Learning to live with minorities

last updated 8 January 2015

Poland

Jan Dziadul

Poles aren’t the most tolerant people in the world, said Jan Dziadul in Warsaw’s Polityka. If you look at the numbers in our most recent census, “we hardly have any minorities at all”—certainly less than 5 percent. There are some Germans, scattered Ukrainians, the odd Belarusian or two. “Yet our level of dislike for other nations” is “astonishingly high.” The latest opinion poll on attitudes toward other peoples showed that more than half of us dislike Gypsies and Russians, nearly half don’t like the Jews, and about a third resent the Germans and Ukrainians. A few of us even have it in for the Czechs and Slovaks. These “xenophobic attitudes” may just be left over from Polish history. Before World War II, every third citizen of Poland was a non-Pole, and ethnic tensions here ran high, just as they did all over Europe. But it’s time to put those feelings behind us and show some appreciation for the feelings of minorities. After all, “the E.U. is very insistent on this issue.”