All I had mainly heard was that France and the UK had a deal with Poland that if it were attacked we would go to it's aid and so war was declared when Gernany invaded Poland.
History is written by victors - and in case of WWII the Polish lost. Shortly after regaining our independence we, yet again, found ourselves under Russian rule. Poland did not become a socialist country through free elections - everything was rigged and the socialist politicians were quite open about it at the time. 50 years of socialism (no, it was not communism although it is usually referred to as such by the mass media) has done terrible things to the Polish mentality and sense of identity. For 50 years we were taught that we were somehow worse, inferior to the people who lived in the western world. We were almost locked up in our own country - migration was strictly controlled and if anyone managed to leave the country they were sometimes forced to become a secret informant for the state. This feeling still runs deep and affects anyone, who was born during the socialist rule. It seems however that there is a glimmer of hope in the new generations, who are again starting to feel a sense of identity and realize they are no different to the French or Germans of their age.
One thing makes me proud though - we managed to keep our limited independence after the war. even though we did not 'rule' our own country, we still had our own borders, our own flag, own language and a natonal anthem. The likes of Ukraine, Lithuania or Latvia weren't so lucky and were incorporated into the USSR, thus losing their national identity for 50 years. It is often said that Stalin realised he would not be able to annex Poland and that he realized he could not break the Polish spirit. In the end, the Russians have tried it for a 150 years before (partitioning) and never succeeded. They even tried an invasion shortly after the I WW (under bolshevik rule) and failed miserably (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Warsaw_(1920). It is said that the Battle of Warsaw was one of the most important battles in the history of mankind as it stopped the bolsheviks from joining with the German socialists - an event that would probably lead to a worldwide 'red' revolution.
[...] the deal between the Russian and Germany to attack Poland at the same time and divide it between them.
We never knew about Ribbentrop - Molotov during the socialist rule. Same with the Katyn massacre - Germans were always blamed. It wasn't until the transformation (1989) that we learnt the truth.
And yet, all my life, whenever I've tried to bring the Poles' plight and their bravery to others' attention, to describe the horrors visited upon them, it's entirely dismissed. Or worse, derided.
This would be an effect of years of propaganda - we were sold, every single one of us, in exchange for good relations between Stalin and the western world.
The Russians fell victim to propaganda too - if you ask any American or European who won the IIWW they will say it was the Americans, the British and the French. This is not perfectly accurate, since it was the Russians that are responsible for 'liberating' (a most unfortunate word) Europe from Nazism. The Allies only landed in Normandy when the war was more or less won. At the time of landing the Russians were no more that 1000 km from Berlin. Sure, Normandy did speed things up, but certainly was not a tipping point.
She did, however, use my heritage against me many more times before I escaped her bigoted, hate-filled world.
Let me put it this way - your ancestors come from a place, that was the centre of the world in 1600, in military, cultural and political aspects. While Europe was ravaged by absolutist rule and religious wars, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was a place, where artists could freely point out the flaws of a monarch (something that has been unheard of anywhere else), where Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Freemasons and Jews lived peacefully with each other, where political and religious freedom was comparable to that of today. Poland was the only country in the world that ever managed to lay a successful siege to Moscow. Napoleon and Hitler tried it - and failed.