A few months back I posted this article on this very blog.
The piece is about my modest effort to help displaced Ukrainian refugees who have found themselves in Poland fleeing the Russian war atrocities in their own country. For those who might have just arrived on this planet, a very brief info maybe in order: in late February 2022, the Russian army attacked the sovereign nation of Ukraine under the pretext of "denazification."
The real reason is less noble: most Russians actually do not consider Ukrainians a separate nation, but, at best, somewhat misguided, perhaps even wayward sons and daughters of the great Russian nation. That's the essence of this war and, at the same time, the essence and foundation of Russian imperialism towards neighboring Slavic nations.
This war in Russia, for many months called there just "a special operation," is presented by the official Kremlin propaganda as a brotherly help of sorts, just as the Soviet intervention in the former Czechoslovakia in 1968 was, when that proud nation of Czechs and Slovaks went off the "right" course, which could have led it to become too independent of the Kremlin rulers. Russians are way too predicable in their ways of handling such situations to be able to fool anyone in Eastern Europe, or in much of the West, some useful Putin idiots here and there being just a glaring exception to this rule.
Being originally from Poland, for many centuries Russia's neighbor, I know these things all too well. It is a sad but truthful statement that the Russians and then the Soviets treated Poland as a vasal country for many long years that would add up to more than a century. Yet putting it this way may not convey the truth at the more primal, individual, human level. Because behind such treatment there was always a lot of genuine human suffering, the kind of suffering you can now witness in Ukraine.
This suffering affected many Polish families, including mine.
When the Soviets entered the eastern part of Poland in mid September 1939 and the Nazis, who had attacked Poland on September 1st, were steadily expanding their conquest of her territory, my grandparents (on both sides) found themselves trapped under the Stalinist rule. The Soviet invasion of Poland was the result of a secret Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the pact made actually between Hitler and Stalin that amounted to yet another partition of Poland, only 20 years after the last such period of partitions, also between Russia and Germany (originally Prussia), and also Austria, had ended.
It was my mother's family that suffered the most. When the Soviets arrived, they very much started hunting for able-bodied men and women to serve as a cheap labor force deep inside Russia. My grandma and grandpa ended up in a Siberian labor camp. She returned a few years later alone. He remained in Siberia. Or, rather, his dead body did. Unlike my grandma, whom I knew well and grew very close to, I never got to know him. I don't think I have even seen his picture.
But she returned profoundly changed, damaged by the war and forced labor experience. She never fully recovered from it, being forever pretty much lost in the world, relying on the support of her friends or family to a large extent, never being able to hold a job for a longer period of time. My mother was being raised by her aunt while her parents were laboring in Siberia. She would never be able to relate to her mother, once, I suppose, because as a child she might have felt abandoned by her, and, twice, because her mother, traumatically affected by the war, might have seemed to her strange, unable to relate to her daughter as you would expect a normal mother do.
Sometimes I wonder if this trauma, clearly not only my grandma's but also my mom's, did not also affect me; if only because my mother would sometimes be pretty rude if not hostile to her own mother. I could not understand it at that time, but it would upset me greatly since I loved my grandma and was very attached to it. Only much later on, when I learned my grandparents' war history I was able to better understand what might have strained the relationship between the mother and her daughter. It was the traumatic war experience, and, no doubt, the Siberian labor camp experience was a particularly painful part of it.
Yes, I learned about it much later on because neither my grandma nor my mom wanted to talk about it. This does not surprise me in the least for it is not easy at all to talk about one's trauma. It brings about a lot of emotions that are often hard to control. Doing so makes you very vulnerable, which most people would rather avoid.
It is for these reasons that women who got raped, or other victims of violence or injustice, for that matter, may find it quite hard to report it to the police. That also explains why many Jews kept quiet about their Holocaust experience in the years directly after WWII.
You may now understand better why when the news of the Russian aggression on Ukraine reached me, it became deeply personal to me. My memory flashed back to my time with my grandma, a tragic victim of another such aggression. This war will too, unfortunately, produce many new victims. It is doing it every day it lasts. It is a stupid, unprovoked war and should be condemned by all civilized people.
And we should do our best to help its victims. It is with this in mind that I have created special offers for two of my main products (KING and Easy Money in Stocks) and have recently also lowered the price of another trading product (George Collection of trading systems).
Profits from the sales of these 3 items will go towards helping the refugees.
If not interested in trading stocks or e-mini futures or in this particular idea of mine, I would still encourage you to find some way to help these people and their nation in these very difficult for them times.
