author: Szlachetko George

This is the true-life story of a Polish girl soldier who fought for her country and lost her homeland; told through numerous vivid personal experiences. Aged 14 ‘Wira’ became a freedom fighter and later played her part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Liberated from a POW camp she began a new life in exile as a political refugee in England. – Danuta’s story begins with her childhood years in German-occupied Warsaw. She was ten in 1939 when her family home in central Warsaw was destroyed. Her mother turned to smuggling to feed the family as they struggled to survive. The Germans closed down Danuta’s school in an effort to destroy Poland’s identity. Aged 14 she watched smoke rising from the burning Jewish Ghetto. The terror continued as Poles were rounded-up for forced labour. Flickering candles covered the streets where public executions had taken place. Warsaw’s spirit was almost broken, but Danuta refused to be a victim and dreamed of fighting back. The opportunity arrived when she was recruited into the Grey Ranks, part of Poland’s underground resistance army, within an all-female unit. She assumed the pseudonym ‘Wira’ (pronounced Vera) and began her assigned sabotage activities, duties which had to be kept secret even from her own family. – One year later the Warsaw Uprising erupted and the city became an inferno. Abandoned by the outside world, the Polish Home Army resisted the brutal German onslaught for 63 days. Wira, then aged 15, played her part in the field Post Office, in the underground cellars filled with terrified civilians, and on the front line. Wira’s survival was remarkable, but at what cost? – Wira became a POW in Germany joining over 1,700 Polish female soldiers of the Uprising at Stalag VI-C, Oberlangen. Following their emotional liberation, Wira met a Polish officer serving with the 2nd Polish Corps within the British 8th Army. Faced with a hostile, Soviet-backed communist government in Poland, they took the difficult decision to remain in polit.

Book description: https://www.amazon.co.uk/

author: Ziolkowska-Boehm Aleksandra

In Polish Hero Roman Rodziewicz: Fate of a Hubal Soldier in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Postwar England, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm traces the remarkable and tragic tale of Roman Rodziewicz, a true Polish hero of the Second World War. Roman’s childhood was spent in Manchuria where his father, first deported to Siberia, later worked as an engineer for a Chinese company. Following the loss of his parents early in life after returning to free Poland, Roman was trained to manage a self-sufficient estate farming and producing various livestock, vegetables, and honey. Prior to the German invasion of Poland, Roman attended military school at the Suwalki Cavalry Brigade. After the surrender of the Polish army, the partisan forces of Major Hubal continued to fight the Germans. The brave anti-German activities of the Hubal partisans beckoned Roman and he joined them. About eight months later Major Hubal was killed. Roman escaped and joined the underground as an officer fighting the German occupation forces. Captured and tortured, Roman was subsequently imprisoned in Auschwitz and later Buchenwald. After the American army rescued Roman, he joined the Polish army in Italy. At the end of World War II Roman settled in England. One of the greatest misfortunes of his life was losing contact with his fiance Halinka, and later learning she had married believing him to be dead. Two weeks after her marriage, she received a letter from Roman that he had survived the war. They met many years later, and Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm witnessed the meeting of Halinka and Roman in Warsaw. Roman continues to live in England now having reached the age of 100 years in January 2013. Polish Hero Roman Rodziewicz explores the incredible story of one Polish soldier of World War II, and provides an illuminating contribution to the historical record of the period.

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author: Zamoyski Adam

A new edition of Adam Zamoyski’s definitive biography of Chopin, first published in 1979 and unavailable in English for many years.
Few composers elicit such strong emotions as Chopin. Few have been more revered and cherished. And few have had so much sentimental nonsense written about them.
Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Chopin’s birth, Adam Zamoyski’s compelling new biography cuts through the mass of anecdote and myth that has sprung up around the composer’s life and the ebullient and striking personalities of Romantic Paris among whom he lived, including Liszt, Berlioz, Victor Hugo and George Sand, in search of the real Chopin.
Zamoyski brings to the subject an unrivalled knowledge of the historical, social and cultural background of the composer’s native Poland as well as of the France in which he spent most of his creative life. He has scoured the archives of Warsaw, Krakow, Paris and London in his quest for the truth, and has based his account exclusively on primary sources and contemporary accounts.
The result is a biography of authority, perception and wit. Chopin emerges from the sugary romantic mist in which he has been shrouded as a real, palpable personality, a man of intelligence and humour; in music an innovator of genius; in business a feckless spendthrift; in love hesitant and tender; in friendship passionately loyal but often intolerably exacting. Through a close reading of his letters and the use of everyday detail, Zamoyski draws the reader into the private world of this most complicated and reticent of men – ‘a man made for intimacy’, as the poet Heinrich Heine called him – and reveals the real passions, suffering and ultimate tragedy of his life.

