James Bond fandom made me follow most of its character actors and actresses. With the fandom for the culture, language, class, and elegance of the whole direction came the acute curiosity to explore the European cultures lesser-known to me.
One of my favorite films, GoldenEye led me to delve into the present life of its heroine- Natalya Fyodorovna Simonova a.k.a Izabella Scorupco. To describe in brief, she's a Polish actress, model, and singer. She got international fame for having starred in the James Bond film- GoldenEye against Pierce Brosnan.
A delve inside the actress' Instagram account showed up a very interesting picture of her with her mother.
Source: Official Instagram Account of Izabella Scorupco.
Her mother had that typical puffed hair tied in an elegant bun while she has fringes on her forehead and shoulder-length hair. Their dress is also very similar- a neck-covering full-sleeved shirt paired with a pina frock, floral for her mom, and a checkered one for her. Looking at that photograph made me remember the faces of other kids I'd seen in the holocaust movies and documentaries.
The similarities in the European kids of that time are strikingly uniform. Something in Izabella's childhood appearance seemed to me as strikingly similar to Anne Frank and other European kids, particularly the ones as seen in many Holocaust memorial books.
In another photograph of Izabella aged nine, she looks like how typical girls of her age used to look in that part of Europe around during and before the Second World War. Yet again, the style is the same- a high neck full sleeves shirt and the fringes on the forehead - a typical characteristic of all girls of that time in Europe. As such, no particular studies on similarities in appearance were found to further put up as a researched evidence with this piece.
Taking a look at this photograph from the archives of Holocaust work, the dressing style and hairstyles of these girls match that of Izabella's and her mom's in the old photograph. This shows that Polish ladies and girls, and almost all of the European ladies and girls in and around different countries around Poland have had the same style, typical to the early nineties.
On further study into the history of Poland and the origin of Polish natives, I discovered that the country belongs to the West Slavic group of tribes. Customarily, the Slavs are subdivided into East Slavs (chiefly including Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), West Slavs (which consists of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Wends, or Sorbs), and South Slavs (chiefly Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins). These people even though speaking different languages now, look significantly similar in appearance, which could change as per genetic intermixing in the future.
Ethnic race of 'Aryans' as emphasized by Hitler throughout the Third Reich even though 'bogus' or 'humbug', the pattern of appearance, traditions, culture, and language of people varies in a pattern across the geographical locations. I am glad that his propaganda to eliminate everyone apart from Aryans did not go successfully completely.
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-world-map-revealing-different-ethnic-groups-of-the-world-Ethnic-groups-in-the-world-by_fig5_349339050.
A number of factors play role in the variation and distribution of ethnic groups across the globe- Geography, culture, climate, traditions, roots, etc. which shape the different ethnic groups. With similarities and free societal intermixing, the boundaries of ethnicity might dissolve but nevertheless, we're all one, on a single planet called Earth!