THE GUARDIAN: Michael Goldfarb discovers an ugly xenophobia rooted in the catastrophic destruction visited on Poland and Ukraine by totalitarian regimesEuro 2012 was supposed to be an unalloyed celebration of not just football, but also the renaissance of Poland and Ukraine, the two nations that suffered most in the conflict between the twin poles of 20th-century totalitarianism: Nazism and Soviet communism.
But a darkness still pervades both countries. On a recent visit to Poland and Ukraine, I couldn't help but be struck by it. In Warsaw, which I had visited briefly 17 years ago, I was amazed at how much the past drapes itself around the city's prosperous facade [sic].
There are massive, agonised monuments everywhere: to the dead of the Warsaw Uprising, to the fallen and murdered in the east, the martyrs of Katyn. Every step a tourist takes seems to be guiding him on a tour of Polish suffering
In Lviv in western Ukraine, a place I had never visited before, I found the darkness in people's souls. The city survived the worst of the war. Its perfectly preserved medieval heart is wrapped in a ribbon of Austro-Hungarian imperial boulevards and architecture.
But conversation after conversation with people from all walks of life reveal them looking backwards into the bleak times. Perhaps that's to be expected given the catastrophic destruction visited on the two countries, but it has led many to a world-view that is a perversion of the golden rule: do unto others as others have done unto you. » | Michael Goldfarb | Saturday, June 02, 2012