Book description: https://www.amazon.co.uk/

author: Ziolkowska-Boehm Aleksandra

Internationally renowned actress Ingrid Bergman was of Swedish and German descent, though she was known by the majority as Swedish. Though she hailed from Europe, she also had relatives in the United States. This book chronicles her relationship with her American relatives through original letters and recollections of her cousin.

Book description: https://www.amazon.co.uk/

author: Snyder Timothy

The killing fields extended from central Poland’s to western Russia. For twelve savage years, on this bloodsoaked soil an average of one million individuals – mostly women, children and the aged – were murdered every year. Though in 1939 these lands became battlefields, not one of these fourteen million was killed in combat. They were victims of a murderous policy, not casualties of war.
Int his deeply unsettling and revelatory book, Timothy Snyder gives voice to the testimony of the victims through the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. It is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane and authoritative bok that demands we pay attention to those that history is in danger of forgetting.

Book description: https://www.amazon.co.uk/

author: Wiszniewski L.

author: Williamson David G.

Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 was the first brutal act in six years of world war, but the campaign is often overshadowed by the momentous struggle that followed across the rest of Europe. David Williamson, in this timely and thought-provoking study, reconstructs each stage of the battle in graphic detail. He looks at the precarious situation of the Polish nation caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, reconsiders the pre-war policies of the other European powers, particularly France and Britain, and assesses the state of the opposing armed forces before the Germans launched Operation White. In a vivid and fast-moving narrative he follows the course of the campaign as it moved across Poland in September 1939.His book should encourage a fresh understanding of the Polish-German war and of its significance for the wider conflagration that followed. Critical episodes in the German offensive are re-examined: the mock attack at Gleiwitz, the battles at Westerplatte and Bzura, the siege of Warsaw and the impact of the intervention of the Red Army. Throughout the narrative, first-hand accounts of soldiers and civilians who were caught up in events are used to give an insight into the experience of the war. The author dispels myths that persist about the course of the campaign – the apparent destruction of the Polish air force, the Poles’ use of cavalry – and he draws attention to often overlooked flaws in German military organization. He also records the immediate aftermath of the Polish capitulation – the division of Poland between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union and the fate of the captured Polish troops.

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author: Forbes Peter

author: Dryden Linda

Joseph Conrad’s early Malay fiction reflects his seafaring experiences in the East and expresses his misgivings about the assumptions of `white superiority’, of imperial power, and of the possibilities for romantic heroism that characterize the late nineteenth-century imperial romance. In fact Conrad was deeply sceptical about its promises of wealth, glory, and heroic reputation.
Linda Dryden explores how Conrad used and subverted these tales of Empire to offer an unsettling vision of the imperial experience in Malaya. In Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands Conrad challenges the romantic aspirations of his characters; in ‘Karain’ he deliberately exploits the formula of imperial romance; and in Lord Jim he exposes the fragility of the notion of romantic heroism and gentlemanly conduct. Using illustrations from and references to many well-known novels of Empire, such as Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Dryden demonstrates how Conrad’s early Malay fiction alludes to the conventions and stereotypes of popular imperial fiction.

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edited by: Glazer Teresa, Siedlecki Jan, Chmielowska Joanna

This Indian adventure is intrinsically linked to World War II: after the deportations to the Soviet Union a group of Poles found safe refuge in India, where they would stay until the end of the War , hoping to return to their own country. Unfortunately the Yalta Agreements made that impossible. Very few people went back to Communist Poland; the great majority scattering throughout the Western World. But the bonds of friendships formed in India survived and they occasionally had reunions in different parts of the world until they formally organised themselves into the Association of Poles in India 1942-1948. As children or teenagers, more than half a century ago, they did not realise just how unique was their stay in India. As mature adults they decided to research the archives, camp chronicles and their own diaries, to preserve that small, but unique part of the history of the Polish Refugee Odyssey during and after the War. It was only after the majority of the authors of this collective work reached retirement age that they found time for research and writing. To their advantage was the fact that many documents, previously unobtainable in Poland and only available after a fifty-year gap in England, now became accessible. This book often quotes the original documents in order to better convey the spirit of those days and maybe help future researchers, enlivening the text with personal reminiscences and entries from their youthful diaries. The first Polish edition of this book sold out among the people whose story it told, the second found its way to many universities and libraries in Poland, as research of the deportations to Russia had until recently been forbidden, and all the material found in the London Public Record Office, British Library, or the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, was new to them. The English edition will be of interest to their children and grandchildren for whom English became the first language, also their friends in India, and hopefully all students of the period of the Second World War. As it is a collective work, the book retains the individual style of different authors so the English may seem rather unconventional.

Book description: https://www.amazon.co.uk/