The July-August issue of the Polish language magazine Polski Partner is available for free, on-line. Click on the “Free Online” button in the upper right hand corner of their website. Archive issues are also available. The magazine covers news from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, and features articles on everything from fitness to history to cooking. Enjoy!
Cogo News is a new online news and commentary service covering Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the English language. Cogo provides short, succinct articles reviewing the key editorial, commentary and opinion pieces in major regional news outlets. Beyond news coverage, Cogo encourages dialogue and creative writing in and about CEE. Cogo encourages contributions of articles, analyses, short stories, photos, poems, comments, and essays.
Stephen Fry narrates a free new audiobook celebrating the extraordinary work of the legendary Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Available with the Times Literary Supplement on 12th August 2011, and free streaming available online here and here.
Celebrating the life and works of one of Poland’s foremost literary icons, Stephen Fry narrates a new audiobook of selected poems by Miłosz, marking the centenary of his birth.
Stephen Fry commented on his involvement in the project: “It gave me enormous pleasure to read these poems, which I count as amongst the best written in any language since the war. It would give me even more pleasure if I thought that this recording might bring Miłosz and his dazzling mixture of honesty, insight and pure poetic instinct to a wider, English-speaking readership…”
Today marks the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. The on-line Polonia community has commemorated the day in many ways. I begin with John Guzlowski’s poetry from The Warsaw Uprising, August 1, 1944
On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance and the people of Warsaw rose up to throw off the Nazi oppressors. The Poles fought with guns, bricks, stolen grenades, sticks, and their hands and teeth. The Nazis retaliated with tanks, bombers, and fire.
63 days later the last Poles surrendered to the Germans.
250,000 men, women, and children were killed in the fighting, and the city of Warsaw was leveled by the Germans.
As a boy growing up, I would often hear my father talk about the fight the Poles made in the face of German military superiority. He would talk and sometimes he would weep for the dead.
My father wasn’t there, of course. He had been taken by the Germans to Buchenwald Concentration Camp several years before. But when he talked about the Warsaw Uprising, he spoke like a man who had been touched by something that he would never forget.
I tried to capture this in a poem called “Cross of Polish Wood…”
A historical timeline for the Warsaw Uprising can be found at the Warsaw Uprising 1944 website. And, remember to support Wisia’s Story, and projects like it, so to preserve first hand accounts of these events.
The History Channel aired Betrayal: The Battle for Warsaw in 2009. The film’s description is a fitting synopsis of the events that began this day:
The Warsaw Uprising was the largest and perhaps most heroic underground campaign of World War II. It was also one of the most desperate and little known battles of the war. Yet even as the Poles rose up against the Germans in the heart of Warsaw, they were callously betrayed. Not by their enemies but by their allies.
They were promised help that never came, so they took matters into their own hands. In the summer of 1944, more than 20,000 Polish Freedom Fighters and 220,000 Polish civilians died at the hands of the German Army during 63 days of hellacious battle in Poland’s capital city of Warsaw.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded Poland from the West, and two weeks later, Russia invaded from the east. There they formed a resistance movement with the hope of eventually overthrowing German occupation in their homeland and re-gaining freedom. Polish soldiers, who had escaped, joined Allied forces around the world to battle the Axis, while in German-occupied Warsaw, the Polish underground published newspapers; plastered the city with fliers urging resistance; bombed supply trains; assassinated German officials in public; and gathered a force of 400,000 known as The Home Army.
The Germans responded with the brutality that was their trademark, setting up gallows around the city for public executions, rounding up suspected sympathizers and herding them onto trains bound for work camps and gas chambers.
By 1944, the Russians had switched sides and were allied to Britain and America. And as the Russians pushed the Germans out of Russian territory and back through Poland, the Polish underground prepared to rise up against the Germans in Warsaw. The plan was to liberate their capital just before the Russians reached Warsaw and liberate the city.
