Different history
A weird thing happened to me when I was on campus. A young, well dressed man approached me and asked me if I was a student. I responded yes, but I wasn’t sure what his motives was. In fact, I kind of felt threatened, but against my better judgement I spoke with him. It’s part of my goal to try different things even if it makes me uncomfortable.
“Are you willing to ask a few questions about World War II on camera? It doesn’t matter if you know the answers. We’re just doing a special on the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II.”
“Okay…um…sure?” I responded. I am not a World War II buff. In fact, sometimes I actively avoid the topic of World War II because it hurts my brain to think that so many people were brainwashed to actively destroy millions of human beings.
So, we stood on the corner of campus near traffic and another man pointed a camera towards me. The well dressed man asked me:
“Do you know where World War II started?”
“Um…Serbia? No, that was World War I…um…Germany…I think…”
“Yes, that’s basically correct. It was when Germany took over Poland.” Now, I was really embarrassed. I should probably know that.
“Ok, do you know about the genocide that occured in the (I couldn’t catch the name) town of the Soviet Union?”
“Um, yes. I mean, there were a lot of geneocide that occured all over Europe.”
“Do you know about the Warsaw Uprising?”
“No…what happened there?”
And that was basically my embarrassment on camera. I wasn’t sure if this was some sort of “Borat” stunt. But off camera, I asked him where he was from. He was from TVP, a television studio in Poland. There were doing a special on 1944 because they feel that the US and UK, people who basically “won” the world, established how the world will run but, I guess, students from these areas do not know anything about World War II. I was kind of embarrassed that I didn’t know these facts about World War II. But then again, would he know about Partition in India? Or the facts of the Civil War in the United States? I doubt it. I guess it just shows you that most people will focus on the history that affects them the most. And maybe I shouldn’t be embarrassed about my lack of knowledge of Polish history.
