Poland Books

In his many historical works on the medieval history of the Eastern Baltic region, William Urban has set a high standard of historical excellence. Tannenberg and After pushes the standard to new heights, not only within the area of medieval Baltic History but in how a historical account should be presented. Throughout the book Urban paints a picture of the times through the eyes of the various participants. His approach provides the reader with as accurate an account as is available in the English language. He also strives to dispel the myths promoted by earlier historians that presented the topic from a nationalistic bias.

Overall I found the book to be truly fascinating, well written and a remarkable scholarly accomplishment from a World Class Historian.

In his many historical works on the medieval history of the Eastern Baltic region, William Urban has set a very high standard of historical excellence. Tannenberg and After pushes the standard to new heights, not only within the area of medieval Baltic History, but in how a historical account should be presented. Throughout the book Urban paints a picture of the times through the eyes of the various participants. His approach provides the reader with as accurate an account as is available in the English language. He also strives to dispel the myths promoted by earlier historians that presented the topic from a nationalistic bias.

Overall I found the book to be truly fascinating, well written and a remarkable scholarly accomplishment from a World Class Historian.

They Called Me Mayer July is a beautiful book, both in the written word and the art work. It details the day-to-day lives of the Jewish people who lived in their 'schtetles' before the Holocaust and it goes into the various personalities, nick names, and jobs that were done during those years. Artistically, the detail is stunning and a joy to behold. For those of us whose ancestors came from these places, it gives us the opportunity to see and read what life was like, both the good and the difficult. I was so impressed that I bought a book as a gift for a friend and have recommended it to others. We owe a debt of gratitude to the author and his daughter for giving us this wonderful gift.

This book is a treasure! It provides reminiscences in text and in paintings of a Polish Jewish shtetl, Apatow or, as the Jews called it, Apt. Like Grandma Moses, Kirshenblatt began painting late in life and, like her, has produced primitive, lively, intimate illustrations of his remembered world. The text is equally intimate describing the people, their nicknames, and their lives. Anyone interested in furthering his or her knowledge of the shtetl, as told by one of its last living inhabitants, must read this book.

I could not put this book down and I am not in the medical field. Maria really brings the reader into her personal journey as a premiere doctor, scientist, wife, mother, daughter from Poland, now living in the U.S. For a lay person, her descriptions of microsurgery I found fascinating. As the frontier of medicine shifts to regenerative medicine using stem cells, I now have a better understanding of the potential to help so many people as well as the ethical questions posed. It was inspiring to hear this story of diligence and noble efforts. The style in which it was written, really speaks from the heart and that is what I appreciated most. Cheers to Dr. Siemionow for sharing her story and educating us along the way! I highly recommend this book!

This book was truly a joy to read. I could not put it down! Dr. Siemionow interweaves her life story as a surgeon and scientist with the developments of Plastic Surgery and Transplant Medicine. She gets your hooked with her story of reattaching the hand of a young wood-chopper and then travels through many years of research and discovery to her current work in face transplantation. It is a breath of fresh air showing the struggles and successes of reconstructive plastic surgeons, in stark contrast to the drama of cosmetic surgery that dominates news-media today. A must-read for any woman planning a career in medicine or science and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about medical science and practice!

This guy knows how to write, how to live, how to be a poet.

An outstanding portrayal of the immigrants' dilemmas. But the immigrants in "Two Cities" have nothing to do with the United States. They are exiled from Lvov, an ancient Polish town incorporated to the Soviet Union as a result of World War II, and sent to the post-German city of Gliwice in southern Poland. Everything that comes from Lvov or reminds them of Lvov is sacred while everything else is worthless. A child growing in the dual world of imaginary Lvov and real Gliwice has trouble finding his identity. He returns to the past, examines and questions the drama of the war, and struggles to reconcile his life with the semi-imaginative world that surrounds him. Two Cities as well as other short stories included in this book are true masterpieces but must be read with some minimum background on post-war Poland.

"War In The Shadow Of Auschwitz" by John Wiernicki.
Subtitled: "Memoirs Of A Polish Resistance Fighter And survivor Of the Death Camps". Syracuse University Press, 2001.

