Rural/conservative person maybe?
My sister lives there with her husband and two kids, she likes it, it’s expensive though.
My sister lives there with her husband and two kids, she likes it, it’s expensive though.
I like old buildings, so prefer Cracow as it wasn't rebuilt, the old buildings there are really old, not built in past 80 years.
Also capital dwellers tend to have such self-centric attitude that makes other people upset (Warsaw is known as the "default city", because in some early days of internet when some of them asked about where to buy stuff, they didn't mention in which city, they assumed it was Warsaw).
It’s one thing to prefer another city (because it happened to have fewer bombs dropped on it?) it’s another thing to say “stay away.”
There is also a lot of fetishisation of its history by conservatives, since history in Polish schools is told in a very martyr way, and history of Warsaw, its monuments and all that play well into it. If anything, it’s a very good place for conservatives.
[1]: partitions and other shenanigans of Polish history.
I think that's the perception of Polish history pretty much everywhere except Russia, Ukraine, maybe Lithuania? I'm genuinely curious as to what other theories of Polish history exist, especially in Poland.
Personally I’m a fan of taking responsibility. And in the context of falling into partitions we did have a role in that internally the country was a mess, conflicted and for sale. We could learn something from our western neighbours when it comes to forming some unity and valuing work/grit over aristocratic navel-gazing.
I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault (to the point where if there was any it was “due to German influences” and other such weird reasoning). I don’t consider anyone at fault for something their ancestors did, I just didn’t expect such total denial of wrongdoings before encountering it.
People tend to value their own group than the other. Jews tended to keep to themselves, which had two reasons: they were forced to by laws in many countries (e.g. Ashkenazi group evolved to have good math skills mostly because they were forbidden from owning land etc. but were allowed to be merchants) and by Jews themselves tending to one another and keeping outsiders out (which is quite natural for any group, but not to that extent). Consider what happens in most cases when w given ethnicity moves out of their country - they integrate in century or two (see USA). Jews do not, at least orthodox ones (which were majority before I think).
Similar thing happens with other immigrants - if they don't integrate, they are feared. If they have different religion even more so.
Countries outside of Germany during (and before) WWII didn't have state level killings of those "alien" groups.
Perhaps it's just that antisemitism didn't stand out among other -isms and frankly paled in comparison to nazi industrialized genocide.
Make no mistake - it was there - but pre-WW2 Poland was actually fairly diverse with ethnic Poles being 69% of the population and the rest consisting of (population numbers in descending order) Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans.
It was a melting pot of mutual antipathy.
Case in point: to this day in literature there are two terms for the largest of these minorities - Ukrainians and the Rus' (the generally agreed on definition notwithstanding), the difference being that the latter did not display ambitions of forming an independent state.
For a fledgling state any such notion was of course dangerous and Ukrainians were treated in accordance to that (badly).
Antisemitism has always been used by those seeking to gain power through ripping up the society to shreds and it was not and is not limited to Poland.
It's just an artifact of our history: even in 18th century, before partitioning of Poland the social structures we like this: Polish nobles > Jewish bankers, merchants, clerks, lawyers, doctors > Polish peasants. This structure persisted through 19th century into the 1920s and 1930s. You could say, that Poland basically outsourced most of the middle-class jobs to Jews.
In the late 1930s Poland actually ran kind of "affirmative action" to get more Polish students accepted to Polish universities, which had pretty high percentage of Jewish students: 15-25%, compared to 8.5% of Jews in general population.
All this naturally created some outrage against Jews, with Polish people feeling like a second class citizens in their own country, sometimes (but rarely) resulting in violence.
And I’m not at all surprised to know there are many Poles that saved Jews in WW2 - there are also a lot of Germans! I’m sure individually a lot of Poles were and are fine people.
But at least according to my late grandfather it sounded like it was pretty common to experience anti-semitism as well (my grandfather grew up in an ultra orthodox family so was easily identified on the street as Jewish - he became secular during the war).
1. There were times and nations where "anti-semitism, period" was a complete political program that won legal democratic elections.
2. In Poland this program was always in substantial minority, geography and economics nonwithstanding.
3. People susceptible to such programs are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. The program is about labels, but it breeds the hate towards an actual neighbor. Even if the idea is changed to "it's all because of Zambians". Or Poles.
One exception is the city's football team of course - but football in this country is synonymous with ultra-nationalism.