Tadeusz Zaderecki was a Catholic Pole from Lwów (as the city was then known; now L'viv in Ukraine) with many connections in the city's Jewish community. He witnessed the violent Nazi campaign against the city's Jews and collected as much information as possible from Jewish and non-Jewish sources. At the end of the war, he turned his notes into a detailed historical account. Translated from the Polish, widely annotated, and with an introduction by Zaderecki's friend and Holocaust survivor Rabbi David Kahane, Lwów under the Swastika is a document that offers a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust in Lwów.
In a brief life deeply and traumatically disrupted by two years in concentration camps as a political prisoner, Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was tragically destined to become one of the most eloquent witnesses to the Holocaust in Poland. His recollections and stories, the most famous of which is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, document in stark historical, literary, and personal terms the experience of the camps and its cost to humanity. The correspondence in this volume expands on the insights of Borowski's published work and extends to the less-documented aftermath of the Holocaust in postwar Poland and East Germany. The volume opens with Borowski's letter to his mother from Pawiak Prison the day after his arrest and closes with an unsigned telegram informing his parents of his suicide. This English edition also contains new material in the form of additional letters from the private collection of the family of Anatol Girs.Illustrated throughout with photographs and reproductions, the letters to and from family members, friends, and literary figures offer an indispensable picture of the world in the wake of the Nazis - and of the indelible stain that experience left upon the literature, politics, and life of Eastern Europe, in particular upon one gifted and doomed writer.
With the end of World War I, a new Republic of Poland emerged on the maps of Europe, made up of some of the territory from the first Polish Republic, including Wolyn and Wilno, and significant parts of Belarus, Upper Silesia, Eastern Galicia, and East Prussia. The resulting conglomeration of ethnic groups left many substantial minorities wanting independence. The approach of World War II provided the minorities' leaders a new opportunity in their nationalist movements, and many sided with one or the other of Poland's two enemies--the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany--in hopes of achieving their goals at the expense of Poland and its people. Based on primary and secondary sources in numerous languages (including Polish, German, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian and English), this work examines the roles of the ethnic minorities in the collapse of the Republic and in the atrocities that occurred under the occupying troops. The Polish government's response to mounting ethnic tensions in the prewar era and its conduct of the war effort are also examined.
The Polish Complex takes place on Christmas Eve, from early morning until late in the evening, as a line of people (including the narrator, whose name is Konwicki) stand and wait in front of a jewelry store in Warsaw. Through the narrator we are told of what happens among those standing in line outside this store, what happens as the narrator's mind thinks and rants about the current state of Poland, and what happens as he imagines the failed Polish rebellion of 1863. The novel's form allows Konwicki (both character and author) to roam around and through Poland's past and present, and to range freely through whatever comes to his attention. By turns comic, lyrical, despairing, and liberating, The Polish Complex stands as one of the most important novels to have come out of Poland since World War II.
The Holocaust in the Polish Countryside brings the incredibly moving first-hand witness testimony of Tadeusz Markiel and his recollection of life as a Polish Catholic boy in the rural town of Gniewczyna to an English-speaking audience for the first time. His narrative, supplemented with extensive academic footnotes from Alina Skibinska, recounts life in the Polish countryside prior to the Nazis, before describing in horrific detail the torture, rape, pillaging and betrayal of his Jewish neighbours. Skibinska, a founding member of the world-renowned Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, then builds on this with a sensitive historical account that serves to corroborate, enrich and contextualise Markiel's testimony. This book, which also includes a Foreword by Neighbors and Golden Harvest author Jan T. Gross and useful transcripts from post-war trials and correspondence between residents and former residents of Gniewczyna, is of incredible significance to anyone seeking to further their understanding of the Holocaust. It provides readers with extensive source material, in English here for the first time, and delivers new insights into burgeoning Holocaust studies topics like the pillaging of the Jews, the Holocaust in rural areas, and notions concerning the witness and the role of the past in the present.
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