Publications

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...

After crushing the Polish Uprising in 1863–1864, Russia established a new system of administration and control. Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864–1915 investigates in detail the imperial bureaucracy’s highly variable relationship with Polish society over the next half century. It portrays the personnel and policies of Russian domination and describes the numerous...

A messenger of truth, Jan Karski risked his life to carry his harrowing reports of the Holocaust from war-torn Poland to the Allied nations and, ultimately, the Oval Office, only to be ignored and disbelieved. Despite the West’s unwillingness to act, Karski continued to tell others about the atrocities he saw, and, after a period...

The process of creating and implementing sectoral policy has been described from two perspectives.   On the one hand, the attention of the contributors focuses mainly on the social actors of these policy – individuals and institutions on whose activity the process of implementing specific policy provisions depends. On the other hand, the complexity of...

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...