But to prevail the Poles would have to join forces with Joseph Stalin, the same man whose forces had massacred 22,000 Polish soldiers and buried them in mass graves only a few years earlier. On August 1, 1944 at 5 p.m., with the Russian army just miles away, The Home Army launched a surprise attack against the Germans … the Warsaw Uprising was underway. Yet, just when the Poles expected the Russians to join the battle, the Russians stopped as the Germans in Warsaw decimated the Polish insurgents. There was a reason: Stalin had no use for the insurgents; his plan was to install a communist puppet government in Poland after the war. Yet perhaps the most appalling aspect of the story is that Churchill and Roosevelt let Stalin get away with it.
Consisting entirely of archival footage and interviews with survivors, BETRAYAL: THE BATTLE FOR WARSAW is an inspiring and heartbreaking retrospective of one of the greatest fights you’ve probably never heard about. Highlights of BETRAYAL: THE BATTLE FOR WARSAW include:
The little-known Polish perspective on the latter years of World War II, when the under equipped Home Army struggled against superior German forces and waited for help from Allied forces that never seemed to come.
The historic summit in Tehran, in which Churchill and Roosevelt each separately promised Stalin that Poland would be his once Germany fell, paving the way for a half-century of Communist rule there after the War.
Tales of the heroic efforts of the Polish insurgents, including carrying the wounded to safety through the city sewers, the special efforts of the women of Poland both on the battlefield and as nurses in makeshift hospitals, and the efforts to find food and water in the war-torn streets of Warsaw.
Survivors share memories of German brutality, including pouring gasoline on living people and lighting them on fire. “These were not soldiers,” one survivor recalls, “They were rapists and murderers.”
The horribly botched efforts at support by the Russian and American Armed forces, which included supplying the Polish with thirty-year-old rifles that didn’t work and dropping relief supplies directly into the hands of the Germans.
The eventual surrender of The Home Army to German forces, after which Hitler placed the entire remaining population in concentration camps and leveled the city, building by building.
From YouTube and The Wall Speaks: Krystyna Rutczyńska, a courier for the AK (Home Army) speaks about her experience during the first day of the Warsaw Uprising. / Krystyna Rutczyńska, łączniczka AK w Powstaniu Warzawskim opowiada o przeżyciach pierwszego dnia Powstania Warszawskiego.
Ceremonies marking the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Rising of Polish Home Army partisans against occupying Nazi German forces have begun in the Żolibórz district of the capital, where the Uprising began in the early afternoon hours on 1 August 1944.
Memorial events are also planned for tomorrow and Sunday, when President Bronislaw Komorowski will host a meeting with former insurgents who are arriving to Warsaw for the occasion from various parts of the world.
On Monday, the anniversary itself, in line with a long-standing tradition, sirens will wail across the city, buses and private cars will draw to a halt and pedestrians will stand still for a minute’s silence on the stroke of 5 pm, the exact time chosen by the Home Army to launch the uprising. The main ceremony, attended by top-ranking politicians, will be held hour at the Powązki Military Cemetery.
Special concerts, theatre performances, city games and sing-a-longs are also planned.
Fought in a bid to secure Poland’s post-war independence, the Warsaw Uprising was led by the Home Army – commanded by Poland’s government-in-exile in London – which secretly deployed around 50,000 fighters. Around 18,000 of them died in the sixty-three day-long battle.
Some 180,000 civilians were massacred, or killed by crossfire or bombing, as the Germans took Warsaw back street by street.
President Komorowski with veteran Helena Wołłowicz; photo - PAP Bartłomiej Zborowski
President Komorowski was with his aunt and veteran of the 1944 Warsaw Rising Helena Wołłowicz today, to mark the 67th anniversary of the insurgency against Nazi occupation, which began on 1 August 1944.
Bronislaw Komorowski was at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw as part of a day of ceremonies and events to mark the uprising, which was eventually crushed by the Nazis.
Later, President Komorowski led a ceremony at the Warsaw Rising monument outside the parliament building in honour of those fallen 67 years ago.
President Komorowski told the dignitaries and veterans that Poland’s wartime underground state could be an example for his countrymen today.
Komorowski declared that theclandestine state, which included underground courts, universities, theatres and publishing houses, “was a phenomenon then, and today it can also be a source of pride and an important point of reference for contemporary Poles in thinking about their country.”
Komorowski alluded to the parallels between the wartime generation and his own, in their desire for “the reconstruction of the Polish state”.
