Polonia Global Fund

Four years ago, I first began filming Irena Sendler in Warsaw where she lives in a medical home. At 94, she still remembered how she and her friends in the Polish resistance risked torture and death to resue thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. This is their story — Mary Skinner, Producer and Director of “In the Name of Their Mothers.”

In the Name of Their Mothers is the film chronicling the work of Irena and her compatriots in Żegota. An advance screening of the film was held on Wednesday, November 12th at CREEES – Stanford University.

To learn more about the film and to view clips visit the film’s website.

More information about Irena is available at Life in a Jar:

In the fall of 1999, a rural Kansas teacher encouraged four students to work on a year long National History Day project which would among other things; extend the boundaries of the classroom to families in the community, contribute to history learning, teach respect and tolerance, and meet our classroom motto, “He who changes one person, changes the world entire”.

Students from rural Kansas, discover a Catholic woman, who saved Jewish children. Few had heard of Irena Sendlerowa in 1999, now after 250 presentations of Life in a Jar, a web site with huge usage and world-wide media attention, Irena is known to the world. How did this beautiful story develop?/blockquote>

From friend Martha E. Galindo of Galindo Publicidad (whose translation services are excellent).

Immigrant communities in the United States have made choices that native communities do not have to make. Making these choices – to leave one’s native country and begin anew in a new land is wrenching and difficult. The immigrant uproots him or herself with difficulty but with hope that the new circumstances will outweigh the losses of the old. He or she knows very well the many benefits the United States, unique in its values and aspirations, offers to the newcomer who, in many ways, appreciates those qualities and opportunities more than the native-born.

At the same time the immigrant clings emotionally to many characteristics of his or her native land – language, foods, scents, landscape, entertainments, and holidays – things that traditionally were sources of satisfaction, community, pride, solace or joy. Melding the old with the new does not discard one for the other but blends both into something entirely new. It is a cumulative process.

The United States from its very beginning has been a nation of immigrants. The most fundamental values cherished by its earliest immigrants are embedded in the Constitution and The Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” – all the same before the law. (By the way – immediate translation of the Declaration was seen as a must for the benefit of the German community in Philadelphia.)

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are aspirations of every human being. All of us, some earlier, some later, are immigrants to the United States. We bring character, passions, skills and strengths with us and, too often, ignorant and despicable customs as well. Slavery made all the protestations of universal brotherhood seem nothing more than hypocritical mockery of those self-evident truths so beautifully proclaimed. But, over time, the ideals asserted themselves and the dream prevailed over savage reality.

From September 15 to October 15 we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, a time to remember and honor the valuable and joyous customs and traditions that characterize the Hispanic contribution to the United States. The job of extending and defending life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is one that Hispanic immigrants, old and new, take up with the same valor and enthusiasm of all our fellow immigrants. Democracy is also a job like housework – one that is never finished.

From the Polish American Congress Holocaust Documentation Committee: New York Remembers the Invasion of Poland and the Start of WW II

Most Americans would likely say World War II began when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. In fact, however, the official date was two years earlier on September 1, 1939.

That was the day Adolf Hitler unleashed all the brutal military power of Nazi Germany and plunged the world into an orgy of death and destruction which would continue for nearly six long and cruel years.

It all started in the early morning of that tragic September day with the invasion of Poland. “The Germans have begun an offensive with extreme violence on the whole Polish front,” was the way a Reuters dispatch reported the opening of World War II.

In New York City, the Polish American Congress remembers the September 1st invasion of Poland each year with a solemn commemorative mass at St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr Church at 101 East Seventh Street in downtown Manhattan. Established in 1872, it is the first and oldest church serving the Polish immigrants in the city.

The observance this year will be held on the Sunday prior to the official date. The memorial mass will begin at 12:00 noon on Sunday, August 27, followed by a reception at 1:00 p.m. at the church’s lower level. The public is invited.

