Sometimes a war is justified, and coming to the aid of an ally getting invaded is a damn good justification.
Especially if that ally is simply asking for more hardware and not asking for feet on the ground.
Edit: Fixed the link, it was broken for some reason though it worked earlier today. IDK this mirror should work though
As a Czech, I feel like many people forget that the Soviet Union demanded all the allies come to Czechoslovakia's aid and kick the Nazi menace in the bud as soon as they tried to subjugate us. Instead, the UK, USA, and most egregiously, Poland, stabbed us all in the back at the negotiating table while denying the Soviet Union a seat. The western allies were intent on bolstering Nazi Germany and Poland so that they could mount an invasion of the Soviet Union in order to 'free' more markets for Western exploitation. This necessitated conceding to Hitler's demands on the Sudetes and Danzig. Even more interestingly, it also necessitated giving Czechoslovak land to Poland, and some of these regions were quite important for steel production. Of course, the western powers were playing with fire. Hitler famously gave the Danzig or War speech, much to the surprise of Polish diplomats, who were actively in talks to cede Danzig to Germany in order to receive support for war against the Soviet Union (which they had already instigated once before, annexing an independent socialist government in Western Ukraine, and one in Belarus, both who were allied with the Soviet Union and later voted to join it). Turns out, Nazi Germany wasn't a fan of sharing spoils of war.
These things were all fairly obvious to people that lived in Eastern Europe back then, which is why so many Slavs turned to communism.
So to reiterate, anti-war positions are actually good. The west wanted this war, it simply backfired. If the West never jockeyed for this war posture due to a never-ending greed for increasing profits, its likely Hitler would have never gotten anything done and would have been a footnote.
This is what Czech textbooks generally teach about the war, and I'm partial to this interpretation, though I've read that they are changing them recently to 'revise' our historical narrative.
That's why the udssr where allied with Hitler early in the war and signing a NAP, only stopping because Hitler betrayed them and attacked anyway?
Sorry, but this interpretation sounds a bit revisionistic. It was lot of people's fault that Hitler could do what he did, that's not a east vs. West thing. People should focus on the real factors and watch that something like this never happens again.
Claiming the USSR and Nazi Germany were allied is not only Nazi propaganda (aka 'double genocide' theory), but also holocaust denial.
It should be noted that Poland invaded the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War and opportunistically killed tens of thousands of Jews. The Soviet Union, by the accounts of many Jewish and Slavic survivors of the holocaust, saved hundreds of thousands of lives and won the war by not only signing that NAP, but also making sure that the Nazis were not occupying vast swathes of territory in western Belarus and Ukraine that had tons of vulnerable groups in them. The price for being an antisemite was death in the Soviet Union.
I say this as someone whose family house was annexed by the Nazis, and our relatives house was torched and their kids were stolen away to the Rhineland, which we only learned of recently through genetic testing. We just assumed they all died.
Not saying allied, but had an agreement that lasted until the nazis betrayed them. But equalling that saying this is the same as holocaust denial plays holocaust denialism down.
To me it seems that the polish wanted independence, but I don't know much about this conflict, so I am not really comfortable to comment on that.
Fighting nazis was a good thing and the appeasement politic from western nations was a bad take, I would never argue against that, but I don't know how the NAP helped, because for me it semms more like it gave the nazis time and space to make atrocitys in Europe and German.
Sorry to hear that this happens to your family. War is hell an leaves it scars. Hope your family can heal.
Poland went to war with basically all their neighbors at this point and were largely supplied by Germany. There are anxieties about this history to this day in Western Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, and Czechia, because the Poles massacred a lot of people. Its one thing to want independence, its another to massacre innocent civilians for fun.
It wasn't 'appeasement', it was active collusion.
The Soviet Union had just got out of a Civil War and had almost no industry. They had roughly 10 years to build an industrial base capable of defeating what essentially amounted to all of mainland Europe. They were a feudal society before WW2 and were starting from scratch. And they won, so clearly what they did, communism, worked.