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Creating Kashubia: History, Memory, and Identity in Canada's First Polish Community by Joshua C. Blank


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A Kind of Testament


Witold Gombrowicz - 1973
    Written in France in 1968, this personal testimony is more than just a life history or a critique of his work. A Kind of Testament stands as a testament to how Gombrowicz came to be the person and writer that he was and overlap between the two.

Tank: The Definitive Visual History of Armored Vehicles


David Willey - 2017
    Packed full of tanks, armored vehicles, personnel carriers, and anti-tank weaponry, "Tank" combines comprehensive photographic spreads with in-depth histories of key manufacturers and specially commissioned visual tours of the most iconic examples of their kind. The featured vehicles are placed in their wider context, along with with tactical and technological improvements, and the impact of the tank on the evolution of battlefield and military strategy."Tank" charts the evolution of the tank over the past century, covering over 450 tanks and military vehicles from all over the world. Look through the history of tanks and explore the form and function of a weapon that changed history. Learn the different vehicles' weight, size, country of origin, and time of use through in-depth profiles.An essential visual history, "Tank" provides a complete and exciting overview to the iconic vehicles that changed history.

A Nazi in the Family: The hidden story of an SS family in wartime Germany


Derek Niemann - 2015
    Every day Karl Niemann commutes to work, a business manager in charge of various factories. In the evenings he returns home to life as a normal family man.For many years this was all Derek Niemann had known about his grandfather – until he made the chilling discovery that Karl had actually been an officer in the SS; and that his “business” used thousands of slave labourers in concentration camps. Suddenly, a lifetime of unsettling hints and clues fell into place.With the help of surviving relatives and hundreds of previously unknown photographs, Derek reconstructs the lives of his German forebears and uncovers the true story of what Karl did. A Nazi in the Family is an illuminating portrayal of how ordinary people can fall into the service of a monstrous regime."All families have secrets, but few are as shocking as Derek Niemann's." Culture Trip"Extraordinary." Glasgow Evening Times"Vividly captures the complex life of an ordinary man." Andrew Bomford, BBC Radio 4

My Mother's Secret


J.L. Witterick - 2013
     Based on a true story, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a profound, captivating, and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the clever and "righteous" mother and daughter who teamed up to save them. Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are unlikely heroines. They are simple people who mind their own business and don't stand out from the crowd. Until 1939, when crisis strikes. The Nazis have invaded Poland and they are starting to persecute the Jews. Providing shelter to a Jew has become a death sentence. And yet, Franciszka and Helena decide to do just that. In their tiny, two-bedroom home in Sokal, Poland, they cleverly hide a Jewish family of two brothers and their wives in their pigsty out back, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen floorboards, and a defecting German soldier in the attic--each group completely unbeknownst to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commanders standing guard right outside her yard. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a reminder that there are, in fact, no profiles of courage and each individual's character is a personal choice. This book was inspired by the true story of Franciszka Halamajowa, who, with her daughter, saved the lives of fifteen Jews in Poland during the Second World War. She also hid a young German soldier in her attic at the same time. Before the war, there were six thousand Jews in Sokal, Poland. Only thirty survived the war and half of those did so because of Franciszka.

A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland


Michael Moran - 2008
    In this poignant and insightful account, he gives an insider’s view of a country set on a path of wrenching change while simultaneously confronting ghosts from the wartime and communist past. In chronicling the resurrection of the nation from war and the Holocaust, Moran paints a portrait of cities lost and gained, monumental castles, primeval forests, and picturesque landscape gardens among the finest yet least-known in Europe. This captivating journey into the heart of Poland is a timely and brilliant celebration of the return to the European fold of a valiant and richly cultured nation.

The Burning Edge: Travels Through Irradiated Belarus


Arthur Chichester - 2018
    On his journey through the irradiated borderlands he meets an assortment of characters struggling to make sense of a life in the shadows of the Chernobyl tragedy. At the end of his time in the region he decides to take one last journey off the map and walk alone through the irradiated forest on an adventure that will lead him through landscapes untouched and unseen since 1986. This is the first travel book to bring the region to a Western readership.

The History of Love


Nicole Krauss - 2005
    Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives...

Season of Storms


Andrzej Sapkowski - 2013
    A witcher whose mission is to protect ordinary people from the monsters created with magic. A mutant who has the task of killing unnatural beings. He uses a magical sign, potions and the pride of every witcher -- two swords, steel and silver. But what would happen if Geralt lost his weapons?In this standalone novel, Geralt fights, travels and loves again, Dandelion sings and flies from trouble to trouble, sorcerers are scheming ... and across the whole world clouds are gathering - the season of storms is coming...

Polish Fairy Tales


Antoni Józef Gliński - 1862
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

My Wolf, My Friend


Barbara Corcoran - 1969
    Tiny Sasha is so soft and furry; he really seems more like a dog than a wolf.But Sasha is a wolf - and he's growing up. The adults - even Hallie's father - don't like the idea of a pet wolf. And one hunter in town has sworn to kill him on sight.What can Hallie do? She loves Sasha so much. She can't keep him locked up. But if he runs in the woods, how can she protect him?

