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W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
DW
On September 1, 1939, German troops under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime launched an attack on Poland. The countries’ presidents have come together 75 years later in commemoration of the event that marked the start of WWII.German President Joachim Gauck joined his Polish counterpart, President Bronislaw Komorowski, in northwestern Poland on Monday evening for a commemoration ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.
"I feel a deep shame and a deep compassion for those who suffered under the Germans," Gauck told those gathered at the ceremony on Monday evening, recounting the particularly grave losses suffered by Poland under Nazi terror.
The event was held on the Westerplatte peninsula, which lies just under 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the Polish city Gdansk, where the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired on the Polish fort in the early hours of September 1, 1939. The battle marked the beginning of WWII, which would claim over 50 million lives worldwide.
Between 1939 and 1945, Germany and Poland both lost over 6 million soldiers and civilians each during the six-year war.
BBC
Britain entered World War Two because of Germany invading Poland. But it failed to save the country from Stalin's clutches in 1945. So has a feeling of historic debt affected Anglo-Polish relations over the years?I hear someone speaking Polish every day. On the train, in a shop, in the street. Ten years after Poland joined the EU, no-one knows for sure how many Poles live in the UK. The 2011 census estimated it at nearly 600,000.
But that doesn't include those who stayed after the end of World War Two, or their offspring - people like me. In total, the UK is probably home to a million or more people who regard Poland as their ancestral home in some way. Yet Britain and Poland have no long standing historical ties, like Britain and Ireland or Poland and France. The 1931 Census showed only around 40,000 Poles lived in the UK. Poland did not open an embassy in London until 1929. So how and why did we all end up here?
When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 it did so for only one reason - Germany had invaded Poland, and Britain had guaranteed to support her ally, like it had supported Belgium in WW1. The diplomat and writer Sir Nicholas Henderson, himself a former ambassador to Poland, called it "a fatal guarantee".