Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

While Still We Live, by Helen MacInnes. 1985

Polish Achievements Spite the “Poles Never Achieved Anything” German Chauvinism.

This is a fictional account of the 1939 war and aftermath. However it has elements that are relevant to this day, and that is what I focus on.

The chauvinistic Germans not only believed themselves superior to everyone else, but disbelieved the fact that Poles had ever achieved anything. Poles were treated as swine. (p. 301). MacInnes educates the reader about such facts as the University of Krakow being 600 years old, which is older than the one at Heidelberg.

Also, she alludes to the military achievement of King John Sobieski: “Or if she had told him [the scoffing German] that the Poles had saved Vienna from the Mohammedan invasion; if they hadn’t, there would be mosques and veiled women in Austria, perhaps even in Germany, just as these reminders of Islam remained in Serbia to this day.”

[Now there are mosques and veiled women in Austria and Germany, but it is for a different reason.]

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For more on the misconception that Germans built Poland, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/germans-built-poland-is-a-myth-piskorski/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/partitions-jewish-complicity-tennant/