“So today, here in this place, where the monument to the Polish underground state stands… the Polish president bows his head low, not only before those who created this state, but also before those who fought for this country, and to those who are able to respect the Polish state,” the head of state said.
From YouTube: The Nazis – A Warning From History, The Wild East (Episode 4, Parts 1-4) discussing the Nazi German policies toward Poland during World War II.
Bishop Jerzy Szotmiller of the Polish Catholic Church reposed in the Lord this afternoon, July 31, 2011, in Częstochowa, Poland. May Your servant and bishop Jerzy rest in peace O Lord!
Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord and may the perpetual light shine upon him.
May he rest in peace. Amen.
Wieczne odpoczynek racz mu dać Panie, a światłość wiekuista niechaj mu świeci.
Niech odpoczywa w pokoju, Amen.
Ś.P. Bishop Jerzy was born in Warsaw, Poland on February 20, 1933. He was ordained to the Holy Priesthood in the Polish Catholic Church by Bishop Maksymilian Rode on February 24, 1961. From October 1975 to November 1976 he served the Polish National Catholic Church in Brazil. On July 29, 1979 he was consecrated Bishop of the Polish Catholic Church in Holy Ghost Cathedral, Warsaw, Poland by the Prime Bishop of the Polish Catholic Church, Most Rev. Dr. Tadeusz Ryszard Majewski with co-consecrators Most Rev. Francis Rowiński (PNCC), Rt. Rev. Joseph Niemiński (PNCC), and Most Rev. Emeritus Maksymilian Rode.
From 1979 to 1986 he served as Suffragan Bishop for the Warsaw Diocese while also serving the Cathedral Parish of Our Lady Queen of Apostles in Częstochowa. He was appointed Bishop Ordinary of the Kraków-Częstochowa Diocese as of June 9, 1986, and held that position until his death. He was predeceased by his wife Regina.
Ś.P. Bishop Jerzy was actively involved in the ecumenical movement, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and ecumenical meetings in the Silesian region of Poland.
A Requiem Holy Mass will be celebrated on August 5, 2011 at 12 noon in the Cathedral Parish of Our Lady Queen of Apostles in Częstochowa.
Poland has recovered a treasured painting, stolen by Germany during World War II. I had posted Gierymski’s similar painting as my Art-for-the-Day on March 22nd.
A valuable 19th century Polish painting missing since the second world war has been returned to Poland after being removed from auction in Germany.
Aleksander Gierymski’s Jewish Woman Selling Oranges was unveiled in Poland on Wednesday by culture minister Bogdan Zdrojewski, who said the return came after many months of negotiations with lawyers representing a German who had possessed it for more than 30 years.
“During those long months, my main thought was to have this picture returned to Poland,” Zdrojewski said.
The work – sometimes referred to as the Orange Vendor – dates from 1880-1881 and is one of several Gierymski works showing Jewish life in poor parts of Warsaw.
The oil on canvas shows an old woman in a cap and with a thick shawl over her shoulders knitting as she holds two baskets, one filled with oranges. She has shrunken cheeks that give her an impoverished look, and is set against a foggy Warsaw skyline.
It has been returned to its original home in the National Museum in Warsaw, where it will undergo many months of renovation.
Museum director Agnieszka Morawinska described it as a “priceless masterpiece” that pleased the painter, rarely content with his own work.
Its return is a “very special day and a true gift for the museum”, she said.
The picture went missing from the museum in 1944, five years into Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland.
It was among a huge numbers of cultural artefacts stolen by German and Soviet forces during their joint wartime occupation of Poland. The country’s government is making efforts to find and bring the works of art back.
The painting resurfaced last November among items offered for sale at a small auction house near Hamburg.
Poland’s chief insurer, PZU SA, paid an undisclosed sum in compensation to the German who had acquired the painting.
Of note, Gierymski painted two similar works: “Żydówka z cytrynami” and “Żydówka z pomarańczami” literally “Jewess with Lemons” and “Jewess with Oranges.”
Gazetta Wyborcza notes in Pomarańczarka w areszcie from November 2010, that Gierymski’s “Jewish woman with oranges” was looted from the National Museum in Warsaw during the war. His other, similar work, “Jewess with Lemons” is on display at the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom. Both paintings have different details, but express the same emotions and situations: toil, the bitterness of existence, persistence in spite of lost illusions, a lonely, tragic, damaged figure pushed down but not broken, and ultimately beautiful.
