Poland // Current

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11 hours ago

"Swimming pool made my daughter pregnant" says mother as she Googles "denial"

A Polish woman who claims her 13-year-old daughter got pregnant on holiday after using a swimming pool is suing the Egyptian hotel... more

richjm
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13 days ago

U.S. relents in 11 year-old girl's deportation case

Eleven-year-old Ewelina Bledniak was looking at a year split from her parents, friends, and everything she loves about living in America. The federal government was ready to deport Ewelina to her native Poland because when she was 3 years old, the family missed a deadline to file a key immigration document.

"I love going to school here, and my friends, I'm going to miss them," Ewelina said as she worried about being deported. "I like living here."

But things are looking up. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney last week asked the U.S. Immigration Court in Atlanta, Georgia, to reopen Ewelina's case and terminate the deportation proceeding ICE had initiated. The motion asks the court to send the case back to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for resolution.

"They seem to be willing to find a favorable solution to this matter," said Ewelina's attorney, Maria Odom of Atlanta. "... It's good news for the child, absolutely."

Her father, Hubert, came to the United States legally and is a naturalized U.S. citizen; and her mother, Agnieszka (Agnes), also arrived legally and is a legal resident. Ewelina is neither.

Under a temporary amnesty program at the turn of the 21st century, illegal immigrants could seek legal status without returning to their home countries. However, a previous lawyer for the Bledniak family missed an April 2001 deadline to file the petition, the Bledniaks say.

Years later, when it authorities realized Ewelina had never achieved her legal status, ICE ordered her to return to Poland to apply for legal U.S. residency through the U.S. Embassy there. "That process could have taken a year," Odom said.

"The government gave Ewelina until July 23 to leave the country voluntarily; after that date, she would be deported and ineligible to return to the United States for 10 years," Odom said. The family has booked a July 20 flight to Warsaw, Poland, where the parents planned to stay for a few weeks before leaving the girl with her maternal grandmother while the immigration process played out.Eleven-year-old Ewelina Bledniak was looking at a year split from her parents, friends, and everything she loves about living in... more

retro_Syl
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5 responses

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16 days ago

Auschwitz as a comic book

They found love in the horrors of a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but despite an amazing escape, never managed to... more

Anyother
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9 responses

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1 month ago

What Poland left to Cuba

[By award winning blogger Yoani Sánchez ] Generation Y Blogger, written on location from Cuba.

I was only fourteen and everything was happening too fast around me. The material shortages were severe and in the shops of my city it was already difficult to find the magazines with many colors but few truths that came from the USSR. We had seen the television show of General Ochoa’s trial*, and my parents lost the illusion watching how the law folded before the olive green uniforms.

News of what happened in Poland came in those same days. We didn’t understand anything, because until then the European socialist block seemed to us something designed for eternity. A distant cousin told us of her apprehensions after a short stay in Moscow, but we still believed that the COMECON, the Warsaw Pact and the Robotron typewriters would survive us all.

The word Solidarity had suddenly become fashionable and several schools in my city were still named People’s Republic of Poland. Although my Marxism-Leninism teacher was making an effort to idealize the East, something inside him snapped when he learned what was happening on the streets of Warsaw. If the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 had been difficult for our leaders to justify, the rebellion of the “Polish working class” left more than one without answers.

I grew up, had a son and he also came to repeat the slogan, “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che.” Today he is the same age I was in that tumultuous 1989, when my doubts began, when I knew that everything they’d drilled into me might not be true.

*Translator’s note*

General Arnaldo Ochoa, a member of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, a prominent general in the Cuban army and a “Hero of the Revolution”, was arrested on June 12, 1989 and charged with corruption, drug trafficking (in alliance with Pablo Escobar) and treason. His trial was broadcast on Cuban TV (the films, subtitled in English, are available on line). Ochoa was executed on July 12, 1989.[By award winning blogger Yoani Sánchez ] Generation Y Blogger, written on location from Cuba. I was only fourteen and... more

UrbanGypsy
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6 responses

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1 month ago

Amen! Priest advocates happy sex life in book

WARSAW, Poland - The Rev. Ksawery Knotz has a message for all married Catholic couples out there: there's nothing wrong with... more

ClipsFC
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2 months ago

NY TV Station Apologizes for Error Blaming Poland Instead of Germany for Auschwitz

In an apparent attempt to be politically correct, much of the American media seems to go out of its way to deliberately avoid... more

openmind
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3 months ago

Fast moving blaze kills 21 in Poland

WARSAW, Poland - A fast-moving fire tore through a three-story building housing homeless people in northwestern Poland early... more

ClipsFC
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3 months ago

Polish politician fumes over gay elephant in zoo

A Polish politician has criticized his local zoo for acquiring a "gay" elephant named Ninio who prefers male companions... more

dirtyemowords
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1 response

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3 months ago

Anti-Semitism Fading in Poland

"As Europe diversifies, nearly every nation and culture on the continent seems to battle for victimhood status. Poles have especially good reason to see themselves as long oppressed, having been fought over and occupied for much of the last century by vicious regimes. Shifting political power struggles during and after the war, among other complications of Polish Jewish history, led some Polish Jews at certain points to side with Soviets against Nazis and Polish partisans. The whole moral morass, essential to Polish identity, tends to be lost on outsiders, many of whom unthinkingly regard the country, throughout most of the last century at least, as just a Jewish killing field.

Jerzy Halbersztadt is director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which will soon begin construction of a new $60 million home next to the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, paid for by the nation and the city.

