“Together we won the battle for memory against contempt, against lies, but we must be aware that 45 years of Soviet, communist propaganda is unfortunately still with us,” President Karol Nawrocki said on Sunday in Bielsko during the observances of the National Day of Remembrance of the Cursed Soldiers.
On Sunday, Karol Nawrocki took part in ceremonies marking the National Day of Remembrance of the Cursed Soldiers. During his speech, he spoke, among other things, about attempts to erase the heroes of the anti-communist independence underground from Polish history.
“It was not only the communists who killed them. It was not only that they subjected them to staged trials. For 45 years they also destroyed their families and the truth about them, sending the entire propaganda machine to destroy the beautiful truth about their attitude and their loyalty to Polish independence. They simply wanted to take our heroes away from us so that we would not know they were steadfast. They cursed them only so that we would not feel the spirit of freedom and attachment to sovereignty. It was not enough to kill them and hide their remains – they had to evaporate them, erase them from our national consciousness,” he said.
As he pointed out, the truth about the Cursed Soldiers could not be erased. “Thanks to you, thanks to the Polish people, thanks to our determination, thanks to the Institute of National Remembrance, thanks to my two outstanding predecessors – the late Janusz Kurtyka and the late President Lech Kaczyński – today we have the National Day of Remembrance of the Cursed Soldiers. We did not allow them to be forgotten. They are and will remain with us,” he stated.
“Together we won the battle for memory against contempt, against lies, but we must be aware that 45 years of Soviet, communist propaganda is unfortunately still with us – even 15 years after the establishment of the National Day of Remembrance of the Cursed Soldiers. There are also those – some of the most important officials in the Polish state – who still say today that compensation should be paid to the victims of the Cursed Soldiers, as they call them. There are those who show contempt for the memory of our heroes, who are so deeply soaked in communist propaganda that they cannot understand that we, free Poles, need these values and the truth about the soldiers of the independence underground in order to build a state community of generations based on truth, not lies, based on freedom and sovereignty, not on Soviet colonialism,” he emphasized.
As he noted, Poland today needs heroes who “thought about sovereignty, thought boldly, were attached to the white-and-red colors, and who never bowed either to German might in 1939 or to Soviet betrayal after 1945.”
“This is our spirit, flowing from a thousand years of Polish history,” he said.