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Trump to Speak to Poles at Site that Honors Nation's Heroism


The monument to the heroes of the 1944 Warsaw Rising against the occupying Nazi Germans in Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, June 22, 2017.
The monument to the heroes of the 1944 Warsaw Rising against the occupying Nazi Germans in Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, June 22, 2017.

U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to deliver a speech during his upcoming visit to Poland at the site of a memorial to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, a Polish official says.

Krzysztof Szczerski, an aide to Polish President Andrzej Duda, said late Wednesday that it is an honor for Poles that Trump will give a major speech at Krasinski Square, "a site which symbolizes Polish heroism."

The speech will come during a brief visit that Trump will make to Warsaw on July 6 before he attends a summit of Group of 20 leaders in Hamburg, Germany.

In Warsaw, Trump will also attend a summit devoted to the Three Seas Initiative, a relatively new effort to expand and modernize energy and infrastructure links in a region of Central Europe that spans from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic and Black seas in the south.

The Warsaw Uprising, the largest act of resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, saw insurgents and civilians fight the German occupiers for more than two months. The revolt was brutally crushed and resulted in the death of more than 200,000 Poles and the destruction of Warsaw.

Today, it stands for Poles as one of the most honorable episodes in their history, as an act of courage against a brutal occupier.

It will be a welcome gesture to many Poles, including Polish-Americans in the United States, a constituency that tends to be conservative and voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

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