The Polish Experience through World War II
The Polish Experience through World War II

Author: Aleksandra Ziólkowska-Boehm

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-05-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0739178202

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The Polish Experience through World War II explores Polish history through the lives of people touched by the war. The touching and terrible experiences of these people are laid bare by straightforward, first-hand accounts, including not only the hardships of deportation and concentration and refugee camps, but also the price paid by the officers killed or taken as prisoners during WWII and the families they left behind. Ziolkowska-Boehm reveals the difficulties of these women and children when, having lost their husbands and fathers, their travails take them through Siberia, Persia, India, and then Africa, New Zealand, or Mexico. Ziolkowska-Boehm recounts the experiences of individuals who lived through this tumultuous period in history through personal interviews, letters, and other surviving documents. The stories include Krasicki, a military pilot who was on of around 22 thousand Polish killed in Katyn; the saga of the Wartanowicz family, a wealthy and influential family whose story begins well before the war; and Wanda Ossowska, a Polish nurse in Auschwitz and other German prison camps. Placed squarely in historical context, these incredible stories reveal the experiences of the Polish people up through the second World War.

World War II Through Polish Eyes
World War II Through Polish Eyes

Author: M. B. Szonert

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13:

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Intertwining the fate of a country with the life of one Polish family, this book tells the story of a Polish girl who attempted to outwit the Nazis and the Soviets. The events are true and based on extensive oral accounts of the participants and documents released only in Polish and never before available in English, including original Auschwitz letters and Nazi exhumation documents.

The Eagle Unbowed
The Eagle Unbowed

Author: Halik Kochanski

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 911

ISBN-13: 0674071050

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The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.

Exile and Identity
Exile and Identity

Author: Katherine R. Jolluck

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13:

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Exile and Identity focuses on the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Polish women forcibly transported deep into the USSR as prisoners or "special settlers" after the Soviet invasion and annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. Using firsthand accounts ranging from the briefly factual to the intensely personal, Katherine R. Jolluck reconstructs the daily lives and attitudes of Polish women based on reports collected upon their amnesty and evacuation from the USSR. These moving stories provide a clear and detailed picture of the conditions in which these women were forced to live, and examine how those victimized interpreted and coped with their daily traumas.

The Girl from Krakow
The Girl from Krakow

Author: Alex Rosenberg

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781477830819

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It's 1935. Rita Feuerstahl comes to the university in Krakow intent on enjoying her freedom. But life has other things in store--marriage, a love affair, a child, all in the shadows of the oncoming war. When the war arrives, Rita is armed with a secret so enormous that it could cost the Allies everything, even as it gives her the will to live. She must find a way both to keep her secret and to survive amid the chaos of Europe at war. Living by her wits among the Germans as their conquests turn to defeat, she seeks a way to prevent the inevitable doom of Nazism from making her one of its last victims. Can her passion and resolve outlast the most powerful evil that Europe has ever seen? In an epic saga that spans from Paris in the '30s and Spain's Civil War to Moscow, Warsaw, and the heart of Nazi Germany, The Girl from Krakow follows one woman's battle for survival as entire nations are torn apart, never to be the same.

Girl 38: Finding a Friend
Girl 38: Finding a Friend

Author: Ewa Jozefkowicz

Publisher: Zephyr

Published: 2019-03-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1786698978

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A heartwarming story, set in contemporary London and WWII Poland, about friendship, human kindness and endurance in the darkest situation. Katya is a twelve-year-old girl with a big imagination. She loves art and working on her super-heroine comic Girl 38. At school, her best friend Gem is a gang leader, and a force to be reckoned with. But at home, Katya feels lonely when her parents are working at the hospital and her only company is an indifferent au pair. Even her neighbour, an elderly lady called Ania, is reclusive. Katya feels afraid of Ania, her overgrown garden and crumbling house. But when, one day, Katya sees her neighbour fall, she rushes to help and finds inside Ania's house a mysterious partly-finished portrait ... As Katya and Ania's friendship blossoms, Ania reveals her childhood story in Poland, a 'walled village' far away and her friend, Mila, who was taken away by soldiers. Meanwhile, at school, Gem takes a dislike to the new boy, Julius, and embarks on a spree of bullying. With her new insights which path will Katya choose to follow? Will Ania's incredible story of friendship and endurance show Katya the way and will she unravel the mystery of the unfinished portrait?

Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II
Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II

Author: Ville Kivimäki

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-12-03

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 3030846636

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This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies from World War I to World War II and from Western Europe to the east, it breaks new ground and helps to explain the troublesome politics of memory and trauma in post-1945 Europe all the way to the present day. This book is an outcome of a workshop project ‘Historical Trauma Studies,’ funded by the Joint Committee for the Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in 2018–20. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

On the Edges of Whiteness
On the Edges of Whiteness

Author: Jochen Lingelbach

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 178920447X

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From 1942 to 1950, nearly twenty thousand Poles found refuge from the horrors of war-torn Europe in camps within Britain’s African colonies, including Uganda, Tanganyika, Kenya and Northern and Southern Rhodesia. On the Edges of Whiteness tells their improbable story, tracing the manifold, complex relationships that developed among refugees, their British administrators, and their African neighbors. While intervening in key historical debates across academic disciplines, this book also gives an accessible and memorable account of survival and dramatic cultural dislocation against the backdrop of global conflict.

Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II
Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II

Author: Aleksandra Ziólkowska-Boehm

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0761869840

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A full understanding of the historical process must include studies of the social and economic conditions of societies as well as biographies of the people on which a clear understanding of history is based—but not just the “great” people. Biographies of “average” individuals, who exist in a society, have their own experiences and are acted upon by their surrounding environments, are essential to a clear and complete understanding of the past and its influence on the present. In this respect, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm has made a major contribution to furthering the understanding of World War II, and especially the part played by Poland and Poles, with her compilation of individual biographies of people who participated in many of its formative events. Ziolkowska-Boehm’s protagonists include a variety of people and experiences that enhance the usefulness of the volume. There are: Tadeusz Brzeziński, a member of the Polish diplomatic corps; the hero who escaped the Lwów ghetto to fight in the Warsaw Uprising and later founded a theatre group in Montréal; a pilot who escaped from the Soviet Union to fly fighters over Great Britain; a photographer of the Warsaw Uprising; a nurse during the Warsaw Uprising; a personal memories of the post-war era move to the United States; a person who was forcefully deported with her family to the Soviet Urals, later escaping to the Middle East and eventually Mexico; the boy who, though only eight when the war began, but survived Pawiak Prison, moved to Brazil, and became an internationally-known poet and artist.

Krysia
Krysia

Author: Krystyna Mihulka

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1613734441

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Few people are aware that in the aftermath of German and Soviet invasions and division of Poland, more than 1.5 million people were deported from their homes in Eastern Poland to remote parts of Russia. Half of them died in labor camps and prisons or simply vanished, some were drafted into the Russian army, and a small number returned to Poland after the war. Those who made it out of Russia alive were lucky—and nine-year-old Krystyna Mihulka was among them. In this childhood memoir, Mihulka tells of her family's deportation, under cover of darkness and at gunpoint, and their life as prisoners on a Soviet communal farm in Kazakhstan, where they endured starvation and illness and witnessed death for more than two years. This untold history is revealed through the eyes of a young girl struggling to survive and to understand the increasingly harsh world in which she finds herself.