Question to Brits: which world war was a bigger trauma?

[garbon]

I'm not sure why we'd consult Marti to see how Polish people feel.

[Tamas]

I'm with grumbler on this one. The original question asked "which world war was the bigger trauma", it is not really about facts but a country's state of mind. Poland regained its independence in WW1 so the national memory converts it into a triumph rather than a tragedy; also, given that WW2 was so much worse for them, most tragic elements in their WW1 story will have been expunged by the far greater and later tragedy.

long WW2 list of Polish tragedies indeed:
-countless killed
-countless oppressed
-about a dozen jews managed to hide

[Martinus]

Poland wasn't really devastated by WW1. And there was no significant deathtoll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties#.C2.A0Poland

Poland was occupied by Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia from 1795–1914. By late 1915 Germany had complete control over modern day Poland. A 2005 Polish study estimated 3.4 million Poles served in the Armed Forces of the occupying powers during World War I. Total deaths from 1914–18, military and civilian, within the 1919–1939 borders, were estimated at 1,130,000.

I guess a million dead Poles is not significant?

I hate to side with Marti on any issue, but you seem to be trolling here.  Marti didn't say that "one million dead Poles is not significant," he said that the death toll from WW1 was not significant.  Even if we accept the Wiki figures (250,000 military, 370,000 civilian deaths) - which are based on pretty flimsy evidence - that doesn't total a million (which figure would include the German, Austrian, and Russian soldiers killed in battle) and so may not, as Marti claims, be "significant" in Polish history.

This. The WW1 and immediate post-WW1 losses/destruction simply do not register in Polish popular opinion, as opposed to WW2 losses.

[Martinus]

I just thought his statement meant he was ignorant of what actually happened in WWI in Poland rather than actually claiming hundreds of thousands was not not significant.

  People are ignorant of most insignificant things.  There is no disconnect between being ignorant of something and it not being significant; in general, there is a direct correlation.

I thought I was being pretty clear there.  I was trying to I don't think he meant that he just didn't care personally (or even that Poles in general don't care) about the number of people killed.  Rather that I thought he was under the mistaken impression that the number of Poles who died was a great deal smaller than what actually occured.  I get that the war does not resonate very much in modern Poland though, I would be surprised if it did after WWII.

That may be true, but I am not under-educated compared to an average Pole, especially when it comes to history. In fact, I researched this topic a bit and the consensus is that there is no universally acceptable figure of Polish losses (btw, I am pretty sure the Poles' death toll of WW1 Raz quoted involves not just ethnic Poles, but people living within the borders of what became Poland after 1920) in WW1, because frankly noone gave a damn at this time. This is because (1) there was a universal understanding that we won that war (because all occupying powers, despite being on the opposite sides, lost), and (2) what came 20 years later eclipsed it by several magnitudes.

So yes, in the popular reception, this was not significant.

[Brazen]

As a vaguely related aside, Mart you need to check out pre-war drama Spies of Warsaw. David Tennant has his shirt off a lot.

[Martinus]

As a vaguely related aside, Mart you need to check out pre-war drama Spies of Warsaw. David Tennant has his shirt off a lot.

Will check it out although he is not my type.

[garbon]

Yeah I'm a bit surprised by David Tennant love.

[Valmy]

That may be true, but I am not under-educated compared to an average Pole, especially when it comes to history. In fact, I researched this topic a bit and the consensus is that there is no universally acceptable figure of Polish losses (btw, I am pretty sure the Poles' death toll of WW1 Raz quoted involves not just ethnic Poles, but people living within the borders of what became Poland after 1920) in WW1, because frankly noone gave a damn at this time. This is because (1) there was a universal understanding that we won that war (because all occupying powers, despite being on the opposite sides, lost), and (2) what came 20 years later eclipsed it by several magnitudes.

So yes, in the popular reception, this was not significant.

Yeah I get all that.  I was never disputing that WW1 was not traumatic to Poland and obviously was way overshadowed by WWII that is obvious.  I was merely disagreeing the reason for that was because there were few deaths.  I misunderstood you meant the public memory of those deaths is that there were few of them but rather you meant on some sort of objective sense they were not significant.

And yeah it is sort of funny in retrospect.  The only hope Polish patriots had was some sort of war between Germany, Austria, and Russia where all three of them lose...which is ridiculous except it actually happened.

[Martinus]

Well, to be honest, I was a bit dismissive of the WW1 casualties as I did not exactly know the numbers - in retrospect, it's a bit surprising that this does not feature as a big thing in our collective memory (the war with bolsheviks of 1920 is much more prominently remembered), especially if you consider we experienced quite a cultural revival in the 1918-1939 period, so it's not like there was noone to write about it either.