In the dry September of 1939, Janusz Wiernicki was a young cadet who had just completed his freshman year at the Military Academy in Lwów, Poland. If the weather had been wet, the German 1939 invasion would have been slowed down, but it was a dry September. The first 88 pages narrate the rapid defeat of Poland and the shock experienced by this young boy as his entire world disintegrates.

His options rapidly diminish. He can not stay at the "manor" of his family; (the Irish would consider his family part of the "Landed Class"). In the woods, he becomes part of a loose organization of Polish Army guerrillas ...Resistance Fighters ... who, it appears, spend their time wandering aimlessly from place to place. There is one "fire fight" where both Germans and Poles take casualties, but, interestingly, most of the time, Janusz is assessing the charms of the various young ladies he encounters. Youth will overcome!

Janusz Wiernicki goes home on leave to visit his relatives and is arrested by the Gestapo as he is just about to return to the Resistance Fighters. Janusz was not successful in hiding his second set of forged identity papers.

The remainder of the book, some 169 pages (or 66%) deals with the witness of Janusz Wiernicki to the inhumanity of the Nazi Germans towards the Poles, towards anyone Slavic, towards the Jews, towards Nazi defined "Untermensch". The author recounts how enforced starvation in the prison camps made food the chief subject of discussion, with the complementary issue being the avoidance of rigorous labor which would hasten starvation. Perhaps Wiernicki survived because his Grandmother was able to send him food packages.

In one instance, Wiernicki used his Grandmother's food to procure a pair of contraband binoculars. Then, the author recounts how he used the binoculars to watch as Hungarian Jews were offloaded from the trains, sorted into the immediate death line and into the line where they would live for a short while more, and the horror of seeing families being sent, left to death, while some were sent, right to life. This eye-witness account is horrifying, but is the heart of this book.

As the war winds down, Wiernicki and his fellow inmates are made to trek from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. At the very end, (of the book and the war), Janusz runs away from the line of prisoners trudging along. The German guards shoot but miss him. He runs and runs. He describes taking a pistol from a young German soldier, a dead young soldier in the side car of a motorcycle. Then he meets with a vehicle bearing the white star of the American Army. Witness.

A non-Jew, author John Wiernicki was a Polish partisan and political prisoner who vividly recalls his experienced during World War II and the horrors of being incarcerated in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was in 1943 that Wernicke as a Polish underground fighter was captured and beaten by the Gestapo, then shipped to Auschwitz. A Gentile, Wernicke's chilling memoir graphically details "life" in that infamous death camp, along with his personal battle to survive both physically and morally in the face of the utter evil that was the Nazi "Final Solution" for its enemies. Especially in the face of current efforts at anti-Semitic revisionism, War In The Shadow Of Auschwitz is a critically important and welcome contribution to the growing library of Holocaust Studies, as well as being recommended for World War II European theater reading lists and reference collections.

The main character in this moving book is a teenaged girl, Roma, who is separated from her affluent family and sent to a concentration camp at the age of 16, where she never knows if she will be in the next group of inmates selected to die in the crematorium. Her only solace from the daily horrors is the imagined conversations she has at night, before going to sleep, with her mother. The story of how she manages to survive with her humanity intact and start a new life in Israel makes for gripping reading; I read this book in one sitting. Especially interesting is the epilogue, where she talks about what it felt like to return to Poland nearly 60 years after she left. Adding to the authenticity of the historical details is the fact that Roma's co-author, her son, is a history professor. He writes about the difficulties faced by himself and his mother in writing about her past. Rather than just telling a story, this book addresses the problem of reconciling memory with historical fact, and what it means to write about your past so many years later.

This is the greatest and most touching memoir on the Holocaust I have ever read. It provides psychological insights into the way the victims felt. Read this!!!!!

This is a remarkable book. It is different from many books on the Holcaust because the main characters do not end up in a concentration camp or death camp. Instead, they remain in Poland and try to survive by maintaining Christian identities. Without giving anything away, the method that the parents select for their baby daughter to escape the ghetto is not to be believed. The book also provides a stunning first-hand account of the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union.

I justy read this book and it was very informative and interesting. Such hardships by all but informative as well. I just recently visited Dauchau Concentration Camp in Germany and it makes me appreciate what they went through so much more. Everyone should read some of the books on the Holocaust.

