I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger, disease, and official abuse. Theirs is a story of endurance and fortitude that gives one faith in the human spirit.
Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.
People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'
It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.
In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.
Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.
Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.
I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland.
It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.
States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.
The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as 'cultural pilgrimage,' which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge.
All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.
The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.
Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.
