Recalling the Katyn Massacre was an important aspect of the activities of the democratic opposition in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), one of the reasons being the subject’s high importance for society back then. by Grzegorz Majchrzak This is best exemplified by the fact that a booklet by Ryszard Zieliński entitled ‘Katyń’ was the…
The Roman Catholic Church in Poland was perceived by occupiers, and especially the Germans, as a synonym of Polishness, says Prof. Jan Żaryn, a historian from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Polish Press Agency: What was the situation of Christian churches in Poland during the Second World War? Prof. Jan Żaryn: Most…
During his June 1979 meeting with youth in Gniezno, Pope John Paul II intoned the song ‘Red belt’. Three hundred thousand participants of the Holy Mass sang the refrain in chorus: ‘For a Hutsul, there is no life like in the highlands / when fate throws him into the pits – he soon perishes from…
Rafał Lemkin (1900–59) was an outstanding criminal law expert of Polonised-Jewish descent. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at the John Casimir University (Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza) in Lwów. He contributed to the codification of the Polish penal law, and analysed criminal legislations of the totalitarian regimes of Italy and Soviet Russia. In 1933, he…
Kris Van Heuckelom is Associate Professor in Literary Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His well-written and informative study Polish Migrants in European Film, investigates the long-running tradition of Polish migration, with its developments over the course of a century. The starting point lies in the partitions-era, the “Great Emigration”, when…
11 November 1918 is considered the symbolic date on which Poland regained its independence. However, the process of laying down the legal foundations of the reborn state continued for a number of years. One of the main things was to draw up a constitution. As early as February 1919, the single-chamber Legislative Sejm (parliament) elected…
