What Lives in Us

Polish history is not primarily a story of power, conquest, or domination, but a long record of endurance carried by ordinary people who were forced to preserve their identity when borders disappeared, languages were suppressed, and the right to memory itself was treated as a threat. When the Polish state vanished from the map, it did not vanish from life, because it continued to exist in homes, in faith, in family names, in customs quietly passed down, and in a shared understanding that survival itself could be an act of resistance.

To remember Polish history is not simply to catalogue suffering or tragedy, but to recognize the countless individuals who chose to remain human under conditions designed to strip them of dignity. Farmers, teachers, mothers, priests, and children faced systems that demanded obedience, silence, or erasure, yet many continued to protect one another, to shelter the vulnerable, to preserve language and belief, and to bury their dead with reverence even when doing so carried real danger. These were not people seeking heroism or recognition, but people guided by conscience, often knowing that their actions would never be recorded or rewarded.

This inheritance is not distant or theoretical to me, because history does not end at the archive or the monument. It moves forward through families, marriages, and children, through the lives we build and the values we choose to uphold. In that sense, Polish history is written into my own DNA, not only through blood, but through connection, responsibility, and the awareness that the past continues to shape the moral landscape we inhabit today.

When I study this history, I am not looking backward in search of grievance or validation, but listening for voices that were meant to disappear, voices silenced by occupations and ideologies that treated human beings as expendable. Remembering them is an act of justice – defiance, because it refuses the lie that their lives were insignificant, anonymous, or interchangeable, and it insists that truth matters even when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable.

Stripped of uniforms, slogans, and political abstractions, what remains is something profoundly simple and universal. Most of the people who suffered did not aspire to shape history or define nations. They wanted their families safe, their faith respected, their children given a future, and their lives acknowledged as meaningful. At the core of their endurance was the same human desire that persists across generations, the desire to belong, to be seen, and to be loved.

History becomes distorted and dangerous when it forgets this human core – the soul, and it becomes redemptive when it remembers it honestly. To carry memory is to accept responsibility, not to inflame hatred or flatten complexity, but to tell the truth carefully and faithfully so that those who were erased by violence, terror, or propaganda are not erased again by silence or indifference.

To remember Polish history is therefore to keep faith with people who often had very little left except faith itself, and whose courage did not end with their deaths but survives in culture, language, family, and in the quiet moral choices we make today. They live in us because we remember them, and because we understand that beneath everything else they were simply people who tried to live with dignity, protect what they loved, and hope that their lives would mean something to those who came after.

That hope now rests with us, and with what we choose to remember.

Edward Reid on Facebook

(https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=909335244942413&set=gm.25599183613095134&idorvanity=3625556537551157)

==========================