Polish people know true meaning of freedom

English is the lingua franca of the young of Europe. Perhaps they forget that it is understood by older people, too. Or so I thought as my Polish friend and I walked along the Motława River in Gdańsk one evening behind a young tourist determined to impress upon the young man to her right how sexually liberated she was.

“I don’t believe in marriage,” she announced. “People ask me how you can be 22 and not married, but I don’t need marriage for sex. I have boyfriends.”

The young man, who seemed more interested in the silent girl to his right, asked the loud girl, in quieter tones, what she believed in.

“I believe in freedom.”

And I thought, “Oh, honey. You say that in Gdańsk?” Gdańsk is a city of memorials to freedom, to Polish freedom lost and to Polish freedom won. There is the memorial at Westerplatte, where the German Navy opened fire on Sept. 1, 1939, and at the Polish Post Office where, at that very hour, the SS also attacked.

There is the Gdańsk shipyard, where the Solidarity movement was born, and St. Bridget’s Church, which has memorials to every Polish tragedy since August 1939, including the 1984 murder of Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko.

Every child in Canada is taught that six million Jews were killed between Hitler’s rise to power and the end of the Second World War. But although we may be told that three million of those Jews came from Poland, and that Auschwitz was in Occupied Poland, we are not usually told that three million Poles, mostly Catholics, were killed alongside the Jews and that the Nazis’ ultimate plan for the Poles was to make them slaves.

Actual slaves. To work in the fields and in factories and down mines and as domestic servants. And this is why secondary schooling and post-secondary studies were banned for Poles in Occupied Poland. And why Polish professors were rounded up and shot. And why, since the Soviets were in cahoots with the Nazis at the start of the war, 22,000 Polish officers, most of the aristocracy, were murdered. Officers, aristocrats and professors: not only were they lousy slave material, they were proof that the Poles had a culture of their own, something the Nazis and Soviets wished to deny.

Incidentally, that P on the shirt worn by St. Maximilian Kolbe in the icons does not stand for “Political” (that’s the red triangle) or “Priest.” It stands for “Pole.”

The Nazis did not wish to wipe out all the Poles; they just wanted their beautiful and strategic country and to use the Poles to till it and mine it and serve the German settlers the Nazis would send out there once the war was won. However, the Nazis did want to exterminate all the troublesome Poles, even simple peasants who would hide Jewish neighbours out of kindness, so when a Pole was caught hiding a Jew, the Pole and his or her entire family was killed: children, grandmas and all.

Ultimately the Poles were not enslaved because the Nazis were defeated and Occupied Poland was “liberated” by the USSR in the same way the USSR generally liberated countries: in name only. To make a long story short, Poland was run by a Communist Polish criminal gang controlled by the Soviet Union until 1990, when the gang ceased to be either Communist or controlled by the Soviet Union.

History lies heavily on the city of Gdańsk. By the time I got to the twisted metal sculpture commemorating the murdered Fr. Popiełuszko, I was ready to throw myself down on the floor of Swiętej Brygidy and weep. And this is why I was so aggrieved, the next evening, at the young lady who called her sex life freedom.

Freedom, I wanted to tell her, is not taking off your clothes and having sex with any guy just because you want to. Women have almost always been able to do that; it’s talking about it afterwards that gets you into trouble, and not usually with the police. Sure, people might call you names, but that’s not like being denied high school because you’re a Pole, is it? It’s not like shutting the curtains on May Day because if your child looks out the window at the tanks rolling past, the police might come upstairs and beat up your husband.

To equate sexual license with actual freedom, bragging about it openly, suggests something opposite to what Gdańsk means by freedom. It suggests that sexual license, sex divorced from marriage, is really just another form of slavery. It’s sad.

(Cummings McLean, a Canadian writer living abroad, is the author of Seraphic Singles.)