For the first time...

In my life I’m living through the exploration of Polish history of 1939. During the twelve year long period of my school education, the first day of September has usually been the day of inevitable and often unwanted comeback to school. Now, as tomorrow there will be the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WW2, I’m trying to get the sense of the everyday life in Poland in the days war hung by a thread.

I have two main feeling about those days and their heroes. Firstly – sympathy, as they were facing up to inescapable, many of them knew they were doomed to live under occupation, fight, die. Secondly – I’m sincerely grateful I don’t have to live seventy years ago. I’m truly happy that tomorrow there will be another peaceful day, not the one which would go down in history as the moment when the biggest war in the world’s history began. I’m grateful I have the comfort to have no idea about the quandaries and dilemmas the generation born in the late 1910’s or early 1920’s had.

All my problem seem diminutive compared to theirs, in fact they are incomparably smaller. But my generation, with no remembrance of PRL, grew up in the 1990’s and 2000’s has a totally different common mindset and as a result goals and priorities. We will not have to pay the ultimate price, we are proudly taking part in a rat race, chasing the new opportunities, grasping new challenges and too often forget about the essence in our endless quest for dough, success, accolades, prestige. Sometimes I think we don’t know why and what for we are here…