President Bronislaw Komorowski gave a special address at the Bundestag in Berlin on Wednesday in a session devoted to marking the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII.

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski (C) speaks before the plenary session in the German Bundestag in Berlin, Germany, 10 September 2014. In a commemoration ceremony the Bundestag, the German parliament, remembers the start of WWII in 1939. EPA/Bernd von Jutrczenka

He was welcomed by President of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert, who said that “it must seem like a miracle that today Poles and Germans are not only neighbours who tolerate each other, but are friends too.”

“The full reconciliation [of the two countries] was the culmination of many years of effort aimed at a new beginning in Polish-German relations,” Komorowski told German MPs.

The Polish president stressed that the collapse of the Iron Curtain had hastened the reconciliation.

“Poles and Germans have not wasted the turn of history,” he said.

“The last 25 years have seen the joint building of a united Europe by Poles and Germans, carried out in incredibly direct manner.”

Komorowski, a veteran of the anti-communist underground, also recalled how Poles had admired bids for freedom in East Germany during the 1980s.

“In the Poland of Solidarity we watched with great sympathy all those brave people who managed to take to the streets of East Germany and demand respect for civil rights.”

However, alluding to the crisis in Ukraine, Komorowski said that Russia's “current policy is a great disappointment, and a challenge.”

He urged more resolve, arguing that “only brave politics, built on the foundation of values whose core is human dignity, deserve to be called realpolitik.”

Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the first month of World War II. Approximately 6 million Polish citizens died in the conflict, including 3 million Jews. (nh)



Source: PAP