Post-War Poland

Extract

Next spring the whole Polish nation will celebrate the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the insurrection which Thaddaeus Kościuszko, after participating in the American Revolution, conducted against the invaders of his own country. Without knowing at the present moment under what circumstances this celebration will take place, we all feel that Kościuszko's program of 1794, summed up in the words: “Freedom, Integrity, Independence,” is once again our program for Poland's future.

The permanent significance of these three ideas throughout our whole history is one more proof of the continuity of Poland's development. It was in vain that Kościuszko opposed the partition of Poland, but even that partition and the following century of foreign domination could not interrupt the continuity of Polish national life. What a distinguished American historian, writing recently about Czechoslovakia, has rightly called “the vital immediacy of the past,” is an even more important truism as far as Poland is concerned. Therefore any concrete discussion of our future aims must be based upon the “consciousness of historical realities.”