At the end of the Second World War, the Polish community in Spain faced a major rescue project. After years of helping compatriots forging their way to freedom from German occupation through the French-Spanish border, it was time to help yet other Nazi victims – Polish unaccompanied children abandoned in Allied refugee camps. by Dorota…
The Czechoslovak Legion, established in September 1939 in Poland, was captured by the Soviets. After the Allies recognized the Edvard Beneš group in exile as the official government-in-exile in July 1940, the Czechs contacted the Soviet embassy in London requesting the release of Col. Svoboda’s soldiers interned in the USSR. The fact that the British…
Historians were highly interested in economic history in the mid-20th century. At that time, a number of fundamental studies were published, and discussions on economic matters were printed in the most prestigious historical periodicals. In fact, one historian of socio-economic history, Fernand Braudel, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Two Polish academics, Marian…
When Czesław Milosz arrived in Warsaw in 1981, fresh from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the visits he made, was to a private apartment, to meet with the people responsible for bringing his poems to Polish readers. From 1951, when Milosz had refused to return to Stalinist Poland, a ban had been…
It seems he basked in the full glory of the Polish “golden age” from the moment of his birth. The firstborn, long-awaited royal son, and heir to the largest state in Central and Eastern Europe, almost a million kilometers long and stretching (it strokes Poles’ ego, this phrase, and we will hear more of it)…
The strike started by workers at Poznań’s largest factory, the Joseph Stalin Metal Works, spread to the entire city, and became an anti-communist revolt. For the Stalinist regime, this was an earthquake. by Paweł Sasanka At 6 am on 28 June 1956, when the workers of the W-3 division came to work, none of them…