Forbidden Strawberries


Cipora Hurwitz - 2010
    All at once the life of her tranquil family became a Hell. Forbidden Strawberries is the riveting auto-biography of Cipora Hurwitz, an innocent young girl caught up in the Maelstrom of the Holocaust.Her eldest brother survived the war by the skin of his teeth by fleeing to the Soviet Union. The second brother was murdered when only sixteen. Her parents, by great efforts, succeeded in hiding their little daughter and thereby save her life. Devastatingly, they themselves were unable to escape the hands of the murderers.Cipora, as yet a young child and an orphan, was miraculously saved after surviving the Budzyn camps and the Majdanek extermination camp. The author relates the story of her life during the Holocaust to a delegation of Hashomer Hatzair youth and Israeli High School students on a mission to the death camps in Poland. In Forbidden Strawberries, Cipora presents her testimony on what transpired to her family and friends who were exterminated, thus paying tribute to their memory.

1920 Diary


Isaac Babel - 1991
    “Babel’s 1920 Diary, the source for many of his remarkable Red Cavalry stories, is itself as remarkable as the stories, particularly when one considers that the diarist was a journalist of only twenty-six. The staccato sentences in which Babel rapidly describes the horrific details of revolutionary brutality have the impact of an accomplished style, one that in its spontaneously elliptical way is strangely no less artful than the artfully nuanced directness that is the triumph of Red Cavalry.”—Philip Roth “An electrifying translation accompanied by an indispensable introduction. . . . Babel’s journey is a Jewish lamentation . . . a tragic masterwork.” —Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic “A precursor of Holocaust literature, and more powerful in its effect than any Holocaust literature that I have managed to read.”—Harold Bloom, New York Times Book Review

The Night Portrait: A Novel of World War II and da Vinci's Italy


Laura Morelli - 2020
    Soon, she finds herself sitting before Leonardo da Vinci, who wants to ensure his own place in the ducal palace by painting his most ambitious portrait to date.Munich, World War II: After a modest conservator unwittingly places a priceless Italian Renaissance portrait into the hands of a high-ranking Nazi leader, she risks her life to recover it, working with an American soldier, part of the famed Monuments Men team, to get it back. Two women, separated by 500 years, are swept up in the tide of history as one painting stands at the center of their quests for their own destinies.

Necessary Lies


Eva Stachniak - 2000
    Set during one of the 20th century's most tumultuous decades, it tells the story of Anna, a lecturer in English from the University of Wroclaw, who arrives in Montreal in the fall of 1981. When martial law is declared in Poland, she chooses to remain in Canada, although emigration means abandoning her husband, an activist in the political opposition, and deserting her homeland as it reels from the shock of being betrayed by its own people. What follows is a bittersweet tale of Anna's marriage to a German émigré, a composer, and her journey back to Europe 10 years later--after his death and the fall of Communism--to come to terms with her own departure and her second husband's past. Necessary Lies, which won the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award, tackles an intriguingly volatile period of repression, recrimination, and reconciliation in central and eastern Europe (and in Canada's separatist Quebec as well). Stachniak is a lucid lecturer who deftly makes fiction from events that have been fodder for recent travel literature, such as Eva Hoffman's Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe and Irena Karafilly's Ashes and Miracles: A Polish Journey. Stachniak's strength as a writer lies in her skill in invoking place--its sights and smells and energy--and in juxtaposing a city's present with its complex past. Like an archaeologist or archivist, she delves into the layers of history to reveal the collective source of personal tragedy. But these strengths ultimately prove to be the novel's shortcoming as a work of fiction. Stachniak has a faintly irritating tendency (right from page 1) to engage in irresolvable arguments about whether Poland is part of central or eastern Europe. More significantly, she fails to render psychologically compelling characters, despite the potentially fascinating figures she draws upon. Furthermore, central confrontation scenes with Anna's Polish ex-husband and her second husband's longtime German lover miss the opportunity to sound the depths of betrayal. How unsatisfactory for the reader when the collision of two world views gets reduced to the banality of a co-owned apartment buyout. --Diana Kuprel

Where the Devil Can't Go


Anya Lipska - 2011
    Who is she? And why did she die?Janusz Kiszka, unofficial 'fixer' to East London’s Polish community, and a man with his own distinctive moral code, has been hired to track down a missing waitress. Meanwhile, DC Natalie Kershaw, a rookie detective who’s not afraid of breaking a few rules, investigates the suspicious deaths of two Polish girls.They hail from very different worlds, but Kiszka and Kershaw are set on collision course…When Kershaw accuses Kiszka of murder, he escapes to Poland, determined to find the real killer. There he discovers a terrible secret from the country’s troubled communist past revealing why the girls were murdered.But is he too late to save the life of a third?