“No German will spit in our face” – this was one of the slogans shouted yesterday by participants of the demonstration in front of the German Embassy building.
As has become tradition, Polish patriots gathered in front of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Warsaw. The purpose, unchanged for years, was to remind Poland’s western neighbour of the unaccounted wrongs inflicted on Poland during World War II. Members of the Gazeta Polska Clubs, the Border Defense Movement, and the Roty of the Independence March Association loudly demanded reparations.
Among the demonstrators was Przemysław Czarnek, Deputy Chairman of the Law and Justice party. He addressed not the crowd, but, through the embassy building, the German federal government.
“This is a date that will forever remain in the history and reality of our state and nation. On the morning of September 1, it was Germany’s genocidal attack on Poland. That is how the ordeal of nations began,”
he said about September 1, 1939.
“When we look at six million victims, nearly three million of them Polish nationals, let us cry out: It is Poland that is the greatest victim of World War II. It is Poland and the Poles who created the only underground state of its kind, one that fought despite being oppressed and abandoned by its allies,”
he continued.
Czarnek stressed that “the demand for reparations is a matter of our dignity and respect for ourselves.”
“Not only for the victims. If you want to be respected, start respecting yourself. If you don’t respect yourself, don’t be surprised that the world doesn’t respect you,” the politician emphasized.
And further:
“Germany is an important neighbour, an important trade partner. We want to build a future of economic cooperation with them. Among them, we have friends. We know decent Germans. There were such even during World War II. Some even served in the Polish army, let us recall those of German descent, such as Józef Unrug.”
“But today, we repeat after our president Karol Nawrocki: in the name of the common good, for future fruitful cooperation, for mutual relations based on respect, we demand reparations,”
he underlined.
