BiblioVault - Books about Poland

Mapping Warsaw

The Spatial Poetics of a Postwar City

Ewa Wampuszyc

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Mapping Warsaw is an interdisciplinary study that combines urban studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, history, literature, and photography. It examines Warsaw's post-World War II reconstruction through images and language.

Juxtaposing close readings of photo books, socialist-era newsreels called the Polska Kronika Filmowa, the comedies of Leonard Buczkowski and Jan Fethke, the writing and films of Tadeusz Konwicki, and a case study on the Palace of Culture and Science—a "gift" from none other than Stalin—this study investigates the rhetorical and visual, rather than physical, reconstruction of Warsaw in various medias and genres.

Ewa Wampuszyc roots her analysis in the historical context of the postwar decade and shows how and why Poland's capital became an essential part of a propaganda program inspired by communist ideology and the needs of a newly established socialist People's Republic. Mapping Warsaw demonstrates how physical space manifests itself in culture, and how culture, history, and politics leave an indelible mark on places. It points out ways in which we take for granted our perception of space and the meanings we assign to it.

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A Match Made in Hell

The Jewish Boy and the Polish Outlaw Who Defied the Nazis

Larry Stillman, from the testimony of Morris Goldner

University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

    When Moniek (Morris) Goldner and his family were uprooted from their Polish farming village during a German action, the child-sized sixteen-year-old fled into the forests. He eventually met up with his father, who had also escaped, and together they managed to survive until a former friend betrayed the pair. Wounded and left for dead beneath his father’s murdered body, Goldner was rescued by the enigmatic outlaw Jan Kopec, who was also in hiding, looking for ways to profit from his criminal expertise.
    For eighteen months Kopec hid the boy with him, moving from one area to another, often staying in hideouts he had fashioned years earlier. At first Kopec trained Goldner simply to serve as his accomplice in robberies and black market activities. But before long he pushed the training to a whole new level, making it possible for him to sell Goldner’s services to a shadowy resistance group which was becoming interested in the daring young saboteur.
    And through it all, these two disparate personalities—the quiet, small-framed boy and the stocky, callous mercenary—forged an remarkable friendship and co-dependency born of need and desperation in a hellish time and place.

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Medallions

Zofia Nalkowska

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Medallions is a collection of eight documentary stories originally published in Poland in 1946 that recount Nazi war crimes under the German occupation of the country. The author, Zofia Nalkowska, was a member of a special committee for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland, and the stories reflect facts she learned from victims and witnesses to atrocities inflicted on Polish civilians.

Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature, Medallions stands as the culmination of Nalkowska's literary style, a style the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once described as "the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature." More than mere historical record, Medallions offers the reader startling immediacy, the repetition of an event as it persists in the testimonial present, in the scars on the consciousness and conscience of individuals.

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Messengers of Disaster

Raphael Lemkin, Jan Karski, and Twentieth-Century Genocides

Annette Becker, Translated by Käthe Roth

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Leading up to World War II, two Polish men witnessed the targeted extermination of Jews under Adolf Hitler and the German Reich before the reality of the Holocaust was widely known. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term "genocide," and Jan Karski, a Catholic member of the Polish resistance, independently shared this knowledge with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Having heard false rumors of wartime atrocities before, the leaders met the messengers with disbelief and inaction, leading to the eventual murder of more than six million people.

Messengers of Disaster draws upon little-known texts from an array of archives, including the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Carrying the knowledge of disaster took a toll on Lemkin and Karski, but their work prepared the way for the United Nations to unanimously adopt the first human rights convention in 1948 and influenced the language we use to talk about genocide today. Annette Becker's detailed study of these two important figures illuminates how distortions of fact can lead people to deny knowledge of what is happening in front of their own eyes.

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Mothers, Families or Children? Family Policy in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, 1945-2020

Tomasz Inglot

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Mothers, Families, or Children? is the first comparative-historical study of family policies in Poland, Hungary, and Romania from 1945 until the eve of the global pandemic in 2020. The book highlights the emergence, consolidation, and perseverance of three types of family policies based on “mother-orientation” in Poland, “family orientation” in Hungary, and “child-orientation” in Romania. It uses a new theoretical framework to identify core and contingent clusters of benefits and services in each country and trace their development across time and under different political regimes, before and after 1989. It also examines and compares policy continuity and change with special attention to institutions, ideas, and actors involved in decision making and reform. As family policies continue to evolve in the era of European Union membership and new governmental and societal actors emerge, this study reveals mechanisms that help preserve core family policy clusters while allowing reform in contingent ones in each country.

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Multicultural Commonwealth

Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives

Stanley Bill

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

An Innovative Study on Historical Multiculturalism in Central and Eastern Europe

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was once the largest country in Europe—a multicultural republic that was home to Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Although long since dissolved, the Commonwealth remains a rich resource for mythmaking in its descendent modern-day states, but also a source of contention between those with different understandings of its history. Multicultural Commonwealth brings together the expertise of world-renowned scholars in a range of disciplines to present perspectives on both the Commonwealth’s historical diversity and the memory of this diversity. With cutting-edge research on the intermeshed histories and memories of different ethnic and religious groups of the Commonwealth, this volume asks how various contemporary conceptions of multiculturalism can be applied to the region through a critical lens that also seeks to understand the past on its own terms.

