Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, Between East and West brilliantly illuminates the soul of these lands and the shaping power of their past.

    They were to kill those who resisted. A few hundred of the trapped Jews, mostly teenagers, armed only with pistols, Molotov cocktails, and a few light machine guns, vowed to fight back. Resistance is the full story of the uprising and the events leading to it, told by a survivor of the battle who is now a world-renowned Israeli scholar of the Holocaust. Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s was the home of Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community. It included the rich, the poor, and the middle class; casual assimilationists and ardent Zionists; representatives of the full spectrum of political and religious factions. Then came the German onslaught of ruthless violence against the Jews - isolation and starvation amid desperation and disease - then deportations. As the ghetto walls rose, hundreds of thousands were rounded up and sent to Treblinka. But resistance began to take shape, and when the final attack order came, the ghetto fighters stood ready. One of the few survivors of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, Holocaust scholar I. Gutman draws on diaries, personal letters, and underground press reports in this compelling, authoritative account of a landmark event in Jewish history. Here, too, is a portrait of the vibrant culture that shaped the young fighters, whose inspired defiance would have far-reaching implications for the Jewish people and the State of Israel.Supported by moving and dramatic excerpts from diaries, letters, and other documents of the period, Resistance is destined to take its place as the classic account of a most important turning point in Jewish and world history.

    Surviving Soviet captivity and Gestapo torture, he escaped Poland in 1942 and embarked on a heroic crusade to give Allied leaders his eye witness report of Nazi extermination of European Jews. Karski is the first definitive account of the little-known episode--one of the earliest documentations of atrocities to reach the west and perhaps the most significant warning of the genocide to come. Karski's story introduces vital new insights about the Polish Underground, and about the Allies' reaction to the Holocaust.

    Nor was the power they held the result of their own actions; they were installed as the country's rulers by the Soviet army. Yet Polish Communists set out to produce credible claims to authority and legitimacy for their power by reshaping the nation's culture and traditions.Jan Kubik begins his study by demonstrating how the strategy for remodeling the national culture was implemented through extensive use of public ceremonies and displays of symbols by the Gierek regime (1970-1980). He then reconstructs the emergence of the Catholic Church and the organized opposition as viable counter-hegemonic subcultures. Their growing strength opened the way for counter-hegemonic politics, the delegitimization of the regime, the rise of Solidarity, and the collapse of communism.He is not studying politics per se, but rather culture and the subtle and indirect ways power is realized within it, often outside of traditionally defined politics. Kubik's approach, which draws heavily on modern anthropological theory, helps explain why Solidarity happened in Poland and not elsewhere in the Communist bloc.