This is a well-written and riveting story of love, endurance, suffering and God's provision. The explanations of the atrocities committed by the Nazis to William, Rosalie, their families and friends is horrible and hard to absorb, but reading it is only a fraction of the pain that these two brave people endured.

Having met, listened to and visited with both William and Rosalie, I can attest to the scars that they carry as well as the passion they have for sharing their stories with others. They continually re-open old wounds by telling people what happened to them in hopes that the true story of the Holocaust will never be ignored or forgotten.

I strongly encourage you to get this book, read it, and learn from it. We must NEVER FORGET.

"William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony" is the personal story of William and Rosalie Schiff who were a young couple struggling to stay alive during the Nazi holocaust in which German antisemitism motivated the torture and murder of their families, friends, and neighbors. Now both in their eighties and living in Dallas, Texas, their story is effectively and accurately narrated by Craig Hanley is a seminal biography detailing their experiences, the loss of their families, their years of torture at the hands of their Nazi captors, and their struggle to find each other after the war ended. This is a riveting, harrowing, dramatic, true story, the stuff of which block buster movies and television mini-series are made from. "William & Rosalie" is a welcome and informative addition to the growing body of Holocaust literature, made even more valuable as the survivors of that generation are now dying off and the attempts by neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and Islamic anti-Semites at denying the Holocaust are continuing unabated. Enhanced with family photographs, a 'Key to Inter-Chapter Photos', and a selected bibliography of suggested further readings, "Williams & Rosalie" is particularly distinguished by an underlying message warning of the dangers of prejudice and ethnic hatred. Now academic or community library should fail to include a copy of "William & Rosalie" in the Judaic Studies or Holocaust Studies reference collections.

Jankiel (Yankiel) Wiernik is one of the few Jewish forced laborers at Treblinka to have escaped from this Nazi German factory of death, and lived to tell the world about it. He had various jobs at the camp, including the construction of more and ever-larger gas chambers (p. 18). There is no reason for questioning the veracity of what Wiernik has written. He reports the emanation of steam from intertwined layers of corpses on a hot day (p. 39). (Decomposition of bodies is an exothermic reaction). Either Wiernik had arcane knowledge of the chemistry of putrefaction, or he actually saw what he claimed to have seen.

On a typical day at Treblinka, 10,000-12,000 people were murdered (p. 16); with a daily high of about 20,000 victims (p. 21). At first the victims were buried in mass graves. In time, these were re-exhumed and burned, not in crematoria as at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but on huge open-air pyres. The transports to the Treblinka death camp were not limited to Jews. There were also transports of Gypsies (p. 26, 38) and Poles (p. 35).

Wiernik relates events at Treblinka to those of the outside world. He got hold of a German newspaper that described the sensational discovery of the bodies of the Soviet-murdered Polish officers at Katyn (p. 28). Evidently sensitized to the incriminating nature of bodies, the Germans decided to re-exhume and burn the bodies of the Treblinka victims. In addition, recently-arriving Jews, the remnants of the Warsaw ghetto following the Uprising, were treated with exceptional brutality. Finally, Wiernik observed the arrival of Jews that had been caught at Hotel Polski (p. 41)--a fraudulent German offer of amnesty to Warsaw Jews still in hiding.

Many modern Holocaust materials dwell on those underworld Poles who served the Germans--the informers and the szmalcowniki (blackmailers). In contrast, Wiernik focuses on their Jewish counterparts: "Another amazing characteristic of the Germans is their ability to discover, among other peoples, hundreds of depraved types like themselves, and to use them for their own ends. In camps for Jews, there is a need for Jewish executioners, spies, stool pigeons. The Germans managed to find them, to find such vile creatures as Moshko from the vicinity of Slonim, Itzig Kobyla from Warsaw, Chaskel the thief, and Kuba, a thief and a pimp, both Warsaw born and bred." (pp. 17-18).

One particularly malicious Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about the Nazis' choice of Poland as the site of the death camps because Poles welcomed them or at least wouldn't object much to them. No doubt, this libelous canard is facilitated by the countless misleading accounts in the western press of "Polish death camps". Ironically, not only didn't the Germans seek any form of "permission" from the conquered and despised Polish untermenschen, but actually kept the death camps a jealously-guarded secret. So extreme was this secrecy that a German woman who had inadvertently been shipped to Treblinka was deliberately killed in order to protect the secret of extermination (p. 22-23).

