The Eagle Unbowed

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The Eagle Unbowed

Author : Halik Kochanski
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 911 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012-11-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674071056

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The Eagle Unbowed by Halik Kochanski Pdf

The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.

The Eagle Unbowed

Author : Halik Kochanski
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 768 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2012-10-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780141962412

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The Eagle Unbowed by Halik Kochanski Pdf

In Halik Kochanski's extraordinary book, the untold story of Poland and the Poles in the Second World War is finally heard By almost every measure the fate of the inhabitants of Poland was the most terrible of any group in the Second World War. Following the destruction of its armed forces in the autumn of 1939, the Republic of Poland was partitioned between Nazi and Soviet forces and officially ceased to exist. Racial violence and ideological conformity were at the very heart of the new regimes. As the war progressed millions of Poles were killed, with each phase unleashing a further round, from the industrialised genocide of Treblinka to the crushing of the Warsaw Rising. Polish Jews were all to be murdered, Christians reduced to a semi-literate slave class. In this powerful and original new book Halik Kochanski has written perhaps the most important 'missing' work on the whole conflict: an attempt in a single volume to describe both the fate of those trapped within occupied Poland and of those millions of Poles who were able to escape. Reviews: 'An extraordinary achievement ... a brilliant exercise in historiography ... Kochanski neither debunks nor sensationalises. She has no ideological axe to grind, and makes balanced use of family experience and interview material as against the official record and a handed-down sentimental consensus. The truth is far more powerful than the legend. It's great history writing' Herald 'A superb account of Poland during the second world war ... The pain and loss ... is poignantly evoked by Kochanski ... The Eagle Unbowed, a model history, conveys with harrowing immediacy the plight of the Polish people in the conflict' Ian Thomson, Spectator 'A remarkable book ... [Kochanski] brings to the subject not only an impressive grasp of the military and political context, but also a balance, neutrality and honesty few could manage, combined with the intelligence, imagination and empathy necessary to grasp the true depth of the experience she recounts ... This book is history at its best.' Standpoint 'Poland's war was so terrible as to almost defy summary ... this book is opinionated, fluid and forceful' Oliver Bullough, New Statesman About the author: Halik Kochanski read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford and then completed a PhD at King's College London. She has taught at both King's College London and University College London and presented papers to a number of military history conferences. She has written a number of articles and is the author of Sir Garnet Wolseley: Victorian Hero (1999). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has been a member of the councils of the Army Records Society and Society for Army Historical Research and remains a member of both societies. She is also a member of the British Commission for Military History and the Institute for Historical Research. She is currently a judge for the Templer Medal book prize.

No Greater Ally

Author : Kenneth K. Koskodan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2011-12-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781780962221

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No Greater Ally by Kenneth K. Koskodan Pdf

An in-depth history of the Polish soldiers who served in World War 2, with previously unpublished first-hand accounts and rare photographs. There is a chapter of World War II history that remains largely untold; the monumental struggles of an entire nation have been forgotten, and even intentionally obscured. This book gives a full overview of Poland's participation in World War II. Following their valiant but doomed defence of Poland in 1939, members of the Polish armed forces fought with the Allies wherever and however they could. Full of previously unpublished accounts, and rare photographs, this title provides a detailed analysis of the devastation the war brought to Poland, and the final betrayal when, having fought for freedom for six long years, Poland was handed to the Soviet Union.

Poland 1939

Author : Roger Moorhouse
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2020-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9780465095414

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Poland 1939 by Roger Moorhouse Pdf

A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.

The Jews of Bialystok During World War II and the Holocaust

Author : Sara Bender
Publisher : UPNE
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : History
ISBN : 1584657294

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The Jews of Bialystok During World War II and the Holocaust by Sara Bender Pdf

Jewish society as an active protagonist in the story of the Holocaust

Parachuting into Poland, 1944

Author : Marek Celt,Jan Chciuk-Celt
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2013-05-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781476603384

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Parachuting into Poland, 1944 by Marek Celt,Jan Chciuk-Celt Pdf

This firsthand account, never before published in English, details a secret World War II mission in 1944 called Operation Salamander, in which Tadeusz Chciuk (writing as Marek Celt) parachuted into German-occupied Poland with the enigmatic political adviser Dr. Jozef Retinger. The goal of the mission was to persuade the Polish underground forces and political leadership to accept that it was imperative to start negotiating with the Soviets right away, as they were now to be considered Poland's allies and had the full support of the British and Americans. The story culminates in Operation Wildhorn III, in which Chciuk and Retinger were picked up in Poland by a British plane that landed just a short distance from a significant detachment of German forces, and flew them to safety.

Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945

Author : M.B.B. Biskupski
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 391 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2010-01-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813173528

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Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945 by M.B.B. Biskupski Pdf

During World War II, Hollywood studios supported the war effort by making patriotic movies designed to raise the nation's morale. They often portrayed the combatants in very simple terms: Americans and their allies were heroes, and everyone else was a villain. Norway, France, Czechoslovakia, and England were all good because they had been invaded or victimized by Nazi Germany. Poland, however, was represented in a negative light in numerous movies. In Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945, M. B. B. Biskupski draws on a close study of prewar and wartime films such as To Be or Not to Be (1942), In Our Time (1944), and None Shall Escape (1944). He researched memoirs, letters, diaries, and memoranda written by screenwriters, directors, studio heads, and actors to explore the negative portrayal of Poland during World War II. Biskupski also examines the political climate that influenced Hollywood films.

Jozef Pilsudski

Author : Joshua D. Zimmerman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 641 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2022-06-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780674275850

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Jozef Pilsudski by Joshua D. Zimmerman Pdf

The story of the enigmatic Jozef Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland: a brilliant military leader and high-minded statesman who betrayed his own democratic vision by seizing power in a military coup. In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. From the age of sixteen he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795. Ahead of World War I, he created a clandestine military corps to fight Russia, which held most Polish territory. After the war, his dream of an independent Poland realized, he took the helm of its newly democratic political order. When he died in 1935, he was buried alongside Polish kings. Yet Pilsudski was a complicated figure. Passionately devoted to the idea of democracy, he ceded power on constitutional terms, only to retake it a few years later in a coup when he believed his opponents aimed to dismantle the democratic system. Joshua Zimmerman’s authoritative biography examines a national hero in the thick of a changing Europe, and the legacy that still divides supporters and detractors. The Poland that Pilsudski envisioned was modern, democratic, and pluralistic. Domestically, he championed equality for Jews. Internationally, he positioned Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism. But in 1926 he seized power violently, then ruled as a strongman for nearly a decade, imprisoning opponents and eroding legislative power. In Zimmerman’s telling, Pilsudski’s faith in the young democracy was shattered after its first elected president was assassinated. Unnerved by Poles brutally turning on one another, the father of the nation came to doubt his fellow citizens’ democratic commitments and thereby betrayed his own. It is a legacy that dogs today’s Poland, caught on the tortured edge between self-government and authoritarianism.

The August Trials

Author : Andrew Kornbluth
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2021-03-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674259874

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The August Trials by Andrew Kornbluth Pdf

The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations. The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.

The Eagle Unbowed

Author : Halik Kochanski
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 783 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674068162

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The Eagle Unbowed by Halik Kochanski Pdf

World War II gripped Poland as it did no other country. Invaded by Germany and the USSR, it was occupied from the first day of war to the last, and then endured 44 years behind the Iron Curtain while its wartime partners celebrated their freedom. The Eagle Unbowed tells, for the first time, the story of Poland’s war in its entirety and complexity.

A Question of Honor

Author : Lynne Olson,Stanley Cloud
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307424501

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A Question of Honor by Lynne Olson,Stanley Cloud Pdf

A Question of Honor is the gripping, little-known story of the refugee Polish pilots who joined the RAF and played an essential role in saving Britain from the Nazis, only to be betrayed by the Allies after the war. After Poland fell to the Nazis, thousands of Polish pilots, soldiers, and sailors escaped to England. Devoted to liberating their homeland, some would form the RAF’s 303 squadron, known as the Kosciuszko Squadron, after the elite unit in which many had flown back home. Their thrilling exploits and fearless flying made them celebrities in Britain, where they were “adopted” by socialites and seduced by countless women, even as they yearned for news from home. During the Battle of Britain, they downed more German aircraft than any other squadron, but in a stunning twist at the war’s end, the Allies rewarded their valor by abandoning Poland to Joseph Stalin. This moving, fascinating book uncovers a crucial forgotten chapter in World War II–and Polish–history.