Ten days before he ordered his panzer divisions to invade Poland on that early September morning, Hitler gave his generals a chilling directive on how the “superior” Germans should deal with the “inferior” Polish people when they take over the country.

Translated from German and displayed on the wall at the entrance to the Poland exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC are Hitler’s words of hate: “… send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only then shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.”

Michael Preisler, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, was in Poland in 1939 and experienced the full impact of Hitler’s diabolical command. “The Germans created a new kind of war for Poland. Instead of army fighting army, the Germans started killing innocent civilians the moment they arrived,” he said.

Preisler is presently co-chair of the Holocaust Documentation Committee of the Polish American Congress.

He was only a teenager when he first witnessed how “bloodthirsty and barbaric” the Nazis showed themselves. Preisler had several narrow escapes from death during the German occupation. One he remembers vividly took place shortly after the invasion when he and other Polish refugees were on the country roads desperately fleeing eastward away from the Germans.

A German fighter plane suddenly swooped down from the sky and opened up its machine guns on the helpless line of terrified marchers. Only by running and jumping into an adjacent potato field and hiding underneath was Preisler able to avoid the bullets.

“The plane came down so low to shoot at us, I could even see the cruel face of that German pilot who looked like he was trying to kill us just for the fun of it,” he said.

Shortly after the Germans began their savage destruction of Poland that September, Communist forces from the Soviet Union joined the Nazis and invaded the country from the east.

Although World War II officially ended in 1945 with the surrender of Nazi Germany, there was no such termination of it for Poland. Communist armed forces of the Soviet Union remained in the country to back up an oppressive atheistic system which replaced the German reign of terror with one of their own. Only after the fall of Communism in 1989 could the Polish people consider their ordeal as really over. For this reason, many Poles regard World War II as their nation’s “Fifty-Year War.”

In human terms, the war was a costly one for every nation involved. It was the costliest for Poland which saw 22% of its population killed. Six million Polish citizens perished – three million Polish Christians and three million Polish Jews.

Participating in the anniversary commemoration at the East 7th Street church will be concentration camp survivors, veterans of the Polish army who fought the Nazis, as well as former members of Poland’s Home Army (Armia Krajowa), the largest and most effective underground resistance group in all German-occupied Europe. Most of them are members of the Polish American Congress.

Catallarchy’s Blog features a post on making May Day a day of remembrance for those who suffered under the totalitarianism of communism. Jonathan Wilde states:

Contrary to the promises of ideology, nations whose governments pledged to create a workers’ paradise usually became places of rampant slave labor. The plight of the less fortunate became even less fortunate. Today, we chronicle a small part of their lives.

Read May Day 2006: A Day of Remembrance

There are eleven essays posted including A Forgotten Odyssey by Romuald Lipinski.

New York’s Capital District’s Armenian Genocide Committee announces a day long series of events to be held Monday, April 24th, commemorating the 91st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

• From 12 – 2pm in the Assembly Well of the Legislative Office Building, State Capital, State Street, Albany NY, Commemoration featuring guest speaker, Mr. Aram Arkun speaking on “The Armenian Genocide Today.”
• From 4:30 – 5:30pm at the Reinhold Niebuhr Institute of Religion and Culture, Sienna College, 515 Loudon Rd (Rte 9), Loudonville, NY, Mr. Aram Arkun will lecture on “The Armenian Genocide and its Denial.”
• From 6:30 – 8pm in front of Troy Monument Square, One Monument Square, Troy, NY, The Armenian National Committee of Albany along with local elected officials will join in the reading of proclamations to commemorate the Armenian Genocide.
• From 8:15 – 9:15pm in the City Council Chambers, One Monument Square, Troy, NY, the Armenian Students Association of R. P. I. will host a lecture by Mr. Aram Arkun, “The Final Struggle of the Armenians of Zeytun.”

All events are free and open to the public. For more information please contact the Capital District Armenian Genocide Committee at 518-272-2000.