Best of
Poland

2014

The Books of Jacob


Olga Tokarczuk - 2014
    Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect's secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank--a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day--is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries--those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is--The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.

The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of The Holocaust and Operation Reinhard


Patrick Hicks - 2014
    Millions were shoved into ghettos and forced to live under the swastika. Death camps were built and something called "Operation Reinhard" was set into motion. Its goal? To murder all the Jews of Poland.The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have in the Nazi state. It is a sensitive, accurate retelling of a place that went about the business of genocide. Told as a historical account in a documentary style, it explores the atmosphere of a death camp. It describes what it was like to watch the trains roll in, and it probes into the mind of its commandant, Hans-Peter Guth. How could he murder thousands of people each day and then go home to laugh with his children? This is not only an unflinching portrayal of the machinery of the gas chambers, it is also the story of how prisoners burned the camp to the ground and fled into the woods. It is a story of rebellion and survival. It is a story of life amid death.With a strong eye towards the history of the Holocaust, The Commandant of Lubizec compels us to look at these extermination centers anew. It disquiets us with the knowledge that similar events actually took place in camps like Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The history of Lubizec, although a work of fiction, is a chillingly blunt distillation of real life events. It asks that we look again at "Operation Reinhard". It brings voice to the silenced. It demands that we bear witness.

Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film


Glenn Kurtz - 2014
    The film, shot long ago by his grandfather on a sightseeing trip to Europe, includes shaky footage of Paris and the Swiss Alps, with someone inevitably waving at the camera. Astonishingly, David Kurtz also captured on color 16mm film the only known moving images of the thriving, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, shortly before the community's destruction. "Blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead," he just happened to visit his birthplace in 1938, a year before the Nazi occupation. Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, fewer than one hundred would survive.Glenn Kurtz quickly recognizes the brief footage as a crucial link in a lost history. "The longer I spent with my grandfather's film," he writes, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." Every image, every face, was a mystery that might be solved. Soon he is swept up in a remarkable journey to learn everything he can about these people. After restoring the film, which had shrunk and propelled across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; and into archives, basements, cemeteries, and even an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield as he looks for shards of Nasielsk's Jewish history.One day, Kurtz hears from a young woman who had watched the video on the Holocaust Museum's website. As the camera panned across the faces of children, she recognized her grandfather as a thirteen-year-old boy. Moszek Tuchendler of Nasielsk was now eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler of Florida, and when Kurtz meets him, the lost history of Nasielsk comes into view. Chandler's laser-sharp recollections create a bridge between two worlds, and he helps Kurtz eventually locate six more survivors, including a ninety-six-year-old woman who also appears in the film, standing next to the man she would later marry.Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. "I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals." Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a poignant yet unsentimental exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world.

With Blood and Scars


B.E. Andre - 2014
    She needs to ask her dying father a vital question; his answer is the key to how she will lead the rest of her life. She must force him to revisit his childhood in Poland in 1944, a time when decisions about survival were made on the spur of the moment, a place where chaos undermined all previous morality. Who is her father really? Can she bear to find out? Another secret also torments her: an incident she filed in her memory store. Now the police have found the remains of a child in Whalley Range. Should she try to find the gang of friends from her own childhood days? Or should she keep the secret of what happened then? This coming-of-age novel is a tale of heroic survival against all odds: a life-affirming story of courage and hope set against harrowing circumstances. It celebrates the goodness that can be found in all nations

Women of Valor: Polish Resisters to the Third Reich


Joanne D. Gilbert - 2014
    In this highly readable and educational collection of true stories, educator, public-speaker and author Joanne D. Gilbert celebrates the heroines of World War II who not only fought the horrors of the Holocaust, but survived well into their 80s and 90s—living lives of commitment to the human spirit and human rights. “ . . . I saw that a Nazi was already chasing me . . . I felt and heard bullets flying by—I just kept on running.” ~18-year-old Partisan Manya Feldman “I also had a grenade with which to blow myself up so if captured, I wouldn’t break under torture.” ~ 19-year-old Partisan Faye Schulman “Face-to-face with Adolf Eichmann . . . instead of being struck by terror, I was struck by how normal he looked.” ~17-year-old Lola Lieber “I was determined to be as strong and productive as a boy. . . . I helped the posted guards . . . I camouflaged trails, and scouted out the surrounding areas for safety.” ~7-year-old Miriam Brysk

23 Days: A Memoir of 1939


Antoni Joe Podolski - 2014
    His subsequent escape to England via Finland is describedfollowed by details of his return to Europe through Lithuania as amember of SOE. Finally a reunion with Polish Forces in the MiddleEast was made possible after the Nazi invasion of Russia caused theSoviets to become an uneasy ally of Poland.He returned to England once more and became a fighter pilot with thePolish Air Force at the tail end of hostilities, all by the ripe old age of 22.He died in Norfolk in 1999 aged 76.

