And yet the Cursed Soldiers also include those who protected Polish independence and pride—that national need of ours to be free Poles. Thanks to this protection of independence, Wałęsa and the shipyard workers were able to engage in a great, unequal struggle with… the Polish People’s Republic.
In the postwar years, for peasants who remembered serfdom—that is, the poorest people (and PiS now supports the poor and wronged in just this way)—the ideas of the Cursed Soldiers meant a return to humiliation, enslavement and poverty. For entrepreneurs deprived of their property and intellectuals being spat upon, these soldiers were the only hope of saving what they had built, what belonged to them.
We will learn nothing from history—and to me it is a great teacher—if, instead of facts, we create fairy tales populated only by black-and-white characters. In this way, we will never find out what mistakes were made by people fighting the new system, and consequently we will not learn to avoid those mistakes in the future. After all, we are still fighting for something, and here in our own backyard we have our own “cursed soldiers.”
Our “cursed soldier” Małkowski
I personally know several female and male employees whose boss changed at a local-government company, while they had been there from the beginning. They had outlasted more than one director and knew how to provide the staff with happiness and good wages, but a bad boss defeated them. They formed unions. To this day, the partisans remain active and dig pits for the incompetent boss, but unfortunately the “cursed” no longer have any power. They have only their moral superiority and the defeat of a noble hero who fell in the struggle against evil.
I still remember Maciej Małkowski, our greatest “cursed hero,” and how bravely and sincerely he fought for his people, how loyal he was and how much he sacrificed. We even caught him bending the truth when he was fighting the trade unions at MOPS in 2010 (The Invisible Conflict at MOPS).
Stripped overnight of his position as deputy mayor because the political constellations had changed, the “cursed” man began to fight and criticize his former boss’s decisions, eventually standing against him as a candidate for mayor. To this day, he remains active “in the partisan resistance.”
Everyone rooting for Małkowski should carefully leaf through the pages of history to learn something about fighting those in power.
I Don’t Like PiS, but I Like Wiesław Ogrodnik
Every time I listen to PiS politicians I do not know personally, my fangs grow. I become furious at their hypocrisy and manipulation, at their fear and the aggression that follows it toward everything different and outside their norm. I get angry at their, to me, sick ideology full of envy and revenge.
But when I get carried away by anger, I return to earth and to people. And I remember a local member of the Law and Justice party whom I met: Wiesław Ogrodnik (former president of ZEC and a parliamentary candidate in the last election). I cannot help feeling this sympathy. I see in Ogrodnik a lover of utopia. His truths did not prove themselves in local reality, and, as we know, effectiveness is the measure of truth. Yet it is precisely this sympathy that reminds me that behind every ideology there are always people who carry within themselves what they believe in. And for that I admire them.
That is why I accept the Cursed Soldiers as they were: terrorists carrying pride and freedom, laying their path with the bodies of the innocent.
Grażyna Hanaf