An example of oranges and lemons together in today’s painting: “Pomarańcze i cytryny,” “Oranges and Lemons” by Edward Okuń.
In 1944, twenty-three year-old Jadwiga (known affectionately to her family as ‘Wisia’) had been living in her native Poland under the yoke of German-occupation for almost five years. Unbeknownst to the invaders, an underground force was mobilizing with the aim of reclaiming at least part of its homeland. The ‘Armia Krajowa’ (‘Home Army’) operated in secret, received its orders from the exiled Polish government and employed the skills of many young people like Wisia to aid them in the uprising.
A select group of youth, including Wisia and her brother, had been secretly selected and trained in running messages and administering medical aid. This group of young civilians supported and sometimes even fought alongside the Armia Krajowa. Their jobs were extremely dangerous but they carried out their missions with remarkable bravery. Our documentary will explore not only the historical details of Wisia’s experience but just as importantly, the composition of her courage, to be able to survive – and ultimately escape – when so many were imprisoned or perished at the hands of these violent intruders.
On the 1st of August 1944, led by the Armia Krajowa, the proud people of Poland united in an attempt to repel the invaders from the city of Warsaw. Through a series of operations and concerted attacks, the civilian-supported Armia Krajowa devastated the German occupiers in the short-term and formed the backbone of what history remembers as The Warsaw Uprising. The uprising’s subsequent failure, eventual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers and citizens and Hitler’s vindictive destruction of 90% of the city, does nothing to bury the bravery of all who fought during this period for the basic privilege of a peaceful life.
Countless other stories of bravery by soldiers and civilians alike also remain untold, but the selfless actions of one particular twenty-three year-old woman remain a timeless demonstration of heroism in the face of tremendous adversity. This young woman, Wisia, is now a great-grandmother approaching her 90th birthday with a spring in her step and glint in her eye. She is our grandmother and we can no longer allow her sacrifices to remain simply a page on an historical website. For decades her full story has remained untold, but with your backing we will travel back in time with Wisia. She will acquaint us with the locations, walk us through salient events and introduce us to the survivors of such an unforgettable time in her life, in Warsaw, Poland…
Lend your support to the project. They are 65% of the way there. You can help tell this story before it is too late.
The Polish American Encyclopedia, edited by James S. Pula, is now available.
At least nine million Americans trace their roots to Poland, and Polish Americans have contributed greatly to American history and society. During the largest period of immigration to the United States, between 1870 and 1920, more Poles came to the United States than any other national group except Italians. Additional large-scale Polish migration occurred in the wake of World War II and during the period of Solidarity’s rise to prominence.
The encyclopedia features three types of entries: thematic essays, topical entries, and biographical profiles. The essays synthesize existing work to provide interpretations of, and insight into, important aspects of the Polish American experience. The topical entries discuss in detail specific places, events or organizations such as the Polish National Alliance, Polish American Saturday Schools, and the Latimer Massacre, among others. The biographical entries identify Polish Americans who have made significant contributions at the regional or national level either to the history and culture of the United States, or to the development of American Polonia.
A proud old man died the other day and a window on history closed.
Jerzy Einhorn was 92 when he passed away at his Mt. Lebanon home on July 4.
A prominent doctor in his native Poland in the 1960s, he came to the U.S. in 1967 and became an endocrinologist at Montefiore Hospital, where he treated thousands of patients and directed the thyroid screening program. He also established health clinics in Hazelwood and Greenfield and taught at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Einhorn leaves behind a wife and three children from two marriages. He also leaves behind a back story from his youth straight from the movies — a tale full of Nazis, narrow escapes and dangerous liaisons in occupied Poland during World War II.
A Polish cavalry officer, he fought the Germans in 1939 and then served with the Polish underground Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising, a battle that ended with the Nazi annihilation of the city in 1944.
He won military decorations, escaped captivity multiple times, twice crossed the Eastern Front, swam the Vistula River and ended up imprisoned and beaten by the Soviet secret police in 1945.
