Polish Resilience Quotes
The song was adopted as the Polish national anthem in 1927. At the battle of Macieowice, the great Polish hero, Thaddeus Kosciusko, was seriously wounded and is said to have uttered, “Poland is finished.” The song written by another General was meant to counteract the psychological effect that the Russian enemies of Poland were trying to create by quoting Kosciusko. There are even today, Polish patriots who claim that Kosciusko never made the statement and it was all propaganda.
The notion that a the first line of a national anthem should be focused on the survival of the nation is explained by the history of countries that have and have not existed having been overrun and occupied and absorbed into other nations. That fear exists centuries later. See Ukraine for another example {642421}.
