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Between Nazis and Soviets
Between 1939 and 1947 the county of Janów Lubelski, an agricultural area in central Poland, experienced successive occupations by Nazi Germany (1939-1944) and the Soviet Union (1944-1947). During each period the population, including the Polish majority and the Jewish, Ukrainian, and German minorities, reacted with a combination of accommodation, collaboration, and resistance. In this remarkably detailed and revealing study, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz analyzes and describes the responses of the inhabitants of occupied Janów to the policies of the ruling powers. He provides a highly useful typology of response to occupation, defining collaboration as an active relationship with the occupiers for reasons of self-interest and to the detriment of one's neighbors; resistance as passive and active opposition; and accommodation as compliance falling between the two extremes. He focuses on the ways in which these reactions influenced relations between individuals, between social classes, and between ethnic groups. Casting new light on social dynamics within occupied Poland during and after World War II, Between Nazis and Soviets yields valuable insight for scholars of conflict studies.
In the Polish Secret War
Born in the Polish village of Gaj in 1923, Marian Mazgaj was a teenager when Germany invaded his country and launched Poland into the combat of World War II. Too young to join the Polish army, within a few years he became a member of the Sandomierz Flying Commando Unit, a unit which merged with the "Jedrus" Polish underground group. This memoir provides a vivid record of Mazgaj's career in the military. The Sandomierz Flying Commando Unit and the "Jedrus" underground were actively engaged in fighting the Nazi forces in Poland during World War II, and the author provides a first-hand account of the groups' roles in attacking and disarming German military units; destroying the enemy's grain warehouses and receiving air drops of weapons, ammunition, and explosives from the Allies. He also describes the incorporation of his partisan group into the Home Army, whereby he and his comrades became the Fourth Company in the Second Regiment of the Second Division, gaining strength and destroying many more German units.
Intermarium
History and collective memories influence a nation, its culture, and institutions; hence, its domestic politics and foreign policy. That is the case in the Intermarium, the land between the Baltic and Black Seas in Eastern Europe. The area is the last unabashed rampart of Western Civilization in the East, and a point of convergence of disparate cultures. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz focuses on the Intermarium for several reasons. Most importantly because, as the inheritor of the freedom and rights stemming from the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian/Ruthenian Commonwealth, it is culturally and ideologically compatible with American national interests. It is also a gateway to both East and West. Since...
The Last Peasant War
A history of the largely forgotten peasant revolution that swept central and eastern Europe after World War I—and how it changed the course of interwar politics and World War II As the First World War ended, villages across central and eastern Europe rose in revolt. Led in many places by a shadowy movement of army deserters, peasants attacked those whom they blamed for wartime abuses and long years of exploitation—large estate owners, officials, and merchants, who were often Jewish. At the same time, peasants tried to realize their rural visions of a reborn society, establishing local self-government or attempting to influence the new states that were being built atop the wreckage of the...
Varieties of Antisemitism
The essays in this volume articulate the historical ground on which this artistic exploration of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism depends. They also elaborate the spectrum that connects them, in terms of their historical location and ideological emphases, and thus suggest the ways in which they are connected in terms of rhetorical discourse. The essays are governed by the sense that anti-Semitism has not been a unitary experience or event. Rather it is its varieties that are explored--rexactly those aspects that have made it so difficult to grasp, and that led to the wide-ranging events and murdering methods of the Holocaust. Thus the editors eschew the causal explanation of Hitler's Willing Executioners as they seek to provide more nuanced understanding. Murray Baumgarten directs the Jewish Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter Kenez teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bruce Thompson is a lecturer in History and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
National Identity and Foreign Policy
This book is based on the premise that the foreign policy of any country is heavily influenced by a society's evolving notions of itself. Applying his analysis to Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, the author argues that national identity is an ever-changing concept, influenced by internal and external events, and by the manipulation of a polity's collective memory. The interaction of the narrative of a society and its foreign policy is therefore paramount. This is especially the case in East-Central Europe, where political institutions are weak, and social coherence remains subject to the vagaries of the concept of nationhood. Ilya Prizel's study will be of interest to students of nationalism, as well as of foreign policy and politics in East-Central Europe.
Death Comes in Yellow
Death Comes in Yellow" presents the history of one slave labor camp in order to shed light on all aspects of the slave labor camps established in Poland under German occupation. Hasag-Skarzysko was one of hundreds of camps scattered throughout occupied Poland. They were distinguished by size, the nationality of the prisoners, their location, the date of their establishment, and the authority in charge. The large number of labor camps reflected the German policy of exploiting the work forces of the occupied countries. These camps were part of a Europe-wide system of forced labor. The first part of this volume reviews the external history of the camp. The second section, which studies the internal workings of the camp, is quite different in approach and includes an analysis of prisoner society and a moving description of the individual prisoner's struggle to survive.
Civil War in Poland 1942-1948
This challenging new work uses archival research to examine Poland's government in exile during the Second World War as it sought both to fight against the advances of Germany and the Soviet Union, and to prepare for the moment when it would once more be possible to establish a national Polish government. The author suggests that the Poles were as much at war with themselves throughout the war and in the years immediately following the end of hostilities as they were with the German and Soviet forces. Civil War in Poland, 1942-1948 contributes to the debate on the fate of Poland in this complex period, the origins of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the process of transformation in Europe during and since the Second World War.
Days of Adversity
This work is a reexamination of the decisions regarding the 1944 Warsaw Uprising made by the leadership of the underground Polish Army (AK), as well as the questionable attitudes of senior Polish commanders in exile in London. The questions raised are, was the uprising necessary and why was it so poorly conducted by a totally indifferent leadership? The challenge is made that the Polish leaders in Warsaw and in London were clearly unfeeling. In Warsaw the uprising was allowed to happen and was doomed from the very beginning owing to poor generalship. The Soviets can be seen rather than to have betrayed the Poles, to have behaved in the same manner as they had always behaved to the Poles and ...
First to Fight
A new and definitive account of the German invasion of Poland that initiated WWII in 1939, written by a historian at the height of his abilities. 'Deeply researched, very well-written... This book will be the standard work on the subject for many years to come' - Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny The Polish campaign is the forgotten story of the Second World War. The war began on 1 September 1939, when German tanks, trucks and infantry crossed the Polish border, and the Luftwaffe began bombing Poland's towns and cities. The Polish army fought bravely but could not withstand the concentrated attack. When the Red Army invaded from the east, the country's fate was sealed...
