Today, these brutal events are symbolized by one word, Katyn—a crime that still bitterly divides Poles and Russians. Paul’s richly updated account covers Russian attempts to recant their admission of guilt for the murders in Katyn Forest and includes recently translated documents from Russian military archives, eyewitness accounts of two perpetrators, and secret official minutes published here for the first time that confirm that U.S. government cover-up of the crime continued long after the war ended.Paul’s masterful narrative recreates what daily life was like for three Polish families amid momentous events of World War II—from the treacherous Nazi-Soviet invasion in 1939 to a rigged election in 1947 that sealed Poland’s doom. The patriarch of each family was among the Polish officers personally ordered by Stalin to be shot. One of the families suffered daily repression under the German General Government. Like thousands of other Poles, two of the families were deported to Siberia, where they nearly died from forced labor, starvation, and neglect. Through painstaking research, the author reconstructs the lives of these families including such stories as a miraculous escape on the last transport of Poles leaving Russia and a mother’s daring ski trek over the Carpathian Mountains to rescue a daughter she had not seen in six years. At the heart of the drama is the Poles’ uncommon belief in “victory in defeat”—that their struggles made them strong and that freedom and independence, inevitably, would be regained.

    In the first, Korczak uses fiction to reveal the joys and sorrows of a child, a ten-year-old, juxtaposing them against the feelings of an adult as they both react to two days of adventure spent together. Two prominent themes in his writing are the exploration of the place of children in an adult world and the examination of the treatment and regard children are accorded in that world. In his second book, Korczak spells out his 'Magna Charta Libertatis' in defense of the child's right to respect, right to be him or herself, and, most importantly, right to respect for the strenuous effort expended in the process of 'growing up.'

    Consequently, he joins the ranks of other great poets of old age, such as Robert Penn Warren and W. B. Yeatshimself."(' The New York Times Book Review) "In his early 80's, in some of the best poetry of his "career" (if such a smallhearted word applies to this kind of a life), Milosz is still asking questions that are virtually unanswerable but morally essential: What is it like to have been alive? Who am I? Have I done more good than evil? The first and final province, as Milosz has seemed to know more and more surely over the years, is desire. If it is desire that always leads us away from our beginnings, then it is also through it that we are always being led back toward them, never quite getting there, but creating the world, and ourselves as we go."(' The Harvard Review)

    Individually, each of these 27 stories is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next; taken together, they comprise a vivid, enduring portrait of the struggles of immigrant Jews—particularly women—on New York's Lower East Side.

    Nowolipie Street, where Hen lived as a child and young adult, is both the happy background and the source material for his narration. The story of his youth is vividly presented as remembered and retold by Hen in loving detail. This world is shattered when Germany invades Poland. The author and his family live through the horror of the incessant bombardment of Warsaw and the chaos of the next few months. Slowly but inexorably, the noose begins to tighten around the Jewish population. Eventually, the sixteen-year-old author makes the agonizing decision to leave his parents and flee his country.

    We accompany him to the funeral of cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, buried with the solemn pageantry befitting a primate of the Church; partake of family celebrations of Christmas Eve Wigilia and Easter Wielkanoc , followed by Mass; achieve, with the euphoric if footsore Swick, an epiphany on a nine-day pilgrimage to the legendary Black Madonna of Czestochowa. The author, who taught at the Methodist English Language College in Warsaw and with his native-born wife endured shortages and discomforts on a scale with the average hard-pressed Varsovian, "adopted the Poles as other writers had the Greeks." Readers of this resonant memoir will agree he made a good bargain.

    The Berlin Wall has been dismantled and Germany reunited, Vaclav Havel went from the prisons to the presidency of Czechoslovakia, and the Hungarian people have dismantled the one-partystate. But ten full years before any of these tumultuous events came the first successful challenge to the Leninist state--the shipworker's strike which began in Gdansk, and which led to the formation of the first free and independent trade union in the communist world, Solidarnosc. Now, in Breaking the Barrier, Lawrence Goodwyn provides a fascinating history of the Solidarity movement, tracing thirty-five years of working class activism and state repression that preceded and defined the climactic struggle of 1980 on the Baltic coast of Poland. Goodwyn demonstrates theextent to which Solidarnosc grew out of the workers themselves, not out of intellectual theories. He describes the strikes in 1956, 1970, and 1976, and shows how they provided workers with the knowledge to create Solidarnosc. Indeed in 1980, when they formulated and bargained for twenty-one demandswhich shocked even sympathetic observers, the workers proved themselves far better political strategists than the elite intellectuals of the democratic opposition who came to advise them. Moreover, Goodwyn does not simply recount these dramatic events. In his gripping narrative, the movement comesalive: we see Lech Walesa standing up to the powers of a physically and politically intimidating bureaucracy; we watch the difficult emergence of an alliance between the workers and Warsaw intellectuals, as the strikers adamantly refuse to compromise their demand for free unions, and we findtouching portraits of the martyred priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, and the dissident, Adam Michnik. In the epilogue, Goodwyn offers a provocative critique of Poland and Eastern Europe today, in which he defines the distance still to be traversed to fulfill the democratic legacy of the early years of Solidarnosc. Based on personal interviews with Polish workers and intellectuals, as well asextensive historical research, this vivid interpretation of collective heroism and government corruption will interest anyone who has been amazed by the democratic revolutions in the East and who wants to know the real story of how it all began.

    great book on fighter pilot of ww 2 and Korea