Personally, I think it got subsumed into the "we suffered for 120 years to be free at last" narrative and there was a lot of other problems, both internal and external, that were more related to trying to reunite three completely different countries that people did not pay that much attention to the recent past.

[grumbler]

(btw, I am pretty sure the Poles' death toll of WW1 Raz quoted involves not just ethnic Poles, but people living within the borders of what became Poland after 1920) in WW1... 

Just to clear up some apparent confusion on the Wiki article Raz quoted:
(1)  It is a Wiki article, so not authoritative, though maybe the best thing available;
(2) There are two numbers given:  those for total losses within the post-1920 borders of Poland (the 1.13 million number) from a 2005 bok written by a Pole, and those for Polish-only losses with the modern borders of Poland (the 640,000 number) from a Russian journalist's 2004 book. 
(3)  The latter numbers are the ones I used, and those are the ones we should be using to measure Polish losses.  The former numbers include all the non-Polish soldiers killed fighting over Poland.

[Agelastus]

(btw, I am pretty sure the Poles' death toll of WW1 Raz quoted involves not just ethnic Poles, but people living within the borders of what became Poland after 1920) in WW1... 

Just to clear up some apparent confusion on the Wiki article Raz quoted:
(1)  It is a Wiki article, so not authoritative, though maybe the best thing available;
(2) There are two numbers given:  those for total losses within the post-1920 borders of Poland (the 1.13 million number) from a 2005 bok written by a Pole, and those for Polish-only losses with the modern borders of Poland (the 640,000 number) from a Russian journalist's 2004 book. 
(3)  The latter numbers are the ones I used, and those are the ones we should be using to measure Polish losses.  The former numbers include all the non-Polish soldiers killed fighting over Poland.

But the "modern" borders of Poland are in no way comparable to the previous borders of any iteration of Poland as a country, nor to where Poles actually lived in 1914. For example, does this mean the Polish families kicked out of what became western Byelorussia after 1945 and that then settled in the formerly German inhabited regions near the Oder have their ancestors losses included in the 640000 or not?

It seems somewhat disingeneous to use the post 1945 borders of Poland as the region of comparison for computing Polish WWI losses.

[Ed Anger]

With all that Polish dead, they didn't have the numbers required to change a light bulb. 

[Razgovory]

(btw, I am pretty sure the Poles' death toll of WW1 Raz quoted involves not just ethnic Poles, but people living within the borders of what became Poland after 1920) in WW1... 

Just to clear up some apparent confusion on the Wiki article Raz quoted:
(1)  It is a Wiki article, so not authoritative, though maybe the best thing available;
(2) There are two numbers given:  those for total losses within the post-1920 borders of Poland (the 1.13 million number) from a 2005 bok written by a Pole, and those for Polish-only losses with the modern borders of Poland (the 640,000 number) from a Russian journalist's 2004 book. 
(3)  The latter numbers are the ones I used, and those are the ones we should be using to measure Polish losses.  The former numbers include all the non-Polish soldiers killed fighting over Poland.

But the "modern" borders of Poland are in no way comparable to the previous borders of any iteration of Poland as a country, nor to where Poles actually lived in 1914. For example, does this mean the Polish families kicked out of what became western Byelorussia after 1945 and that then settled in the formerly German inhabited regions near the Oder have their ancestors losses included in the 640000 or not?

It seems somewhat disingeneous to use the post 1945 borders of Poland as the region of comparison for computing Polish WWI losses.

Yeah, It's like considering Soviet casualties in WWII by only taking into consideration ethnic Russians who lived in the borders of what is now the state of Russia.

[Martinus]

Actually, it's the kinda the opposite, Raz, as Poland pre-WW2 occupied territories that were much more sparsely populated than Silesia, Pommerania and Greater Poland it got in WW2 (hell, to this day, sans Warsaw, these territories remain the most densely populated and highly industrialized/urbanised in the country).

If Poland had today's borders in 1918, its population would have been much higher than the population of the territory controlled by Poland after the Polish-Soviet war of 1920.

[grumbler]

But the "modern" borders of Poland are in no way comparable to the previous borders of any iteration of Poland as a country, nor to where Poles actually lived in 1914. For example, does this mean the Polish families kicked out of what became western Byelorussia after 1945 and that then settled in the formerly German inhabited regions near the Oder have their ancestors losses included in the 640000 or not?

It seems somewhat disingeneous to use the post 1945 borders of Poland as the region of comparison for computing Polish WWI losses.

The modern borders exclude a lot of territory in which the Poles lived (even if as a minority) in 1914, for sure.  That's why I called the evidence for those numbers flimsy in my first use of them.