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Music of Another World

Szymon Laks

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Compassionate yet detached, ironic yet pitilessly honest, Szymon Laks, the kapellmeister of the Auschwitz orchestra, presents a disturbing description of a phenomenon seldom mentioned in the literature of the Holocaust: the presence of music among the crematoria. His story is a testament to the human spirit and to music itself, the beauty of which Laks and others honored even as the lives of so many were destroyed.

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My Fathers Testament

Edward Gastfriend

Temple University Press, 1999

This first-person account, by the youngest of eight children of a pious Jewish family from Sosnoviec in Poland, is remarkable for the faith shown by a teenager faced with the horrifying realities of the Holocaust. Edward Gastfriend, known as Lolek as a boy, remembers in heart-wrenching detail the seven years he survived in German-occupied Poland.

The accelerating Nazi assault on the Jews abruptly shattered Lolek's life. Jews were randomly beaten and arrested, forced out of their homes, deported to slave labor camps, and shot on the streets. During this time, Lolek lost his family, friends, and neighbors, the whole while struggling to hold onto a promise he made to his father before his father was deported. Lolek pledged never to denounce God and to maintain his faith. This covenant proved to be the key to his remarkable survival in several slave labor camps including Auschwitz and several satellite camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

My Father's Testament is an intimate portrayal of a teenage boy trying to stay alive without losing his humanity - in hiding, in the camps, and during the death marches at the end of the war.

Embedded in this unique memoir are two other stories of fathers and sons. One lies in the moving Foreword by David R. Gastfriend, Ed's son, now a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. The other lies in Bjorn Krondorfer's Afterword. Years after he met Edward Gastfriend, Krondorfer was startled to hear his father mention Blechhammer as one of the places where he was stationed as a young German soldier. Blechhammer was where Lolek was held in a slave labor camp. The coincidence led this German father and son to travel back to the site to confront the Holocaust.

My Father's Testament will engage readers interested in history, the Holocaust, and religion.

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My Life's Travels and Adventures

An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland

Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa

Iter Press, 2020

In her never-finished My Life’s Travels and Adventures, the eighteenth-century Polish doctor Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa plays a myriad of roles, including child bride, wife, mother, lover, adventuress, slave trader, writer, and home-taught physician. She successfully carved out a viable niche for herself, navigating the multicultural, multiethnic, and varied religious environment of Europe’s eastern periphery. Despite limited expectations for female professionals, she became a highly sought after and well-respected practitioner of the medical arts and rose to the position of court physician to Turkish pashas and Hungarian princes, and even to Sultan Mustafa III. My Life’s Travels and Adventures—part memoir, part autobiography, and part travelogue—provides a view into eighteenth-century social, professional, and gender interactions and weaves a rich narrative replete with vignettes of love, travel, and popular superstitions important to our historical, ethnographic, and religious understanding of the era.

This edition brings the entirety of this personal and idiosyncratic memoir to English for the first time.

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My Sister's Mother

A Memoir of War, Exile, and Stalin’s Siberia

Donna Solecka Urbikas

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

In the 1950s, baby boomer Donna Solecka Urbikas grew up in the American Midwest yearning for a "normal" American family. But during World War II, her Polish-born mother and half sister had endured hunger, disease, and desperate escape from slave labor in Siberia. War and exile created a profound bond between mother and older daughter, one that Donna would struggle to find with either of them. In this unforgettable memoir, Donna recounts her family history and her own survivor's story, finally understanding the damaged mother who had saved her sister.

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My War against the Nazis

A Jewish Soldier with the Red Army

Adam Broner, with a foreword by Antony Polonsky

University of Alabama Press, 2007

A poignant account of the perils and fortunes of an indomitable survivor of violence in Eastern Europe during World War II.

In 1939, to escape Nazi occupation, 14-year-old Adam Broner and his older brother Sam left their home and family in Lodz, Poland, and made their way to the Soviet Union. Adam enlisted in the Red Army to join the fight against the Nazis but was sent to work in a Siberian coal mine instead when his nationality was discovered. After a bold and daring escape from Siberia, Broner reached the Soviet Polish Kosciuszko Army, joined the struggle against the Nazis, participated in the liberation of Poland, and rode victorious into Berlin in 1945. He later learned that his parents, siblings (except Sam), and all other close relatives had perished during the war.

Broner rebuilt his life, established a family, returned to Moscow for a degree in economics, and then went back to Poland, where he accepted a job in the Polish central planning agency. Eventually fed up with the growing anti-Semitism of the Communist government there, the author emigrated to the United States in 1969. He earned a doctorate from Princeton University and served as an economic adviser to New Jersey governors and the state legislature. In retirement, Broner learned portrait painting and reproduced the likenesses of his parents and siblings from memory, which are presented along with their biographies in this book.

In recounting his struggle for survival during some of the most dramatic upheavals of the 20th century— the Great Depression, Nazism, World War II, and the spread of Communism in Central Europe— Broner reveals a life dedicated to the ultimate goal of freedom, which he achieved through a combination of arduous effort and fortunate circumstance.

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