To Dad—Polish Officer Murdered in Katyn

To Dad—Polish Officer Murdered in Katyn PDF Author: Witomila Wolk-Jezierska
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1796020176
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
The poems To Dad have been inspired by the trauma of one of the most horrific crimes in human history, aggravated by repercussions that followed such as the perpetuation of the Katyn lie, international cover-up, impunity of the perpetrators, inability to recover the remains of the victims, ruthless persecution and coercion of the families, massive censorship, disinformation, and above all, the conspiracy of silence that lasted for generations. The poems sharpen our perception of the intensity and uniqueness of depth and length of agony experienced by the Katyn families. They give testimony to unbearable adversity of several generations of the Polish people deeply harmed and wounded by the Soviet Union and abandoned, marginalized, and ignored by the entire world for decades. The poems are supplemented by historical essays, which put the eradication of the Polish elites in Katyn in the historical context.

To Dad—Polish Officer Murdered in Katyn

To Dad—Polish Officer Murdered in Katyn PDF Author: Witomila Wolk-Jezierska
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1796020176
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
The poems To Dad have been inspired by the trauma of one of the most horrific crimes in human history, aggravated by repercussions that followed such as the perpetuation of the Katyn lie, international cover-up, impunity of the perpetrators, inability to recover the remains of the victims, ruthless persecution and coercion of the families, massive censorship, disinformation, and above all, the conspiracy of silence that lasted for generations. The poems sharpen our perception of the intensity and uniqueness of depth and length of agony experienced by the Katyn families. They give testimony to unbearable adversity of several generations of the Polish people deeply harmed and wounded by the Soviet Union and abandoned, marginalized, and ignored by the entire world for decades. The poems are supplemented by historical essays, which put the eradication of the Polish elites in Katyn in the historical context.

The Katyn Massacre 1940

The Katyn Massacre 1940 PDF Author: Thomas Urban
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526775387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In the spring of 1940, Stalin‘s NKVD executed 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn and other places. When Wehrmacht soldiers discovered some of the graves three years later, the Soviets succeeded in convincing US President Roosevelt of the German perpetration. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no clear picture of the crime, and therefore made no public comments. Using thousands of recently released US documents, this book refutes the popular thesis that the Western Allies deliberately lied about the Katyn case in order not to endanger the alliance with Stalin. As well as consulting Polish and Russian documentation on this war crime, for the first time, the diaries of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who wrote a great deal about Katyn, have been examined. Completely new for research is the role that Hitler's opponents in the Wehrmacht played in solving the crime: at the Nuremberg trial they convinced the US delegation that the executors were not from the SS, but from the NKVD. Nevertheless, it took until 1990 for Kremlin chief Gorbachev to admit Soviet responsibility. Today in Putin's Russia, however, there is a tendency once more to keep quiet about the crime or even to blame the Germans.

Surviving Katyn

Surviving Katyn PDF Author: Jane Rogoyska
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786078937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE ‘A gripping reconstruction… utterly compelling reading.’ Adam Zamoyski ‘This is a grim story, thoroughly researched and brilliantly told.’ Geoffrey Alderman, Times Higher Education The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in utmost secrecy in April–May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake – the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators – whose quest for the truth in the face of an inscrutable, unknowable, and utterly ruthless enemy came at great personal cost.

Katyn

Katyn PDF Author: Wojciech Materski
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300151853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.

My Boyhood War

My Boyhood War PDF Author: Bohdan Hryniewicz
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 075096474X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Bohdan Hryniewicz was only 8 when war broke out and 13 when it ended. In those years he saw more than most men would in 10 lifetimes; and his recall is extraordinary. He cites three days as defining this period: the saddest, 19 September 1939 as Russian tanks rolled into his home town of Wilno; the happiest, August 1 1944, when the Polish flag flew once again from the highest building in Warsaw; the most bitter, October 3 that year, when his commanding officer forbade him to join the other members of his battalion as they entered a prisoner of war camp. The Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days and was the largest single military effort by any resistance movement in the war. Throughout, Bohdan was the personal runner of lieutenant Nalecz, CO of the battalion of the same name. Betrayed by Stalin, all the Poles were expelled to camps after surrender and the city dynamited. Bohdan is probably the last witness to this tragedy.

