In fact his life was all right without his soul - he slept, ate, worked, drove a car and even played tennis. But sometimes he felt as if the world around him were flat, as if he were moving across a smooth page in a math book that was covered in evenly spaced squares... " -from The Lost Soul The Lost Soul is a deeply moving reflection on our capacity to live in peace with ourselves, to remain patient, attentive to the world. It is a story that beautifully weaves together the voice of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and the finely detailed pen-and-ink drawings of illustrator Joanna Concejo, who together create a parallel narrative universe full of secrets, evocative of another time. Here a man has forgotten what makes his heart feel full. He moves to a house away from all that is familiar to him to wait for his soul to return. The Lost Soul is a sublime album, a rare delicacy that will delight readers young and old."You must find a place of your own, sit there quietly and wait for your soul."

    If the diagnosis they present is right, then we have a great problem in Poland.” —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize laureate and author of FlightsMikołaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction—a book that has been widely praised by critics and was shortlisted for Poland’s top literary prize—Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth.Both biting and knowing, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To takes the form of first-person vignettes, through which Grynberg explores the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles haunted by the Holocaust and its continuing presence.In “Unnecessary Trouble,” a grandmother discloses on her deathbed that she is Jewish; she does not want to die without her family knowing. What is passed on to the family is fear and the struggle of what to do with this information. In “Cacophony,” Jewish identity is explored through names, as Miron and his son Jurek demonstrate how heritage is both accepted and denied. In “My Five Jews,” a non-Jewish narrator remembers five interactions with her Jewish countrymen, and her own anti-Semitism, ruefully noting that perhaps she was wrong and should apologize, but no one is left to say “I’m sorry” to.Each of the thirty-one stories is a dazzling and haunting mini-monologue that highlights a different facet of modern Poland’s complex and difficult relationship with its Jewish past.

    The crisis has not been resolved. From a certain point of view it is still as serious as it ever was, as it is primarily a crisis of faith, hence a moral and social crisis." Pope Benedict XVIThe apparitions in 1917 of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three peasant children in Fatima, Portugal, are perhaps the most important private revelations in the history of the Church. At the height of World War I and on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Our Lady appeared in Fatima to warn us of another even greater world war, the spread of Communism, and a terrible persecution of the Church unless people returned to God. She asked for us to offer daily prayer and sacrifice for conversion of the world and salvation of souls.Because of the prophetic nature of Our Lady's messages and their potential significance for the entire world, they have been the subject of much study and controversy, and they have influenced the decisions not only of many individuals, but also of Popes, Bishops, and heads of state.To celebrate the 100th anniversary of these important apparitions and messages for the modern world, renowned author-photographer team Grzegorz Gorny and Janusz Rosikon traveled throughout Europe to tell the story of Fatima and its impact on the destiny of both individuals and nations. With stunningly beautiful four-color photographs on every page, and in-depth detail and insights on all aspects of the story and message of Fatima, they probe the mysteries of Fatima and their continued relevance for our modern age. Lavishly Illustrated."

    Brought up in a small village, country-girl Ania arrives in the university city of Wroclaw to pursue her career as a sculptor. Here she falls in love with Dominik, an enigmatic write at the center of a group of bohemians and avant-garde artists who throw wild parties. When martial law is declared, their lives change overnight: military tanks appear on the street, curfews are introduced and the artists are driven underground. Together, Ania and Dominik fight back, pushing against the boundaries imposed by the authoritarian communist government. But at what cost?

