In his latest book, John Micgiel takes us behind the scenes to reveal the joint operation of Polish and American intelligence at the end of the Second World War. “Project Eagle” is the remarkable story of the parachute-volunteers unit operating behind enemy lines. A story that has been almost completely forgotten. Towards the end of…
There has been a lot of talk about the prison resistance movement operating in Auschwitz. The number of books devoted not only to the issue itself, but also to Witold Pilecki, is growing. Meanwhile, the most important book on this subject was written by a former Auschwitz prisoner over forty years ago. Józef Garliński was…
Kris Van Heuckelom is Associate Professor in Literary Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His well-written and informative study Polish Migrants in European Film, investigates the long-running tradition of Polish migration, with its developments over the course of a century. The starting point lies in the partitions-era, the “Great Emigration”, when…
The suggestive image of an “Iron Curtain” creating an airtight separation of East and Central Europe from the western part of the continent often prevent us from taking note of exchanges which took place across the divide from Szczecin to Trieste. Similarly, if we examine Cold War intellectual history, we tend to look on the…
For the new book by Katarzyna Kosior, Becoming a Queen in Early Modern Europe: East and West the author carefully studied ceremonial and quasi-ceremonial events (she does not specify, however, what she understands by the term “ceremonial”) in the lives of women who are to become queens in 16th-century France and Poland. The ways in…
The main goal of a historical exhibition is not to represent the truth about the past, but to promote a particular, desired vision of it. This statement is one of the core hypotheses of a new book by Anna Ziębińska-Witek. It is also the point of departure for a thought-provoking study on the identity-building process…