When God Looked the Other Way

When God Looked the Other Way PDF Author: Wesley Adamczyk
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634150X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Often overlooked in accounts of World War II is the Soviet Union's quiet yet brutal campaign against Polish citizens, a campaign that included, we now know, war crimes for which the Soviet and Russian governments only recently admitted culpability. Standing in the shadow of the Holocaust, this episode of European history is often overlooked. Wesley Adamczyk's gripping memoir, When God Looked the Other Way, now gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Soviet barbarism. Adamczyk was a young Polish boy when he was deported with his mother and siblings from their comfortable home in Luck to Soviet Siberia in May of 1940. His father, a Polish Army officer, was taken prisoner by the Red Army and eventually became one of the victims of the Katyn massacre, in which tens of thousands of Polish officers were slain at the hands of the Soviet secret police. The family's separation and deportation in 1940 marked the beginning of a ten-year odyssey in which the family endured fierce living conditions, meager food rations, chronic displacement, and rampant disease, first in the Soviet Union and then in Iran, where Adamczyk's mother succumbed to exhaustion after mounting a harrowing escape from the Soviets. Wandering from country to country and living in refugee camps and the homes of strangers, Adamczyk struggled to survive and maintain his dignity amid the horrors of war. When God Looked the Other Way is a memoir of a boyhood lived in unspeakable circumstances, a book that not only illuminates one of the darkest periods of European history but also traces the loss of innocence and the fight against despair that took root in one young boy. It is also a book that offers a stark picture of the unforgiving nature of Communism and its champions. Unflinching and poignant, When God Looked the Other Way will stand as a testament to the trials of a family during wartime and an intimate chronicle of episodes yet to receive their historical due. “Adamczyk recounts the story of his own wartime childhood with exemplary precision and immense emotional sensitivity, presenting the ordeal of one family with the clarity and insight of a skilled novelist. . . . I have read many descriptions of the Siberian odyssey and of other forgotten wartime episodes. But none of them is more informative, more moving, or more beautifully written than When God Looked the Other Way.”—From the Foreword by Norman Davies, author of Europe: A History and Rising ’44: TheBattleforWarsaw “A finely wrought memoir of loss and survival.”—Publishers Weekly “Adamczyk’s unpretentious prose is well-suited to capture that truly awful reality.” —Andrew Wachtel, Chicago Tribune Books “Mr. Adamczyk writes heartfelt, straightforward prose. . . . This book sheds light on more than one forgotten episode of history.”—Gordon Haber, New York Sun “One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face.”—Andrew Beichman, Washington Times

The Katyn Order

The Katyn Order PDF Author: Douglas W. Jacobson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1590135970
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
The German war machine is in retreat as the Russians advance. In Warsaw, Resistance fighters rise up against their Nazi occupiers, but the Germans retaliate, ruthlessly leveling the once-beautiful city. American Adam Nowak has been dropped into Poland by British intelligence as an assassin and Resistance fighter. During the Warsaw Uprising he meets Natalia, a covert operative who has lost everything—just as he has. Amid the Allied power struggle left by Germany's defeat, Adam and Natalia join in a desperate hunt for the 1940 Soviet order authorizing the murders of 20,000 Polish army officers and civilians. If they can find the Katyn Order before the Russians do, they just might change the fate of Poland.

A Man Without Breath

A Man Without Breath PDF Author: Philip Kerr
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101621095
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Bernie Gunther enters a dangerous battleground when he investigates crimes on the Eastern Front at the height of World War 2 in this gripping historical mystery from New York Times bestselling author Philip Kerr. Berlin, 1943. A month has passed since Stalingrad. Though Hitler insists Germany is winning the war, morale is low and commanders on the ground know better. Then Berlin learns of a Red massacre of Polish troops near Smolensk, Russia. In a rare instance of agreement, both the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Goebbels want irrefutable evidence of this Russian atrocity. And so Bernie Gunther is dispatched. In Smolensk, Bernie finds an enclave of Prussian aristocrats who look down at the wise-cracking, rough-edged Berlin bull. But Bernie doesn’t care about fitting in. He only wants to uncover the identity of a savage killer—before becoming a victim himself.

The 79th Survivor

The 79th Survivor PDF Author: Bronisław Młynarski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Inhuman Land

Inhuman Land PDF Author: Jozef Czapski
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
A classic work of reportage about the Katyń Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the atrocity himself. In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles—men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished—were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish Army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer Józef Czapski. General Anders, the army’s commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving the Poles arriving for military training; gathering accounts of what their fates had been; organizing education, culture, and news for the soldiers; and, most important, investigating the disappearance of thousands of missing Polish officers. Blocked at every level by the Soviet authorities, Czapski was unaware that in April 1940 many officers had been shot dead in Katyn forest, a crime for which Soviet Russia never accepted responsibility. Czapski’s account of the years following his release from the camp and the formation of the Polish Army, and its arduous trek through Central Asia and the Middle East to fight on the Italian front offers a stark depiction of Stalin’s Russia at war and of the suffering, stoicism, and bravery of his fellow Poles. A work of clear observation and deep compassion, Inhuman Land is one of the twentieth century’s indispensable acts of literary witness.