Countess Karolina Lanckorońska is best known for her memoirs titled Those Who Trespass Against Us: One Woman’s War Against the Nazis (‘War Memoirs’ in Polish). In the memory of Polish historians, whom she often generously supported, she went down in history as a scholar and patron of science. She was the first woman in Poland…
The Europe of stakes – this is the term that can be used to describe most of our continent in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Reformation took on many different faces, and the paths leading to what was most important for Europeans at the time, namely salvation, proved to be not only different and…
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…
