Publications

28 June 1956 in Poznań. One of the first months of Polish freedom

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’...

The Irish to the Rescue: The Tercentenary of the Polish Princess Clementinas Escape

In May 1719, the rescue and escape of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska from her detention in Innsbruck was celebrated throughout Catholic Europe. It was a feat of painstaking planning, daring execution, and steel-nerved improvisation. Masterminded by Kildareman Charles Wogan, he and his Irish and French companions influenced the course of international relations, shocking King George...

Surviving Katyn. Stalin's Polish massacre and the search for truth

The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story...

TOTALITARIAN AND 20TH CENTURY STUDIES

The subject matter of the present batch of articles is focused along a number of topical axes. The authors of the articles mention such issues as the genesis of the British guarantees for Poland of March 1939 and British-Polish co-operation during the war, also in the field of special operations. Relatively much space in the...

Wola 1944. An Unpunished Crime and the Notion of Genocide

August 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the Wola Massacre – a mass murder committed against the civilian population of Warsaw in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising. To this day, many circumstances of this crime remain unclear, and its perpetrators unpunished. Were the events in Wola inconsistent with the policies of the German...

Becoming a Queen in Early Modern Europe

Queens of Poland are conspicuously absent from the study of European queenship—an absence which, together with early modern Poland’s marginal place in the historiography, results in a picture of European royal culture that can only be lopsided and incomplete. Katarzyna Kosior cuts through persistent stereotypes of an East-West dichotomy and a culturally isolated early modern...

Totalitarian and 20th Century Studies

The structure and content of the volume references the fundamental research and historiographical problems with which the Witold Pilecki Center has been involved since its inception. These encompass the very specific nature of Polish society’s encounter with the two totalitarianisms – and in particular with German occupation policy – as well as the key challenges...
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