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In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.
"This collection of articles summarises results of investigations into archival materials concerning wartime stories of various nations involved in the Great War. The objective of the authors was to analyse the wartime experience of individuals and local communities as well as whole nations."--Provided by publisher.
The book aims to reconstruct and analyze the disputes over the Polish-Jewish past and memory in public debates in Poland between 1985 and 2012. The analysis includes the course and dynamics of the debates and, most importantly, the panorama of opinions revealed in the process.
Traces the controversial history of how the symbol of the cross in modern Poland has been appropriated by different secular projects.
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Like Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography written thirty years earlier, A Year of the Hunter is a "search for self-definition". A diary of one year in the Nobel laureate's life, 1987-88, it concerns itself as much with his experience of remembering - his youth in Wilno and the writers' groups of Warsaw and Paris; his life in Berkeley in the sixties; his time spent with poets and poetry - as with the actual events that shape his days. Throughout, Milosz tries to account for the discontinuity between the man he has become and the youth he remembers himself to have been. Shuttling between observations of the present and reconstructions of the past, he attempts to answer the unstated question: Given his poet's personality and his historical circumstances, has he managed to live his life decently?
Based on extensive original research, including interviews with key participants, this book investigates the sudden and unforeseen collapse of communist power in Poland in 1989. It sets out the sequence of events, and examines the strategies of the various political groupings prior to the partially free election of June 1989. This volume argues that the specific negotiating strategies adopted by the communist party representatives in the Round Table discussions before the elections was a key factor in communism’s collapse. The book shows that on many occasions, PZPR decision-makers ignored expert advice, and many Round Table bargains went against the party’s best interests. Using in-depth interviews with major party players, including General Jaruzelski, General Kiszczak and Mieczyslaw Rakowski, as well as Solidarity advisors such as Adam Michnik, the text provides a unique source of first-hand accounts of Poland’s revolutionary drama.
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Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.