Władysław Szpilman is currently the most well-known of the Warsaw Robinsons. How did he survive in German-occupied Warsaw? by Michał Studniarek In 1939, Władysław Szpilman resided in the center of Warsaw on Śliska Street with his parents, Samuel and Edwarda, his brother Henryk and his two sisters – Regina and Halina. Władysław was working…
In the summer and autumn of 1942, in the General Government (GG), the Germans carried out mass deportations of the Jewish population to extermination camps. These actions, code-named Operation ‘Reinhardt’, aimed to exterminate all the Jews from that area. The few who managed to escape deportation sought refuge on the so-called Aryan side. In these…
It is easier to wipe a country off the map than to destroy its soul. In the 19th century, that truth was discovered by Russia, Prussia and Austria as the loss of independence had a mobilising effect on the Poles. It became an impulse for spreading patriotic attitudes as well as an unprecedented flourishing of…
One of the several classic ‘Polish insurgences’: armed, bloody and lost. Apart from the romantic legend around it, it is distinguished by the fact that the episode lasting a year was unusually effective in unsettling things as they were. After the lost uprising, two paths of development, possible before, were not available to the Poles…
Sometimes literature sets up things for a revolution, although it usually takes some time until it actually breaks out. A generation needs time to read Rousseau’s Meditations, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Marx’s Capital, or The Catcher in the Rye. One can count on the fingers of one hand the literary works that directly triggered…
Out of the many countries in Europe with which Russia has had conflicts over historical interpretation, Poland occupies a special place. It belongs to those countries – alongside Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – which have been criticized by Russian authorities and Kremlin-friendly commentators the most frequently and vehemently. One can also claim, without exaggeration,…
