A LONG TIME
“THE SWASTIKA,” said Hans Frank, “will fly over this land forever.”
Frank is the German governor of conquered Poland. He means that the German campaign was a naked conquest, and that Poland is now absorbed into Germany; that Poland has ceased to exist at all.
It is not given to us to read the future. All we can do is to guess in the dim light of reflections from the past. Poland has ceased to exist before. It has been wiped from the map of Europe as a child expunges thin lines on a slate.
Poland vanished, but the Poles remained. They never become Austrians, or Russians. Will they ever become Germans? Surely Herr Hitler’s own racial ideas do not argue that they will.
Forever, Herr Frank, is a long time.