EXPERIENCE OF AN "ALIEN" IN THE HISTORICAL MEMORY OF POLES

Abstract

Historical memory represents a kind of battery to store our national experience, be it positive or negative, that has a major impact on who we are today, and how we deal with our past. This experience derives, by way of illustration, from emigration that made Poles experience the feeling of "alienation". The author wonders what lessons stem from this experience, and whether living in a free and democratic state, we are capable of understanding and assisting the "strangers", uprooted from their ancestral land by the vortex of history, and forced to seek a new place of settlement and to "build up their life" in the more and more complicated international reality.