“Protest!” is a leaflet written by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a Polish novelist, social activist and co-founder of the underground Catholic organisation Front for the Rebirth of Poland (Front Odrodzenia Polski, FOP). Illegally distributed on 11 August 1942, the pamphlet called for solidarity with the Jews who were subjected to brutal terror. On 22 July 1942, the…
Rafał Lemkin (1900–59) was an outstanding criminal law expert of Polonised-Jewish descent. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at the John Casimir University (Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza) in Lwów. He contributed to the codification of the Polish penal law, and analysed criminal legislations of the totalitarian regimes of Italy and Soviet Russia. In 1933, he…
A temporary exhibition titled The Power of the Story: From and Old Chronicle to a Modern Museum has opened at the Polish History Museum. It focuses on various ways of narrating Polish history and is divided into its successive stages: from the Middle Ages until modern times. The exhibition makes the visitor familiar with the…
Look at the photo carefully. The face of a Polish girl dressed in the camp’s striped uniform is symbolic of Nazi policy towards children whose lives were considered unnecessary. by Piotr Abryszeński The German Generalplan Ost was created on the basis of the assumption that a “living space” (“Lebensraum”) in the territories of Central…
On January 22, 1863, the Polish ‘Central National Committee’ proclaimed the outbreak of an uprising and issued a manifesto whereby it proclaimed itself the Interim National Government. The document appealed to all the inhabitants of the former Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita (Commonwealth), within its pre-partition borders, to fight against tsarist rule for liberty. The manifesto heralded the…
An English-language translation of the Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples – a Chinese ethnographic album created at the behest of Emperor Qianlong in the mid-18th century – has recently been published. The publication contains descriptions of peoples with whom the Middle Kingdom maintained contacts, including Poles. by Anna Zhou The Qing dynasty (1644-1912),…
