This man is Grzegorz Braun. He’s a Polish MP. And on Tuesday, whilst there was a little celebration of chanukah in the parliament building over there in Warsaw, he took a fire extinguisher and blew out the candles on the menorah, the special Chanukah… candle holder. And really, that’s not very nice. Not very nice at all. But what do we know about Braun?

His great, great grandfather was Adolph Braun. Who lived near the little village where my maternal grandmother’s family had their mud hut. And every Friday night, Adolph and his friends would mount their horses, whilst drunk on the local potato liqueur, ride into the shtetl and beat the living shit out of all the jews they could find. Only stopping when they found someone to rape. Then they’d go back home, sleep off their excesses and do as little as they possibly could until next Friday came around. Which is why, in 1900, my grandmother’s family moved to London. They were potlessly poor, spoke no English, arrived on a boat (big one, probably) and were really pissed off that they weren’t going to invent ‘benefits’ for another 48 years. But anywhere was better than Poland.

Grzegorz’s grandfather, Greg, was living in that same village when the nazis came a’knocking in 1940, looking for local recruits. Greg was illiterate, worthless, had no skills and terrible halitosis. Making him ideally suited for Nazi enrolment. Which he thus did, along with hundreds of thousands of his co-countrymen, helping the Germans with the vital task of rounding up and murdering every Jew in the land which had been Poland until a few months ago but was, at that time, the latest addition to the German empire.

Due to a handling incident at the neo-natal unit of Warsaw General, in 1967, baby Grzegorz was dropped on the floor when being passed from the midwife to his father, Grzeg, and he landed on his head. Emergency room x-rays showed that the damage was so severe that the only way to save the baby was to remove all the useful bits of his brain, leaving just the hate, the evil, the uselessness, the moronic and anything remotely decent or ‘nice’. But it was that or lose him altogether. So his parents decided that he could always have a career in politics and they chose to save him.

Thus the man we all know and love today. He is quite openly anti-American, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Semitic, anti-Protestant and anti-pretty-much-anything-else-you-can-think-of. Hence he runs some far right wing party committed to the sanctity and purity of all things Polish. He IS pro-Russian. Ironic that the far right sides with the far left for purposes of being hateful. But thus we must forgive poor Grzegorz, because he knows no better and banged his head as a child. We must not judge all Polish people by his standards. Some of my absolutely favourite builders are Polish.

And yet, from the pogroms to the eager and willing help they gave towards ‘the final solution’, to their committed participation in concentration camps, right up to extinguishing the lights on a fucking menorah, them Poles live up to my grandmother’s oft-quoted saying: The Germans learned anti-semitism from the Poles.

Good to learn from history.

(All of the above is verified, validated historical fact, other than the bits I made up, but they’re true too. Just in a different way.)

Happy Saturday

A xxxx