Publications

Poland is celebrated internationally for its rich and varied performance traditions and theatre histories. This groundbreaking volume is the first in English to engage with these topics across an ambitious scope, incorporating Staropolska, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Enlightenment and Romanticism within its broad ambit. The book also discusses theatre cultures under socialism, the emergence of...

The signing of the Gdansk Agreements in August 1980 signaled the birth of the Solidarity independent trae union movement. The sixteen months that followed until the December 1981 declaration of martial law remain one of the most fascinating chapter in the history of communist states. But the events of August 1980 did not materialize from...

Based on years of archival research, The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Ghetto. The functioning of the...

Sir Andrzej Panufnik used to say that he communicated in music, not words. But his literary legacy is substantial, as this book demonstrates. Its major element is Composing Myself, the autobiography he wrote in 1985, long since a collector’s item and here republished in a fully annotated new edition. It provides a graphic account of...

Briggens House, near Harlow in Essex, was one of the most important of the establishments requisitioned by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. Its mission was to accomplish Winston Churchill’s directive to ‘set Europe ablaze’, and, initially, the house was used as a finishing school for the Cichociemni, elite Polish saboteurs,...

During the Second World War, an unofficial group of Polish diplomats from the Polish Legation in Bern, led by that country’s envoy to Switzerland Aleksander Ładoś, cooperated with representatives of Jewish organizations to rescue Europe’s Jews. From at least the beginning of 1941 until the end of 1943, the members illegally purchased and issued passports...

Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman’s Experience is the first-person account by Jewish journalist Sara Nomberg-Przytyk of surviving Auschwitz then rising to various leadership roles in the newly-formed postwar Polish Communist Party. Building a just and equitable Poland for the common Pole through communism was her dream. The reality was neither simple nor successful. Working for...

The majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays edited by Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees,...

German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering World War II. Destruction of the Jews was a unique phenomenon of World War II. As Elie Wiesel said: „while not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims.” The Jews were totally helpless. They had no country of their own, no government, no representation, or...

Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935) is considered the founder of modern Poland, established in 1918 after more than 120 years of partitions, and one of the most important European statesmen of his time. Wolfgang Templin shows him as a person full of contradictions – from the leader of Polish socialists before World War I to autocratically ruler...