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The August Trials
The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland
Andrew Kornbluth
Harvard University Press, 2021

The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past.

When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten.

Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations.

The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.

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Between the Brown and the Red
Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki
Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki
Ohio University Press, 2012

Between the Brown and the Red captures the multifaceted nature of church-state relations in communist Poland, relations that oscillated between mutual confrontation, accommodation, and dialogue. Ironically, under communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger. This happened in spite of the fact that the government deployed nationalist themes in order to portray itself as more Polish than communist. Between the Brown and the Red also introduces one of the most fascinating figures in the history of twentieth-century Poland and the communist world.

In this study of the complex relationships between nationalism, communism, authoritarianism, and religion in twentieth-century Poland, Mikołaj Kunicki shows the ways in which the country’s communist rulers tried to adapt communism to local traditions, particularly ethnocentric nationalism and Catholicism. Focusing on the political career of Bolesław Piasecki, a Polish nationalist politician who began his surprising but illuminating journey as a fascist before the Second World War and ended it as a procommunist activist, Kunicki demonstrates that Polish communists reinforced an ethnocentric self-definition of Polishness and—as Piasecki’s case demonstrates—thereby prolonged the existence of Poland’s nationalist Right.

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Books Are Weapons
The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism
Siobhan Doucette
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Much attention has been given to the role of intellectual dissidents, labor, and religion in the historic overthrow of communism in Poland during the 1980s. Books Are Weapons presents the first English-language study of that which connected them—the press. Siobhan Doucette provides a comprehensive examination of the Polish opposition’s independent, often underground, press and its crucial role in the events leading to the historic Round Table and popular elections of 1989. While other studies have emphasized the role that the Solidarity movement played in bringing about civil society in 1980-1981, Doucette instead argues that the independent press was the essential binding element in the establishment of a true civil society during the mid- to late-1980s.
            Based on a thorough investigation of underground publications and interviews with important activists of the period from 1976-1989, Doucette shows how the independent press, rooted in the long Polish tradition of well-organized resistance to foreign occupation, reshaped this tradition to embrace nonviolent civil resistance while creating a network that evolved from a small group of dissidents into a broad opposition movement with cross-national ties and millions of sympathizers.  It was the galvanizing force in the resistance to communism and the rebuilding of Poland’s democratic society.
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Diary 1954
Leopold Tyrmand
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Poland’s Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954—written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin’s death—is an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the lies—big and small—that the regimes employed to stay in power. Witty and insightful, Tyrmand’s diary is the chronicle of a man who uses seemingly minor modes of resistance—as a provocative journalist, a Warsaw intellectual, the "spiritual father" of Polish hipsters, and a promoter of jazz in Poland—to maintain his freedom of thought.
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A Great Restlessness
The Life and Politics of Dorise Nielsen
Faith Johnston
University of Manitoba Press, 2006
Dorise Nielsen was a pioneering feminist, a radical politician, the first Communist elected to Canadaís House of Commons, and the only woman elected in 1940. But despite her remarkable career, until now little has been known about her.From her youth in London during World War I to her burial in 1980 in a heroís cemetery in China, Nielsen lived through tumultuous times. Struggling through the Great Depression as a homesteaderís wife in rural Saskatchewan, Nielsen rebelled against the poverty and injustice that surrounded her, and found like-minded activists in the CCF and the Communist Party of Canada. In 1940 when leaders of the Communist Party were either interned or underground, Nielsen became their voice in Parliament. But her activism came at a high price. As a single mother in Ottawa, she sacrificed a close relationship with her family for her career. As a woman in an emerging political organisation, her authority was increasingly usurped by younger male party members. As a committed communist, she moved to Mao's China in 1957 and dedicated her lifeís work to a cause that went seriously awry.Faith Johnston illuminates the life of a woman who paved the way for a generation of women in politics, who tried to be both a good mother and a good revolutionary, and who refused to give up on either.
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My Family's Role in the World Revolution
and Other Prose
Bora Cosic
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Bora Ćosić's My Family's Role in the World Revolution enjoyed a successful run as a play, but the film version was closed immediately and ultimately caused Ćosić's publications to be for over four years.

During the German occupation of Belgrade, a family—including an alarmist mother, an eternally drunk father, two young aunts who swoon over American movie stars, and a playboy uncle—attempt to find any kind of work they can do at home. When the postwar Socialist society is being ushered in after the war, the narrator becomes the slogan-spouting ideological leader of the household, while his family tries—and often fails miserably—to take part in the "great change."

