Author: Gordon Snider Snider (author)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780359598397
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Gordon Snider
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0359568742
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
Merriam Press World War 2 Fiction Series. Poland Interrupted follows the tumultuous life of Kaz Kowinsky, a boy who comes of age in Krakow following the Great War. When Germany invades at the start of World War II Kaz goes to Gydnia attempting to reach his naval unit but is turned back by German tanks. Then taken prisoner, beaten, and barely escapes with his life. He returns to Krakow where he joins his best friend in the resistance movement. They spy on the Germans, smuggle food and arms to the partisans fighting in the nearby Tatras Mountains, rescue a famous Jewish mathematician from prison, ambush trains. Not all goes as planned. Kaz becomes a fugitive and flees into the Tatras Mountains where he continues to spy on the Germans. Germany is finally pushed back by the allies and slowly retreats from Poland, only to be replaced by Russians who are more brutal than the Germans. Kaz has lost everything and soon realizes that his only hope for survival is to stow away on a ship and flee his beloved country.

Author: Gordon Snider
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781724170880
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Merriam Press World War 2 Fiction Series Poland Interrupted: A Journey follows the tumultuous life of Kaz Kowinsky, a boy who comes of age in Krakow following the Great War and joins the Polish resistance when Germany invades at the start of World War II. Like Poland, Kaz's life is constantly interrupted. He lives in a family that is so dysfunctional he can hardly breathe. Raised by an aunt and uncle, he is returned to his mother, who abandons him in an orphanage. He meets Christina, a bewitching girl who Kaz hopes will become his girl friend, but she chooses his best friend, Charlie, instead. Kaz rebels against his misfortunes by taking dangerous risks, including a harrowing encounter with a train in blood alley. He escapes the orphanage and makes his own way as an apprentice in a factory. He learns to drive trains, searches for a father he has never known, joins the navy, lives in a whorehouse with Charlie, and meets Daneta, who gets him a job in her father's factory. Daneta reads books, listens to classical music, and loves ballroom dancing. Kaz prefers bars, local dance halls, and ribald songs. They marry despite their differences, but it is not a marriage made in heaven. Conflicts inevitably arise. Kaz retreats from his troubles by hiring onto a fishing boat and going to sea. His plans are interrupted when he learns that Daneta is pregnant. Kaz is determined not to abandon his child as his own parents have done, so he returns to Krakow to help care for the baby and to repair the marriage. Then, bombs start to fall as Germany invades Poland. Kaz takes a train headed for Gydnia in an attempt to reach his naval unit but is turned back by German tanks. He is taken prisoner, beaten, and barely escapes with his life. He returns to Krakow where he joins Charlie in the new resistance movement. Kaz and Charlie spy on the Germans, smuggle food and arms to the partisans fighting in the nearby Tatras Mountains, rescue a famous Jewish mathematician from prison, ambush trains, and help save many of Poland's precious querns (stones used to grind flower into bread). But not all goes as planned. Daneta and his child disappear into the German prison system, Charlie is arrested, and Christina joins the partisans in the mountains near Warsaw. Kaz becomes a fugitive and flees into the Tatras Mountains where he continues to spy on the Germans. Christina joins him, and for a brief time Kaz finds the love for which he has longed. But his life is interrupted, once more. Christina disappears following a battle in the Tatras, and the partisans are forced deeper into the mountains. Germany is finally pushed back by the allies and slowly retreats from Poland, only to be replaced by Russians. Poland's new occupiers are even more brutal than the Germans. Kaz has lost everything and soon realizes that his only hope for survival is to stow away on a ship and flee his beloved country.

Author: Rutu Modan
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770461817
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
In modern-day Tel Aviv, a young man, Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father's death, he finds himself not only piecing together the last few months of his father's life, but his entire identity. With thin, precise lines and luscious watercolors, Modan creates a portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties. Exit Wounds is the North American graphic novel debut from one of Israel's best-known cartoonists, Rutu Modan. She has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children's Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times, Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture and is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. Exit Wounds was the winner of the 2008 Eisner award for Best Graphic Album -New and was nominated for the televised 2007 Quill Awards in the graphic novel category.

Author: Elisa-Maria Hiemer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311066741X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction aims to increase the visibility and show the versatility of works from East-Central European countries. It is the first encyclopedic work to bridge the gap between the literary production of countries that are considered to be main sites of the Holocaust and their recognition in international academic and public discourse. It contains over 100 entries offering not only facts about the content and motifs but also pointing out the characteristic fictional features of each work and its meaning for academic discourse and wider reception in the country of origin and abroad. The publication will appeal to the academic and broader public interested in the representation of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and World War II in literature and the arts. Besides prose, it also considers poetry and theatrical plays from 1943 through 2018. An introduction to the historical events and cultural developments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Czech, and Slovak Republic, and their impact on the artistic output helps to contextualise the motif changes and fictional strategies that authors have been applying for decades. The publication is the result of long-term scholarly cooperation of specialists from four countries and several dozen academic centres.