He lost his father — forced to dig his own grave before being shot — and a sister, sent to a concentration camp with her two children.
His story is one of millions from that time, but unlike many others, he wrote it all down in a memoir, “Recollections of the End of an Era,” published in Polish in 2000 and translated into English in 2005…
Chicago Polish-American author Wesley Adamczyk invited me to his home on July 14, 2011, to see his exhibition. As I make my way in, he advises me to watch out for the electrical cords running to a strategically placed floor lamp in his living room. He has positioned several lamps to shine on his collection of memorabilia and publications related to the Katyń Massacre and the deportation of Poles to Siberia at the beginning of World War II.
“Some of my collection I have displayed on the walls and tables,” he says, “and some things I am going to display through multimedia. This is a display of a performance piece titled Two Christmas Eves,” he indicates, pointing to a poster, “one in Poland shortly before the war, one in Siberia in 1941, after my family and thousands of other Polish people were deported to Siberia in 1940.” The drawings contrast the cultured family life Adamczyk knew as a child with the brutality of the Soviets…
Lauren Redniss has written a very modern portrait of this celebrated couple that is a treat to read. From the custom type created by the author to the layout of the sparse text to the illustrations, the author presents a biography that captures not only the linear progression of the lives of these scientific giants, but connects their work to its effects in the world. “Radioactive” is a work of art.
One key to the success of this book is the incorporation of numerous quotes of Marie, Pierre, and others. Actual words help the reader relate to the Curies and to their time. In addition, the accounts and testimonies of other sources linked to the Curies’ work help the reader understand the magnitude of their discoveries. This is especially evident in chapter 5 “Instability of Matter” in which Marie’s thesis that radiation may inhibit malignant cell growth is followed by the 2001 testimony of a cancer patient being treated for Non-Hodgkins lymphoma with a thermoplastic radiation mask. The same chapter included the development of the atom bomb, the Manhattan Project, a copy of declassified FBI files, and the testimony of a Hiroshima survivor.
As the story of Pierre and Marie Curie progresses chronologically through the nine chapters of the book, the author mirrors the characters’ personal and professional lives with other seemingly random events…
One underlying theme of the book is the remarkable partnership of individuals who, working together, discover something new. At the turn of the century, an amazing confluence of scientific discoveries and ideas created an atmosphere where information was shared among scientists. Beginning with Pierre and Marie who never sought a patent for their discoveries, to Marie and Paul Langevin, then to Marie and her daughter Irene, then Irene and her husband Frederic Joliot, etc., these relationships clearly show the benefit of sharing ideas and how those ideas spread with a life of their own throughout the scientific community.
The book spotlights Marie’s great personal strength. As the reader follows Marie’s life, one begins to understand the tremendous challenges she overcame starting with her Polish childhood in Russian-occupied Poland. Her clandestine studies through the secret “Flying University” allowed her to acquire an education so thorough that she could ably compete as one of 23 women of 1800 students attending the Sorbonne. Conducting the physically exhausting work of proving the existence of polonium and radium, and later suffering through radium toxicity did not detract from Marie’s focus on scientific study and the raising of her two daughters…
Radical Gratitude is both narrative and inspiring practical guidance, telling the story of one family’s survival in Stalinist Siberia. That experience develops into a guide to becoming a person who can give to others. Each chapter details the ways we can achieve radical gratitude (learning to be grateful even for the difficult experiences in life). Andrew Bienkowski has spent more than 40 years as a clinical therapist. At the age of six, he and his family were forced to leave their Polish homeland for Siberia where his grandfather deliberately starved to death so that the women and children might have enough to eat. The years that followed were harrowing and influenced his entire life. After Siberia, the family spent a year in an Iranian refugee camp where Andrew nearly died from dysentery, malaria and malnutrition. Three years in Palestine followed, a year in England, before he finally immigrated to America where he went on to earn a Masters in Clinical Psychology. Mary Akers’ work has appeared in a number of international literary journals, many related to health and healing.
Bishop Jerzy Szotmiller of the Polish Catholic Church reposed in the Lord this afternoon, July 31, 2011, in Częstochowa, Poland. May Your servant and bishop Jerzy rest in peace O Lord!
