Editor's Introduction
The text that follows was originally published on my Polish blog on 28 February 2022, only days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It is neither an academic paper nor a work of journalism.
It is an essay.
More precisely, it belongs to a form I have cultivated for years: a sequence of reflections in which historical photographs, literary quotations and personal commentary are deliberately placed side by side. The aim is not to reconstruct history in the manner of a historian, but to invite the reader to reflect on memory, moral language and the way civilizations choose to remember—or to forget—their past.
Some of the quotations come from literary works rather than archival records. They should therefore be read according to the conventions of literature, where an attributed statement may serve as metaphor, condensation of experience, or a vehicle for a broader historical truth rather than a verbatim transcript of an actual conversation.
The accompanying photographs form a deliberate visual contrast.
The upper images, taken in occupied Paris, portray the Holocaust as it unfolded within the outward order of a European capital: administrative, disciplined, almost ordinary in appearance. The lower collage, depicting the anti-Jewish pogrom in Lviv in the summer of 1941, confronts the viewer with a radically different visual language of violence—public, immediate and brutally physical.
The juxtaposition is not intended to compare the value of human suffering, nor to reduce the immense complexity of wartime France or wartime Ukraine to a single image. Rather, it asks a philosophical question:
Can the same crime acquire a different moral appearance simply because it is carried out according to different cultural forms?
Four years after this essay was written, historical memory has once again become one of the most sensitive issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Debates over the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Volhynia massacres, exhumations, and competing national narratives demonstrate that the past continues to shape the political present.
For that reason, the following text should be read not as an attempt to settle historical disputes, but as an invitation to consider how historical memory, literature and visual imagery interact when societies seek to understand both their past and their present.
_________________________________________
Monday, 28 February 2022
"...Double standards..."?
to put it mildly
Source: Al Jazeera, "Double standards: Western coverage of Ukraine war criticised"
"...Media pundits, journalists, and political figures have been accused of double standards for using their outlets to not only commend Ukraine’s armed resistance to Russian troops, but also to underline their horror at how such a conflict could happen to a 'civilised' nation.
CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv Charlie D’Agata said on Friday: 'This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.'"
...
a fact
...
"...[Ukraine] This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan..."
let me repeat after the CBS correspondent...
within the existential-phenomenological correctness of his monologue
"...And [today no one would believe] that I saw, in Warsaw in 1944, six [today European] Ukrainians rape a young woman from our building, and then gouge out her eyes with a teaspoon; and they laughed and joked while doing it..." [1]
"'Eastern savages,' General Reinefarth called them, while General Erich von dem Bach echoed him [watching what the Ukrainians were doing in Warsaw in 1944]: 'One could begin to believe in the Untermensch theory...'" [2]
...
perhaps they were savages
perhaps Ukrainian Untermenschen
but,
then as now,
useful
to the United Europe
and to the United States Department of State
Source: "70th anniversary of SS-Galizien. Ukrainians celebrate"
"Historians have difficulty reaching an unequivocal assessment of Ukrainians who fought alongside the SS.
A considerable number of them nevertheless emphasise that, in this way, their compatriots were fighting against the Red Army..." (editorial interpolation by T.L.)
...
historians may indeed have a problem
but apparently
the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, does not
"...Ukraine is one of us, and we want it to become part of the European Union,' European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday in an interview with Euronews."
...
and rightly so
shared values
are not subject to the judgement of outsiders
Ukraine has long since earned the right
for its representatives to sit
both in the European Parliament
and in its committees
as well as at the Court of Justice of the European Union
Source: "War in Ukraine. President Zelensky: Ukraine has already earned EU membership"
— You need not ask anyone for anything, Mr. Z.
You need not convince anyone.
...
Notes
[1] Marek Hłasko, Drugie zabicie psa (The Second Killing of the Dog), Kultura, Nos. 1–2, Paris, 1965.
[2] Józef Mackiewicz, Nie trzeba głośno mówić (One Need Not Speak Aloud), Instytut Literacki, Paris, 1969.
