truly an honor to witness this. We do not honor the dead because they can remember us. We honor them because we refuse to forget them.

Germany's General Government (Generalne Gubernatorstwo) formally began operating in occupied Poland on October 26, 1939. Following the German and Soviet invasions of September 1939, Germany divided the Polish territories under its control. Some western and northern regions were annexed directly into the German Reich, while much of central and southern Poland came under the jurisdiction of the General Government, a separate administrative region headed by Governor-General Hans Frank. This marked the beginning of a brutal occupation characterized by mass executions, forced labor, and the systematic persecution of the citizens.

231 years ago today, Russia, Prussia, and Austria agreed to the final partition of Poland. A nation that had existed for centuries was extinguished as an independent state. Its territory was divided, its sovereignty destroyed, and its people placed under foreign rule. For the next 123 years, Poland would not exist as an independent country, still, a nation is more than its borders. Poland survived in its language, its literature, its music, its faith, and above all, in the determination of generations who refused to surrender their identity. Children were born, lived, and died without ever knowing a free Poland, yet they preserved the memory of a homeland they hoped their descendants would one day reclaim. In 1918, after 123 years, Poland returned to the map of Europe. Empires had attempted to erase a nation and they failed.

On this day in 1608, Poles arrived at Jamestown, Virginia - just a year after the colony itself had been founded. Think about how remarkable that is. More than four centuries ago, at the very beginning of permanent English settlement in North America, Polish craftsmen were already there. They had been recruited for their specialized skills and helped produce glass, pitch, tar, soap ash, and other valuable materials needed to make the struggling colony economically viable. Captain John Smith himself specifically praised the work ethic of the Polish and other continental craftsmen. They were not simply passengers or bystanders in the story of early America. They were skilled workers helping build it. Historical records even describe Polish settlers coming to John Smith’s aid during a violent encounter, and later protesting when they were denied the same political rights enjoyed by English colonists. Their protest succeeded: colonial authorities recognized their rights, and the Poles returned to work and agreed to teach their crafts to others. It is extraordinary to realize that the Polish-American story reaches back to 1608. Long before the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, long before Pulaski and Kościuszko became names associated with American independence, Poles were already crossing the Atlantic and contributing their knowledge, labor, and courage to a new society. (Encyclopedia Virginia⁠) Polish history in America did not begin yesterday. It began almost at the beginning of America itself.