This volume also includes several Ćosić short stories, and recent essays on the war in the former Yugoslavia.
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Poland 1945
War and Peace
Magdalena Grzebalkowska (translated by John Markoff and Malgorzata Markoff)
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
The official end of World War II did not mean the end of the torments inflicted on civilians. This book brings us vivid personal accounts of ordinary people in Poland—Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and others—caught up in the most violent war in history and its aftermath. No place experienced more intense suffering for a longer period of time than Poland—the first country to be invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the last to be “liberated”. This is the story of how people survived the flames of war, and began to clear the rubble and try to rebuild their lives, from January to December 1945.
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Scattered
The Forced Relocation of Poland’s Ukrainians after World War II
Diana Howansky Reilly
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Following World War II, the communist government of Poland forcibly relocated the country's Ukrainian minority by means of a Soviet-Polish population exchange and then a secretly planned action code-named Operation Vistula. In Scattered, Diana Howansky Reilly recounts these events through the experiences of three siblings caught up in the conflict, during a turbulent period when compulsory resettlement was a common political tactic used against national minorities to create homogenous states.
    Born in the Lemko region of southeastern Poland, Petro, Melania, and Hania Pyrtej survived World War II only to be separated by political decisions over which they had no control. Petro relocated with his wife to Soviet Ukraine during the population exchange of 1944–46, while his sisters Melania and Hania were resettled to western Poland through Operation Vistula in 1947. As the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought resettlement, the Polish government meanwhile imprisoned suspected sympathizers within the Jaworzno concentration camp. Melania, Reilly's maternal grandmother, eventually found her way to the United States during Poland's period of liberalization in the 1960s.
    Drawing on oral interviews and archival research, Reilly tells a fascinating, true story that provides a bottom-up perspective and illustrates the impact of extraordinary historical events on the lives of ordinary people. Tracing the story to the present, she describes survivors' efforts to receive compensation for the destruction of their homes and communities.

Silver Medal for World History, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Finalist, Housatonic Book Awards

Finalist in History, Foreword Books of the Year

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Solidarity And Contention
Networks Of Polish Opposition
Maryjane Osa
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Offers an innovative model for understanding how social movements occur in repressive societies. After a series of failed attempts at mobilizing society, Poland's opposition sprang to surprising-and newly effective-life with the formation of the Solidarity trade union in 1980. If not for those past failures, this book suggests, Solidarity might never have succeeded. Solidarity and Contention deftly reconstructs the networks of protest in Communist Poland to show how waves of dissent during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s left an organizational residue that both instructed and enabled Solidarity and, ultimately, the Polish revolution. Using newly available documentary sources, Maryjane Osa establishes links between activists during three waves of protest: 1954 to 1959, 1966 to 1970, and 1976 to 1980. She shows how political challengers, applying lessons drawn from past failures, developed an ideological formula to de-emphasize divisive issues and promote symbolic concerns, thus facilitating coalition building. Solidarity was therefore able to take advantage of a large opposition network already well in place before the founding of the union. An important case study in itself, the book also answers one of the most intriguing questions in social movement research: how can movements emerge in authoritarian states-where media are state controlled, the rights of assembly and speech are restricted, and the risks of collective action are high? Maryjane Osa is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University
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Tito and His Comrades
Jože Pirjevec, Foreword by Emily Greble
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
This landmark biography reveals the life of one of the most powerful figures of the Cold War era. Josip Broz (1892–1980), nicknamed Tito, led Yugoslavia for nearly four decades with charisma, cunning, and an iron fist.

With his Partisans he fought Hitler during World War II, and after the war he shrewdly resisted the Soviet Union's grasp. A leader of the non-aligned nations, he long enjoyed a reputation in the West as "the only good Communist" despite a dubious human rights record at home. Jože Pirjevec employs impressive research from archives in eight languages to offer this illuminating, definitive portrait of a complex man in turbulent times.

Pirjevec recounts how Tito, with little schooling but an astute intellect and driving ambition, rose through Communist Party ranks to shape and rule the Yugoslav federation. Surviving multiple assassination attempts by Nazis, Soviet spies, and others, Tito boldly threatened Stalin in return and may have, Pirjevec reveals, contrived Stalin's death. The narrative follows Tito's personal and political life into old age, as the specter of a Soviet invasion haunted him until his death at age eighty-seven. Available in English for the first time, this edition includes new material from Pirjevec and a foreword by Emily Greble.
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TITO
YUGOSLAVIA'S GREAT DICTATOR, A REASSESSM
STEVAN K. PAVLOWITCH
The Ohio State University Press, 1992

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Words and Occasions
An Anthology of Speeches and Articles Selected from His Papers by the Right Honourable L. B. Pearson
L. B. Pearson
Harvard University Press, 1970

In 1924 the magazine of Victoria College at the University of Toronto carried a humorous sports essay, “The Game's the Thing,” by a history lecturer named Lester Bowles Pearson. This lively and imaginative piece is the first selection in the present anthology of articles and speeches, interviews and debates by Pearson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 and Canadian Prime Minister from 1963 to 1968.

The pieces deal with a variety of subjects: national and international, political and nonpolitical, serious and frivolous. Of special interest are “Canada and the San Francisco Conference” (1945), “Some Principles of Canadian Foreign Policy” (1948), “Politics, Opposition, and the Plight of Democracy” (1960), and “Liberal Leadership Convention” (1968). Pearson's introductory remarks to each selection serve as autobiographical and interpretive links, carrying the reader forward through his career and with him on his travels to the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. The twenty-two photographs that are included add a visual dimension to this valuable record of a distinguished public life.

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