Warsaw Boy: A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood


Andrew Borowiec - 2014
    Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war six million had been killed: some were innocent civilians - half of them were Jews - but the rest died as a result of a ferocious guerrilla war the Poles had waged. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a fifteen-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade through the shattered window of a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers running below. 'I felt I had come of age. I was a soldier and I'd just tried to kill some of our enemies'. The Warsaw Uprising lasted for 63 days: Himmler described it as 'the worst street fighting since Stalingrad'. Yet for the most part the insurgents were poorly equipped local men and teenagers - some of them were even younger than Andrew. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment, both above and below ground as the Poles took to the city's sewers to creep beneath the German lines during lulls in the fierce counterattacks. Wounded in a fire fight the day after his sixteenth birthday and unable to face another visit to the sewers, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital wondering whether he was about to be shot or saved. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad. From one of the most harrowing episodes of the Second World War, this is an extraordinary tale of survival and defiance recounted by one of the few remaining veterans of Poland's bravest summer. Andrew Borowiec dedicates this book to all the Warsaw boys, 'especially those who never grew up'. Andrew Borowiec was born at Lodz in Poland in 1928. At fifteen he joined the Home Army, the main Polish resistance during the Second World War, and fought in the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising. After the war he left Poland and attended Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Cyprus with his English wife Juliet.

Poland


Wil Mara - 2014
    Today, however, it is a country in the midst of transition, with a bright future ahead of it. Readers will get a close-up look at Poland as they learn about its incredible history and immerse themselves in its rich cultural heritage. They will also learn about the country's modern government and get a taste of its incredible natural beauty.

The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon


Brian E. Vick - 2014
    Historians have nevertheless generally dismissed these spectacular festivities as window dressing when compared with the serious, behind-the-scenes maneuverings of sovereigns and statesmen. Brian Vick finds this conventional view shortsighted, seeing these instead as two interconnected dimensions of politics. Examining them together yields a more complete picture of how one of the most important diplomatic summits in history managed to redraw the map of Europe and the international system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The Congress of Vienna investigates the Vienna Congress within a broad framework of influence networks that included unofficial opinion-shapers of all kinds, both men and women: artists and composers, entrepreneurs and writers, hosts and attendees of fashionable salons. In addition to high-profile negotiation and diplomatic wrangling over the post-Napoleonic fates of Germany, Italy, and Poland, Vick brings into focus other understudied yet significant issues: the African slave trade, Jewish rights, and relations with Islamic powers such as the Ottoman Empire and Barbary Corsairs. Challenging the usual portrayal of a reactionary Congress obsessed with rolling back Napoleon's liberal reforms, Vick demonstrates that the Congress's promotion of limited constitutionalism, respect for religious and nationality rights, and humanitarian interventions was influenced as much by liberal currents as by conservative ones.

Last Stop Klindenspiel (A Kate Stanton Hollywood Mystery Extra)


Marta Tandori - 2014
    Separated from her father when the Allies liberated Poland, Katya and the rest of her family are sent to an internment camp in Oslo where they’re eventually rescued by a Norwegian war hero. After four tumultuous years together, he brutally murders her sister, forcing Katya and her mother to seek refuge with her grandmother in faraway Droeback where Katya’s mother is murdered by villagers soon after their arrival. Fearing for her safety, Katya’s grandmother sends her to Klindenspiel, the only circus of its kind in Europe, where all of the performers are children. Once there, Katya quickly learns that all of the young performers share her terrible secret, making them more like her than she could ever have imagined. Things become complicated when Klindenspiel’s artistic director pairs Katya with Aleks, a good-looking but secretive seventeen-year-old, who’s skilled in acrobatics and dance. Curious about, and attracted to her new partner, Katya secretly follows him one night and learns the horrible truth behind Klindenspiel’s magic. With the curtains about to rise on Klindenspiel’s newest show, Katya and Aleks must give the performance of a lifetime – both on and off the stage – because their lives, and those of their fellow performers, are depending on it.

Give Us This Day: a Memoir of Family and Exile


Helena Wisniewska Brow - 2014
    Seventy years later, and no closer to a longed-for Polish homecoming, Stefan's New Zealand-born daughter revisits her past. What is the burden her father has carried all these years? And why is he unable - or unwilling - to let it go?With an ageing father and the ghost of a namesake aunt as her guides, Helena Wisniewska Brow searches for meaning in the family lives shaped by exile: her father's, her mother's and her own.

The True Story of the Wooden Horse


Robert J. Laplander - 2014
    Many attempts at escape characterised its history, and the story of its establishment is a fascinating one. Now, historian Robert Laplander attempts to provide a comprehensive history of the camp and compound, framed around the ingenious wooden horse escape.

The Polish Patriot: True Story


Uri Jerzy Nachimson - 2014
    The book illustrates in a very tangible way the occurrence of the second world war and allows you to understand that giving up was not an option, there was always light at the end of the tunnel, even when it seems impossible. The life story of a young man who lost his whole family in occupied Poland, his country had betrayed him, and yet he did not lose hope. The book was written in 2013 -2014, by his son Uri Jerzy Nachimson, 9 years after his death at the age of 93.

The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe


Michael Gubser - 2014
    The phenomenological movement not only produced systematic reflection on common moral concerns such as distinguishing right from wrong and explaining the status of values; it also called on philosophy to renew European societies facing crisis, an aim that inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as well as later communist bloc dissidents.Despite this legacy, phenomenology continues to be largely discounted as esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the isolated rational mind. Intellectual histories tend to cite Husserl's epistemological influence on philosophies like existentialism and deconstruction without considering his social or ethical imprint. And while a few recent scholars have begun to note phenomenology's wider ethical resonance, especially in French social thought, its image as stubbornly academic continues to hold sway. The Far Reaches challenges that image by tracing the first history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe, from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patocka, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), and Václav Havel.