[Poland’s] final royal election took place on 7 September 1764 in the village of Wola near Warsaw. In the presence of the Russian military, noblemen convened in the village elected Stanisław Poniatowski to be Poland’s new monarch. Prof. Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski talks to the Polish History Museum about what happened behind the scenes of the election,…
14 June 2020 is the 80th anniversary of the first mass transport to the German Concentration Camp in Auschwitz. The vast majority of the 728 men were Polish political prisoners. Overall, the group consisted of members of the resistance movement; social and political activists arrested under AB Aktion, Catholic clergy, and a small group of…
The National Ossoliński Institute is fundamental to Polish culture. With its 200 year history, the Institute’s collection needs special care and this is not always an easy task. Director Adolf Juzwenko talks about the history of Ossolineum and his own contribution to its development. Ossolineum is an extremely distinguished institution in Poland. And its…
“The Sanation political movement was never uniform, it was bound by the person of Józef Piłsudski – his authority, and his will. When he was absent, differences became more pronounced. Each of the groups was striving to play a dominant role in the country, and be seen as the one most obviously and faithfully continuing…
“Reversing the schemes, sometimes adopted without reflection, I consider to be part of our historical duty. It consists in constantly rediscovering the past, not in establishing one canonical version in line with the political order of today”, says Professor Andrzej Nowak in the interview about the common European memory, and challenges it constitutes for the…
Jan Sehn (1909-1965) was a Polish lawyer and professor at the Jagiellonian University. Shortly after the war, he conducted research at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and also participated in preparing accusations against several dozen German war criminals who had worked at the camp. Additionally, he published a number of scientific papers on the functioning…
