Publications

Czesław Miłosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced...

Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940. Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp – Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruellest...

Michal Goleniewski was one of the Cold War’s most important spies but has been overlooked in the vast literature on the intelligence battles between the Western Powers and the Soviet Bloc. Renowned investigative journalist Kevin Coogan reveals Goleniewski’s extraordinary story for the first time in this biography. Goleniewski rose to be a senior officer in...

Jewish Childhood in Kraków is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children’s experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously. Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence...

A fascinating study of the devastating new form of warfare that redrew the map of Europe in the opening year of World War II, bringing about the military collapse of three modern industrialized armies. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany launched the invasion of Poland, employing a new type of offensive warfare: Blitzkrieg. So named...

“Prus is of particular interest not only because of his great popularity in the decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century but because his deliciously contrarian nature makes it impossible to pigeonhole him as ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’, or – perhaps more to the point for this study – judeophilic or antisemitic”. Bolesław Prus and...

The memoirs discovers the odyssey from the Red Army to the RAF and the daily life of Roman taken into the Russian Red Army. In WWII, as a conscripted soldier, a cattle train takes Roman further and further into the Soviet Union, away from his village. He sleeps in peasant huts, empty schools, factories, and...

Seven centuries of extraordinary women! Though often overlooked in conventional accounts, women with myriad backgrounds and countless talents have made an impact on Polish and Polish American history. John J. Bukowczyk gathers articles from the journals Polish Review and Polish American Studies to offer a fascinating cross-section of readings about the lives and experiences of...

By 1942 the Nazi leadership had decided that the Jewish ghettos across occupied Poland should be liquidated, with Warsaw’s being the largest , processed in phases. In response the left-wing Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) and right-wing Jewish Military Union (ZZW) formed and began training, preparing defences and smuggling in arms and explosives. The first Warsaw...

In a normal country, the rights of labour unions render it possible for the demands of workers to be met peacefully. But in a place where there is no right to strike, where legislation imposed on workers annuls with one fell swoop a hundred years of labour union achievements, where the government lowers the workers’...