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This text tells the story of Polish teenager Stefan, who was deported with his family to the Soviet Union during World War II. Stefan recounts the hardships he faced, the squalid living conditions in nine-month-long winters, and his survival in the aftermath of the changed Soviet alliance.
It is one of the most perplexing paradoxes of modern life. As technology dramatically expands our ways of communicating, loneliness has become one of the leading causes of premature death in all technologically advanced nations. The medical toll is made heavier by powerful social forcesschool failure, family and communal disintegration, divorce, the loss of loved ones. And while loneliness, the lack of human companionship, the absence of face-to-face dialogue, and the disembodiment of human dialogue have all been linked to virtually every major diseasefrom cancer to Alzheimer's disease, from tuberculosis to mental illnessthe link is particularly marked in the case of heart disease, the natio...
From the Author Having spent nearly ten years writing my memoirs, originally in Polish, I hope that with this English edition they will reach a wider circle of readers. They span more than eighty years of turbulent world historyand when is such history not turbulent?--and include details which may not be familiar to many readers. Those acquainted with the epoch I am describing may wander, before picking up the book, whether it is yet another retelling of an often described drama, the subject already of myriad historical classics. I would say, yes, but it is a retelling with a twist. This book is, above all, a tale of exceptional good fortune, which, in contrast to the experiences of many oth...
As the title "The Myth of German Villainy" indicates, this book is about the mischaracterization of Germany as history's ultimate "villain." The "official" story of Western Civilization in the twentieth century casts Germany as the disturber of the peace in Europe, and the cause of both World War I and World War II, though the facts don't bear that out. During both wars, fantastic atrocity stories were invented by Allied propaganda to create hatred of the German people for the purpose of bringing public opinion around to support the wars. The "Holocaust" propaganda which emerged after World War II further solidified this image of Germany as history's ultimate villain. But how true is this "o...
In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement. Written with verve and panache, and illustrated with 100 striking photos and drawings, Singer's study provides an invaluable historical and conceptual map both of melodrama as a genre on stage and screen and of modernity as a pivotal idea in social theory.
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The most heinous Soviet crimes – the Red Terror, brutal collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, Stalin's Great Terror, mass deportations, and other atrocities – were treated in the West as a controversial topic. With the Cold War dichotomy of Western democracy versus Soviet communism deeply imprinted in our minds, we are not always aware that these crimes were very often questioned, dismissed, denied, sometimes rationalized, and even outright glorified in the Western world. Facing a choice of whom to believe –the survivors or Soviet propaganda– many Western opinion leaders chose in favor of Soviet propaganda. Even those who did not believe it behaved sometimes as if they did. ...
Stalin is quoted as saying 'One man's death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic'. This is the story of a man who was determined to be neither. Kazimierz Tomasz 'Tomek' Hubert was 17 when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Despite his young age, he was quickly deported to the Vorkuta Gulag in the Arctic Circle, for the crime of being the son of a military governor. Here he would survive torture, starvation and even the threat of cannibalism, before he managed to escape and set off on a 6,000km walk to freedom. In this moving tale of endurance against all odds, Andrew Hubert von Staufer traces his father's footsteps from the gulags of Siberia to flying Spitfires in air battles against the Luftwaffe. This is a remarkable account of the Second World War and its long-reaching impact.
John Cooper's pioneering full-length study is a treasure trove of new information, fresh in terms of the ground it covers and the material it assembles. Building on newspapers, archives, and interviews to illustrate the lives and professional experiences of the individuals involved, Cooper also brings out such broad underlying themes as emancipation, antisemitism, radical assimilation, and professionalization. This engaging work on Anglo-Jewry will be of value to the historian and general reader alike.