Practices of memory. German-Polish Debates on Remembrance

Memorial sites, monuments, and museums are a natural element of the surrounding landscape and an important tool for shaping collective memory. They refer both to what a given community wants to celebrate and to difficult and painful events. In the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we observed the changing languages of…



Witold Pilecki: Auschwitz Volunteer Who Warned The World

In 1940, Witold Pilecki, a Polish Army officer and member of the Polish underground resistance, volunteered to be captured by the Gestapo. There were rumours that Auschwitz was a place of shocking brutality, but the Polish underground leadership needed someone on the ground to find out the real extent of the horrors taking place. Leaving…


The Volunteer with author Jack Fairweather and Clare Mulley

Writer and broadcaster, Clare Mulley, joins the Costa Prize award–winning author and journalist Jack Fairweather, to discuss the story of Witold Pilecki, a Polish cavalry officer and resistance leader during the Second World War. Pilecki was an amazing character whose life we should all know more about; a man who willingly volunteered to be imprisoned…


Pilecki Institute in Berlin from September 16

The Pilecki Institute office opens in Berlin and an exhibition is to be organised for its opening on September 16. “The exhibition, directed at the German and more widely, western audience, talks about the Polish experience of the war,” said Hanna Radziejowska, co-curator of the exhibition. The exhibition is called “Volunteer to Auschwitz” and will…


1 2 3 4