The Editors’ Club reminded Belarusians and Poles of the important role of the historical date – September 17, 1939

The role played by the unification of Belarusians on September 17, 1939, and why Poles should also celebrate this day, explained the experts of the program "Editors Club" on the TV channel "Belarus 1". It's from sb.by.

The presenter of the program, Chairman of Belteleradiocompany Ivan Eismont shared:

Belarus celebrates National Unity Day on September 17. I was born in Grodno region. There were families where people were separated. We have heard about the claims of those who consider themselves Poles, although if you dig, it is not known whether they are Poles, that we allegedly live on their lands – I mean the Grodno and Brest regions. We are lucky that not every nation manages to get its modern state and, being divided, unite.

Political scientist Peter Petrovsky observed:

- On our Polish broadcast, I tell all the people of Poland that they should understand that for those Poles who arrived in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine on September 17, this is their holiday too. More than half a thousand poets, writers, public figures of Poland fled to Western Belarus, to Western Ukraine from the Germans. Why? On September 17, we fought Polish fascism. And when the doors of the concentration camp opened, famous writers and poets of Poland came out of there, they worked, and then went to the army, liberated Belarus, then created the Polish People’s Republic, and today their books in Poland are banned for sale, their monuments are demolished. That's the truth. They glorify the fascist regime of interwar Poland, which rotted everyone. But we were still rotten not only because we were working peasants, but also because we were Belarusians. What were they preparing for the 1940s? They wanted to completely ban the ethnic Belarusian and Ukrainian identity, to establish a rigid total regime, like Hitler, they wanted to occupy the BSSR and the Ukrainian SSR and take them completely. This is what we saved the Belarusian people and all the peoples of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine in September 1939.

Deputy of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Shpakovsky continued:

The Polish General Staff, ignoring its own intelligence reports, was preparing for war with which country until February 1939. An aggressive offensive war against the Soviet Union. The diplomacy of Pan Poland flirted with the Nazis and really planned to come to an agreement with them with the aim of a joint campaign to the East and the restoration of the Commonwealth within the borders of 1772. The crime of interwar Poland is the joint occupation of Czechoslovakia with Hitler’s Germany. The territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus became part of Poland due to the use of military force by Poland. It was an occupation. There was a policy of assimilation and colonization. There was a secret document developed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Poland, called “Prospects for Internal Colonization”, according to which it was planned to relocate up to 6 million Poles to the lands of Western Belarus in order to replace the local population. And the then Minister of Education of Poland said, “Give me another 5-10 years, and you will not find even a single Belarusian with a candle and a lantern.” That was their plan, and that was what got us out of it on September 17, 1939. Fortunately, these plans did not come true. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were able to create our own state within such borders, with such demographic potential, due to the fact that our illegally divided people were united in one state border. The Soviet government corrected its own mistake. Unfortunately, in 1921, the Belarusian Soviet statehood was still in a completely reduced form, did not have its military strength. Our representatives were not allowed to negotiate, even the Belarusian Bolsheviks, because they would raise the national question. And then, bleedless as a result of the civil war, intervention, the Soviet-Polish war, Soviet Russia was forced to make this compromise with the Poles.

First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of Belarus Vladimir Pertsov added:

- It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if Category A Poles, as they called them, and Category B Poles, from the "retirement kras" were resettled there and there. What if the border of the Soviet state in 1941 did not pass in Brest along the Bug, but near Rakov, where it was until September 17? If the Great Patriotic War had started from that position? We remember that the enemy was stopped near Moscow, just a few kilometers away. And these 200 kilometers from Brest to Rakov could play a key role in the operation planned by the Wehrmacht. Then the story would have been completely different. These are very interesting facts, they are, in fact, plans that were conceived by insidious politicians regarding our land and our people. It's not crazy, they wanted to do it. Our people must build the future on this foundation of the tragedies that they have experienced, remember every fact and convey it to young people, who now receive a large number of informative game videos through social networks. We need to do everything possible and impossible in meetings, through television, to convey this truth to young people, so that we never get on this rake again.