On Nov 15, 2004, at 8:32, Sue Babbs wrote:
I typed "Famous Poles" into Google and came up with a long list of sites starting with:
http://www.polish.org/en/frames/Old/fpa_main.html
http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~zbzw/ph/sci/distra.htm
http://www.memorablequotations.com/Poland.htm
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/List%20of%20famous%20Poles
Many thanks, Sue, even though I wasn't the one who asked :) I visited all of the sites, just to see how many names I'd recognize... About 1 in 4 on average, as it turned out, though only about 1 in 8 or10 in the area of science. I *knew* Poland had always been strong in maths (and, even for that, I have my geeky son to thank for <g>), but had no idea just *how* strong... They didn't teach us half of that stuff in school :) Though I did know about 9 of 10 names in the literature section, I'm pleased to say, and about half in arts.
As to modern composers, try Henryk Gorecki.
<VBG> That was the only name I did *not* recognise in the music section; I'll have to ask DH about him, since he's the "music hound" in our household... :)
What struck me as truly sad was the number of non-Slavic names on the various lists (and some had Slavic names, which weren't so, at birth); a lot of those people perished, in WWII, as *Jews*. They had been "assimilated", yes... Their first language was Polish, their allegiance was to Poland, where they'd lived for hundreds of years and many generations... All the same, when Hitler and his "to the fifth generation" racial laws came in, they were herded off to the gas chambers, or had to emigrate to survive. And, when I learnt about them in school after WWII, their origins were never mentioned - whether for PC reasons, or to gain as many "kudos" as possible for Poland I never knew, but it always stuck in my craw...
Lest we forget...
--- Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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