    From imprisonment in the notorious Kozelsk prison to the forced labor camp in the Siberian Arctic Circle, the compelling story pulls the reader into a world of suffering and brutality it would be impossible to imagine. Forced to dig runways in temperatures as low as 50oC while under constant threat from sadistic guards, it was an indescribable living hell with death the only companion. He endured and witnessed atrocities which haunted him for the rest of his life with so many friends murdered or frozen to death in the unforgiving cruelty of Siberia. But fate intervened and the icy wasteland was replaced by the blistering heat and dry deserts of the Middle East, where the student who had never picked up a gun was taught to fight in the Italian campaign, at Monte Cassino, Ancona and Bologna. Yet the intense desire to return to his homeland never left him and only memories of his idyllic life before the war sustained him when he sank to the lowest depths of despair. Waclaw could not know of the terrible suffering of his family or the sacrifices of his countrymen as they fought so desperately to keep Warsaw, only to be denied their homeland in the cruelest way imaginable. Although they were ultimately the victors, they lost everything their home, their loves, their country and nothing was ever the same again. In a country governed by Communist Russia and controlled by their secret police, it was impossible to return under fear of imprisonment or death and no knowledge of the achievements and bravery of the Poles was allowed to be known. No one was safe under the Stalinist reign of terror. Everything was strictly censored or destroyed and with the passage of time few people were left alive to tell their story. It was only in 1989 that Poland truly broke free from the Russian yoke and its people gained the freedom they had fought so valiantly for. This dramatic and poignant story based on the memories of Waclaw Kossakowski is recounted in vivid detail and documents a tragic period in the history of the Polish people in Europe. His story demands to be told and ensures that many other unrecognized Poles will not be forgotten."

    I can be careful, but what is that? I am going to fight."A fighter pilot ready to die. A girl whose world has crumbled. A city bombed and broken. A country struggling for existence.As a Polish fighter pilot serving in the RAF, Pilot Officer Jedrick Ondraski does not expect to survive the war with Nazi Germany; he only wants to avenge his family and homeland before he dies. But when he meets Helen Smith, a young American woman, during an air raid on a dark London street, the encounter forces him back into the world he has renounced. A marriage of convenience seems to be the only way for him to provide her a home and a life after the bombing that destroyed her tranquil home. Helen, destitute and alone, clings to him for help and comfort; but when he joins his squadron in aerial battle with the very enemy who destroyed his own country, there seems little hope of a future for either of them. As the Luftwaffe aggressively targets civilian London, the whole country braces for a Nazi invasion. And in the blackout of the London Blitz, two young souls reach out for life, love…and the One Who can lighten their darkness.The first WWII historical novel by author and historian Sarah Brazytis, 'Lighten Our Darkness' will take you to the bombed streets of London, the barracks of the RAF, and the flak-riddled skies of the Battle of Britain.

    It details the emergence of homosexual movement and charts cross-border flows of cultural products, identity paradigms and activism models in communist Poland. The work demonstrates that Polish homosexual activists were not locked behind the Iron Curtain, but actively participated in the transnational construction of homosexuality. Their magazines were largely influenced by Western magazines: used similar words, discussed similar topics or simply translated Western texts and reproduced Western images. However, the imported ideas were not just copied but selectively adopted as well as strategically and creatively adapted in the Polish magazines so their authors could construct their own unique identities and build their own original politics.

    A journalist in Warsaw is looking for her brother, who’s been missing for twenty years. A London financier is struggling with panic attacks. In Chicago, an old man is dying in a nursing home.What connects them? As the mystery unravels, the protagonists’ worlds are turned upside down.

    Days later the Allied armies marched into Rome seizing the first Axis capital. No-one in 1939 could have foreseen an entire Polish Corps engaged on the Italian Front. Most had been held prisoner in the USSR following Polands defeat and their release by Stalin was only achieved through the intense negotiations of British and Polish politicians generals, notably Sikorski and Anders,. The Polish Army was evacuated to Iran in 1942 and subsequently incorporated into the British Army as the Polish II Corps. Their ultimate post-war fate was shamefully ignored until too late. This book, which charts the extraordinary wartime story of the exiled Polish Army in the east, makes extensive use of undiscovered archive material. It reveals in depth the relations between the British and Polish General Staffs and the never ending hardships of the Polish soldiers.