The Crime and the Silence

Author : Anna Bikont
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780374710323

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The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont Pdf

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category A monumental work of nonfiction on a wartime atrocity, its sixty-year denial, and the impact of its truth Jan Gross's hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian's disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was a shocking secret that had been suppressed for more than sixty years, and it provoked the most important public debate in Poland since 1989. From the outset, Anna Bikont reported on the town, combing through archives and interviewing residents who survived the war period. Her writing became a crucial part of the debate and she herself an actor in a national drama. Part history, part memoir, The Crime and the Silence is the journalist's account of these events: both the story of the massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past. Including the perspectives of both heroes and perpetrators, Bikont chronicles the sources of the hatred that exploded against Jews and asks what myths grow on hidden memories, what destruction they cause, and what happens to a society that refuses to accept a horrific truth. A profoundly moving exploration of being Jewish in modern Poland that Julian Barnes called "one of the most chilling books," The Crime and the Silence is a vital contribution to Holocaust history and a fascinating story of a town coming to terms with its dark past.

Resistance

Author : Halik Kochanski
Publisher : Penguin Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2023-03-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0141979011

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Resistance by Halik Kochanski Pdf

'The best book about the subject I have ever read' Max Hastings, Sunday Times A sweeping history of occupation and resistance in war-torn Europe, from the acclaimed author of The Eagle Unbowed Across the whole of Nazi-ruled Europe the experience of occupation was sharply varied. Some countries - such as Denmark - were within tight limits allowed to run themselves. Others - such as France - were constrained not only by military occupation but by open collaboration. In a historical moment when Nazi victory seemed permanent and irreversible, the question 'why resist?' was therefore augmented by 'who was the enemy?'. Resistance is an extraordinarily powerful, humane and haunting account of how and why all across Nazi-occupied Europe some people decided to resist the Third Reich. This could range from open partisan warfare in the occupied Soviet Union to dangerous acts of defiance in the Netherlands or Norway. Some of these resistance movements were entirely home-grown, others supported by the Allies. Like no other book, Resistance shows the reader just how difficult such actions were. How could small bands of individuals undertake tasks which could lead not just to their own deaths but those of their families and their entire communities? Filled with powerful and often little-known stories, Halik Kochanski's major new book is a fascinating examination of the convoluted challenges faced by those prepared to resist the Germans, ordinary people who carried out exceptional acts of defiance and resistance. 'A superb, myth-busting survey of the many ways in which the subjugated peoples of Europe tried to fight back' Saul David, Daily Telegraph

Broken But Unbowed

Author : Greg Abbott
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2017-02-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781501144936

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Broken But Unbowed by Greg Abbott Pdf

"The Republican governor of Texas describes the devastating accident that caused his paralysis, his achievements as Texas' longest-serving attorney general and his bold plan to restore America to international prominence through Constitutional improvements and leadership"--NoveList.

Story of a Secret State

Author : Jan Karski
Publisher : Georgetown University Press
Page : 463 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2013-02-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781589019836

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Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski Pdf

Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume is a remarkable testimony of one man’s courage and a nation’s struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression. Karski was a brilliant young diplomat when war broke out in 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army, which had simultaneously invaded from the East, Karski narrowly escaped the subsequent Katyn Forest Massacre. He became a member of the Polish Underground, the most significant resistance movement in occupied Europe, acting as a liaison and courier between the Underground and the Polish government-in-exile. He was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, and entered the Nazi’s Izbica transit camp disguised as a guard, witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust. Karski’s courage and testimony, conveyed in a breathtaking manner in Story of a Secret State, offer the narrative of one of the world’s greatest eyewitnesses and an inspiration for all of humanity, emboldening each of us to rise to the challenge of standing up against evil and for human rights. This definitive edition—which includes a foreword by Madeleine Albright, a biographical essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an afterword by Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously unpublished photos, notes, further reading, and a glossary—is an apt legacy for this hero of conscience during the most fraught and fragile moment in modern history.