Madam, - As a short addition to Polish Ambassador Sobkow's letter of May 11th and to Dr Stefan Auer's article of the same day, let me quote the great Polish poet and 1980 Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) and his memory of VE Day:
"It was May 1945 in the medieval city of Cracow. . .The night the news of the fall of Berlin came was lit with burst of rocket and shells, and the streets echoed with the fire of small arms as the soldiers of the victorious Red Army celebrated the prospect of a speedy return home.
"The next morning, on a fine spring day, Alpha [ Jerry Andrzejewski, a Polish writer and Milosz's friend, author of Ashes and Diamonds] and I were sitting in the office of Polish Film, working on a scenario. Outside the window was a courtyard with young trees, and beyond the courtyard a huge building lately transformed into a prison and the headquarters of the Security Police. We saw scores of young men behind the barred windows on the ground floor. . .Standing in the window, we observed them in silence. It was easy to guess that these were soldiers of the Underground Army.
"Had the London government-in-exile returned to Poland, these soldiers of the 'underground state' would have been honoured and fêted as heroes. Instead, they were incarcerated as a politically uncertain element. Although their foe had been Hitler, they were now termed agents of the class enemy. . .Another of History's ironic jokes." (The Captive Mind, 1953.) - Yours, etc,
HANNA DANGEL DOWLING, Woodley Park, Dundrum, Dublin 14.