    Two separate peace treaties were signed at Brest-Litovsk the first between the Central Powers and Ukraine and the second between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia.Borislav Chernev, through an insightful and in-depth analysis of primary sources and archival material, argues that although its duration was short lived, the Brest-Litovsk settlement significantly affected the post-Imperial transformation of East Central Europe. The conference became a focal point for the interrelated processes of peacemaking, revolution, imperial collapse, and nation-state creation in the multi-ethnic, entangled spaces of East Central Europe. Chernev's analysis expands beyond the traditional focus on the German-Russian relationship, paying special attention to the policies of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. The transformations initiated by the Brest-Litovsk conferences ushered in the twilight of empire as the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman Empires all shared the fate of their Romanov counterpart at the end of World War I."

    Nature abounds in these poems, and Fiedorczuk is, in turn, ever present in "that luscious fruit, the world." Her passionate engagement with the details of the environment and the people in it makes hers an unforgettable voice in contemporary ecopoetics, one that argues for empathy and alertness. She has published five volumes of poetry, three of fiction, and three books on ecocriticism, and won several Polish literary awards.

    A rising star in Polish letters explores faith, eros, death and the making of poems in these deft, personal musings.Hailed in Poland as "the hope of Polish poetry" and the inheritor of its metaphysical tradition, Dabrowski offers these "posts" from city streets and trains, his bedroom and Skype, a hospital and his own notebook, employing colloquial language to confront weighty subjects: "And right here /poetry appears, and forces a stag to bolt / in front of the hood of your car."Tadeusz Dabrowski is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards, and his work has been translated into 20 languages.Antonia Lloyd-Jones's brilliant translations have twice won her the Found in Translation Award.

    Back in 2004, gay rights marches were banned in Warsaw and homosexuality was a taboo subject. Since then, as the economy has grown, the LGBTQ community has become more widely accepted.In OUT, award-winning Warsaw-based photographer Maciek Nabrdalik, whose work has been published in Smithsonian, L'Espresso, Stern, Newsweek, and the New York Times, takes us deep into this community. Exploring issues of identity and citizenship and taking its inspiration from the passport photo format, OUT features dozens of formal color portraits of writers, artists, and people working in a variety of occupations from across Poland. Each is accompanied by a short interview and is shaded to indicate how comfortable that person is with revealing their own sexuality publicly.Intimate and profoundly humane, OUT is a testament to the great strides that can be made in the struggle for LGBTQ rights in a short space of time--a document that will be inspiring to other nations where the queer community does not enjoy the same freedoms.

    But one day she is suddenly forced to confront the cruel reality of the Holocaust, together with the rest of French Jewry. Paulette is forced to separate from her family, and as a result, abandoned by her father. But despite her difficult and shocking life experiences, she remains naive and optimistic, holding on to her thirst for life even in the darkest hours.An authentic and moving life storyI Love You My Child, I'm Abandoning You is an exciting human documentary, taking place in France during the Holocaust. It honors the memory of the French Jews who perished in the Second World War, while simultaneously giving voice the persistent will to live, and the strength and bravery that characterize those who survived and gave rise to the future generations of the Jewish people.An existential odyssey that puts a spotlight on the human need and right to belongAriela Palacz shares her life story through the character of little Paulette Szenker, sensitively weaving past and present into an authentic and moving journey that shifts between WWII France and contemporary Jerusalem. A story about the human spirit and the thirst for a family, a tradition, and a nation, that will touch your heart.Get your copy of I Love You My Child, I'm Abandoning You now!

    Instead, they cook and garden and work together to keep the stoves supplied with wood and coal and the cupboards filled with homemade goodies. They prepare for holidays while Busia tells stories about her life in the old country, Poland. All the while they fear that the landlord will ask them to move and give up the farm and all the seasonal delights it holds -- in the attic, the barn, and down the lane to the creek. A simple and poignant tale of the bonds between an only child and his loving "Busia," his Polish grandmother.