Author: Jack J. B. Hutchens
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793605041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Get Book Here

Book Description
Throughout the twentieth century in Poland various ideologies attempted to keep queer voices silent—whether those ideologies were fascist, communist, Catholic, or neo-liberal. Despite these pressures, there existed a vibrant, transgressive trend within Polish literature that subverted such silencing. This book provides in-depth textual analyses of several of those texts, covering nearly every decade of the last century, and includes authors such as Witold Gombrowicz, Marian Pankowski, and Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Jack J. B. Hutchens demonstrates the subversive power of each work, showing that through their transgressions they help to undermine nationalist and homophobic ideologies that are still at play in Poland today. Hutchens argues that the transgressive reading of Polish literature can challenge the many binaries on which conservative, heteronormative ideology depends in order to maintain its cultural hegemony.

Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385536437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 803

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Krystyna M. Sklenarz, MD
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 145685464X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
There were countless shocking accounts of WWII experiences portraying sufferings of innocent civilian victims. In the U.S., most of them focused on Nazi-German atrocities, victims of Holocaust but much fewer on the Soviet Union, a Nazi - German partner in crime, whose offences were whitewashed or underreported. “Two trains from Poland” is a beautiful and moving story, almost epical account of a little, 6 years old Polish girl from an upper middle class, father a lawyer; mother a university graduate, very literate housewife, a three year old sister and grandparents living nearby. It is a story of survival written 60 years after the events. A midnight knock at her door changed everything for a 6 year old Krystyna Sklenarz. In the middle of the night, a Soviet NKWD (KGB) agent informed her mother that that they are being deported from Poland to Siberia. When asked by her terrified and anxious mother for more details regarding their final destination, the NKWD officer coolly retorted “you are going to where the devil says goodbye”, an old Russian saying needing no further amplification. In her memoirs, Krystyna depicts horror of war from occupation by hostile powers, two years in Siberia, starvation, typhus, life threatening illness in a foreign and hostile country, void of rudimental sanitation and medication, shuttered and disrupted family life, death of her younger sister, an opium den in Persia, mingled with the native aristocracy, learned to speak Farsi, being torpedoed near South Africa, and the arriving in London to live through the Nazi Blitz in the London subway and talking briefly to the Queen. Through it all, Krystyna refused to give up. This is her story this is her journey from the Siberian wasteland, through her struggle to achieve education in a foreign language in only five years, to her entrance into medical school at only 17. The palette of her life has many hues some bright, some dark and hopeless, others funny. Events happened in her life which at times tested credulity. In Teheran in 1942, she was a guest on several occasions in the home of the Shah’s relative and in London, the Queen spoke to her a few words. Krystyna recounts all of this in this tale of courage and perseverance, discussing her stubborn refusal to allow the Nazis or Soviets to defeat her and recounts her later journey and struggles as a female striving to be a doctor when women weren’t supposed to be doctors. The surviving little girl grew up and became a principled and caring woman, whose life taught her self-reliance and dismissed outright any dependence on immediate relief of stress or adversity by artificial intervention through counseling, support groups, drugs legal or illegal, the devises many rely on in our society used to relieve stress and life disappointments. Doctor Sklenarz was an extraordinary woman weathering life in Soviet imprisonment , in exile , in then man-dominated field of medicine, winning admiration of her peers, patients, acquiesces, and love of the entire family scattered through the world.. Through out the entire fourteen months of struggle with painful terminal cancer, Krystyna was true to her character and principles, bearing her fate with dignified stoicism, endurance and without complaints. With her attention to detail and vivid recollection of events, Krystyna takes the reader through a remarkable journey in history and of the human spirit.

Author: Ann Kirschner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416542582
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Do you know why I write so much? Because as long as you read, we are together." -- Raizel Garncarz (Sala's sister), April 24, 1941 Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. But then, few families have a mother and a daughter quite like Sala and Ann Kirschner. For nearly fifty years, Sala kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann and offer to answer any questions her daughter wished to ask. It was a life-changing moment for her scholar, writer, and entrepreneur daughter. We know surprisingly little about the vast network of Nazi labor camps, where imprisoned Jews built railroads and highways, churned out munitions and materiel, and otherwise supported the limitless needs of the Nazi war machine. This book gives us an insider's account: Conditions were brutal. Death rates were high. As the war dragged on and the Nazis retreated, inmates were force-marched across hundreds of miles, or packed into cattle cars for grim journeys from one camp to another. When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Poland, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty. In the first years of the conflict, Sala was aided by her close friend Ala Gertner, who would later lead an uprising at Auschwitz and be executed just weeks before the liberation of that camp. Sala was also helped by other key friends. Yet above all, she survived thanks to the slender threads of support expressed in the letters of her friends and family. She kept them at great personal risk, and it is astonishing that she was able to receive as many as she did. With their heartwrenching expressions of longing, love, and hope, they offer a testament to the human spirit, an indomitable impulse even in the face of monstrosity. Sala's Gift is a rare book, a gift from Ann to her mother, and a great gift from both women to the world.