Before the Holocaust, Warsaw was world’s second largest Jewish city. Most survivors left Poland, but some stayed and today life has revived. Before World War II, Warsaw was the second largest Jewish city in the world after New York. They were among three million Polish Jews killed by the German Nazis. Many survivors left Poland…
The Polish II Corps, which fought under British command in the Italian Campaign of 1943-45, is best remembered for its heroic capture of the abbey of Monte Cassino. But less known are the details of its formation under General Władysław Anders in Russia, from exiles and convicts of the Gulag, and of its amazing journey…
Much has been written about the historic Yalta Conference in February 1945, when Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met to decide the future of the postwar world. Little, however, is known about the role played behind the scenes by three young women. In “The Daughters of Yalta” Catherine Grace Katz tells the story through the eyes…
In the mid sixteenth century, there were many parallels between the political cultures of Poland-Lithuania and the kingdoms of the British Isles. Both saw thinkers, inspired by the ideals of Renaissance civic humanism, challenge more traditional currents of thought deriving from scholasticism and pride in ancient constitutions. Across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania there were…
Should politics be a way of overseeing economic growth and social processes, or should it also be a life lived within communities concentrated around the idea of freedom? Does freedom spread in the structures of the post-modern world all by itself as a vital function of social life, or does it require constant civic care,…
Jan Matejko’s ‘Astronomer Copernicus’ (1873) was, in some ways, the dying star of history painting. While the painting was and remains iconic, the genre waned in the decades following its creation. Yet, Matejko’s star burns bright to this day and the legacy of history painting continues in some contemporary art. Christopher Riopelle, curator of ‘Conversations with…