Polish anti-Semitism persists, Mr. Halbersztadt said. “But Poles are more strongly pro-American, and a side effect is that Poland also has the strongest pro-Israel policy, to which there is no opposition anywhere on the local political spectrum,” he added. “Anti-Semitism is no longer an issue particular to us in daily life.”

Michal Bilewicz, a young Jewish psychologist who specializes in Polish-Jewish relations, echoed that thought. He sat one recent morning in his office at the University of Warsaw, in a building that used to be Gestapo headquarters, beside the former ghetto.

Not that there isn’t anti-Semitism in Poland, “but there is no place for it in public today,” Mr. Bilewicz said. “The last time a national survey was done here, in 2002, although the number of anti-Semites rose slightly — and these were almost all older people — more important the number of anti-anti-Semites went way up.”

He pointed to books like “Fear” and “Neighbors” by the historian Jan T. Gross, documenting pogroms at Jedwabne and other atrocities by Poles against Jews during and after the war, which provoked much public soul-searching and made denial of Polish complicity no longer possible.

Culture, despite the virtual absence of Jews here, has meanwhile helped shift attitudes in this country, not entirely but significantly. Walk into a Polish bookstore these days, and you’ll find shelves heaving with volumes about Jewish history and culture. There is a Jewish book fair here in Warsaw, a Jewish cultural festival in Krakow, not to mention Mr. Halbersztadt’s museum, planned to open in 2012.""As Europe diversifies, nearly every nation and culture on the continent seems to battle for victimhood status. Poles have... more

St_Alia_10191
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2 responses

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3 months ago

Twins swapped as babies receive damages

A ruling at a court in Warsaw has awarded £350,000 in damages to the families of twin girls who were mistakenly swapped as... more

ClareW
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3 months ago

Apples caused failed drunk-driving test?

A Polish lawmaker who failed a drink-driving test said he had eaten too many apples, the website of daily Gazeta Wyborcza said... more

TravG73
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3 responses

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3 months ago

Drink driver had too many apples

A Polish MP who was caught drink driving said he had eaten too many apples.

ClareW
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4 months ago

Auschwitz museum struggles to preserve site

The former Nazi=German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland is becoming so damaged by the elements that museum bosses are... more

richjm
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3 responses

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4 months ago

Farmers on hunger strike against GMOS in Poland

Edyta Jaroszewska, 42 year old organic farmer and the chairperson of the Organic Farmers Association, started hunger strike... more

JanforGore
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7 responses

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4 months ago

Will Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk be extradited to Germany from the US?

A Nazi concentration camp guard feared by many as Ivan the Terrible is wanted in Germany for involvement in the murders of 29,000... more

theolond
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4 months ago

United Kingdom Talk Video Saturday 28th February 2009

Saturday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show HERE ON current tv on Tues, Thurs & Sats. In... more

ChrisReardon
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4 months ago

Cops don't regret Taser killing

Police feared man with stapler. ...Richmond RCMP Const. Bill Bentley said in his INITIAL statement that Robert Dziekanski had... more

urlspotter
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5 responses

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4 months ago

The US will deploy a Patriot missile battery in Poland

The US will deploy a Patriot missile battery in Poland to bolster its defences against possible threats by Russia. Speaking after... more

pibbio
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5 months ago

The Train to Toyland: The Warsaw Jewish Ghetto, Treblinka and Auschwitz

“Toyland” is the 2009 Academy Awards Winner for the Best Live Action Short Film. Set in 1942 Germany, this absorbing 14-minute short film reflects back to harrowing memories about a prelude to the Holocaust, in particular the 1938 Nazi Kristallnacht (The Night of Shattered Crystal) in Germany. “Toyland” tells the powerful story of a German mother in those early days of WWII whose son is best friends with a Jewish boy living next door. When the mother learns that the neighboring Jewish family is scheduled to be picked up and taken away by the Nazi’s on the very next day, she attempts to placate her own son’s curiosity about their surprise trip by telling him that his friend is merely making a vacation visit to “Toyland” in Switzerland.

What begins as the mother’s seemingly innocent attempt to protect her son from an awareness of the Nazi’s disturbingly evil barbarian brutalities unexpectedly leads him to become obsessed with going to “Toyland” along with the Jewish family and his best friend. The film’s story unfolds in a rare time-sequence series of flashback and flashforward rotations. It is a truly unusual dialectical cinematographic rendering of interactive human memory, which reaches its startling conclusion in an incredibly subtle twist of bittersweet fate.

Unpacking the emotional complexities of “Toyland” unveiled recollections about the uncommonly courageous acts of Janusz Korczak, which are seldom mentioned today. However, this important short film impresses us with an irresistible message about the importance of “remembering to remember” the life of Janusz Korczak. On August 6nd, 1942, reflecting his lifelong compassionate devotion to both children and the rights of children, Korczak adamantly refused offers for his own safety and with defiant dignity he led the orphans under his care in the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto to the trains that ultimately would take them all to death at the Treblinka Death Camp.

This detailed article includes colorful photographs from the short-film “Toyland” and a number of vintage photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Treblinka Death Camp and Auschwitz. In addition, it presents a slideshow of memorable vintage photographs , as well as the widely acclaimed, deeply moving Academy Award Winner, “Toyland.”“Toyland” is the 2009 Academy Awards Winner for the Best Live Action Short Film. Set in 1942 Germany, this absorbing... more