Another anti-Polish canard is the one about Germans choosing Poland as the site of the death camps so that they could conveniently recruit numerous Polish volunteers to assist in the extermination of Jews. In actuality, Wiernik doesn't mention even ONE Polish collaborator serving the Germans at Treblinka! He elaborates on the work of Ukrainian collaborators numerous times. Ukrainians willingly served the Germans in roles as diverse as: Supervision of the deportations (p. 6), guarding of the overloaded death trains (p. 7), the reception of new arrivals at the camp (p. 8), the shootings at the "medical dispensary" of those unable to proceed to the "bath houses" (gas chambers) (p. 13), the running of the motor to produce carbon monoxide gas to kill those herded into the gas chambers (p.14), the supervision of the disposal of the bodies (p. 10), and all-around guard duty (p. 43).

For all of the unrelenting horror of what went on at Treblinka, it is interesting to note that there may have been a miraculous sign during one of the mass burnings of victims on a pyre, as described by Wiernik: "At one time, when the corpses were placed on the fire-grate, an uplifted arm was noticed. Four fingers were balled into a tight fist, except for the index finger, which had stiffened and pointed rigidly skyward as if calling God's judgment down upon the hangmen. It was an accident but, nevertheless, all present were unnerved. Even our fiendish tormentors turned pale and could not turn their eyes from that ghastly sight. It was as if some higher power were at work. That arm remained pointed upward for a long, long time. A portion of the pyre had long since turned to ashes but the uplifted arm still called to the heavens above for retributive justice. This small, meaningless incident, however, spoiled the high good humor of the hangmen for a while at least" (pp. 39-40).

This is one of the key eyewitness documents that is 'evidence' for the holohoax. Wienik was a prisoner at Treblinka; he escaped and wrote a propagnada pamplet that was quickly translated to English and published in the US. This is one of the most cited documents by holohoax scholars. Today it is hard to find, but is available in some university libraries. (I have a copy, and I'm hoping the price goes up.)

What are the facts - Wiernik was a prisoner at Treblinka and there was an uprising at the camp and many prisoners escaped. The Nazis finally abandoned and razed the camp.

What is the phantasmagoria - I've quoted some examples below to give you and idea Wiernik's imagination at work:

"One of them, Ivan, was tall, had and gentle eyes, but was, nevertheless, a sadist. He often attacked us while we worked and nailed our ears to the wall"

"A German named Zopf was a vile a savage beast, who took special delight in abusing children. When he pushed women around and they begged him to desist because of the children, he frequently snatched a child out of a woman's arms and tore it in half"

"It turned out that women burned easier than men. Accordingly, corpses of women were used as kindling for the fires."

"The Germans stood around with satanic smiles on their faces, radiating satisfaction over their foul deeds. They drank toasts with choice liquors, ate, caroused, and enjoyed themselves around the warm fire. Thus, even after death the Jew was of some use ... the heat came from the burning bodies of Jews. The German fiends stood warming themselves, drinking, eating and singing."

"time and time again children were dragged out of their mother's arms and tossed into the flames alive, while their tormenters laughed."

Either Wiernik was telling the truth, and the laws of physics were suspended during the holohoax, or he a pathological liar. I'll go with the latter explanation.

Note that Wiernik mentions Ivan (the terrible), and John Demjanuk of the US was extradited to Israel and tried as the real Ivan. He was identified by five 'eyewitnesses' and sentenced to death. As it turned out, forged documents were used to extradite Demjanuk, and, he have never set foot in Treblinka. He was finally freed. The eyewitnesses at the trail were also pathological liars.

The journal Isaac Babel kept when he rode with the Cossacks in the 1919-20 war the Soviet Union waged against Poland served as source material for the stories in his brilliant collection, RED CALVARY. The diaries are a gem in themselves, displaying Babel's immediate response to the situation at hand, later to be transmuted by the writer's alchemy into the gold of the stories. It is a little slice of history in the raw, viewed through the eyes of a great writer, a writer who refused to conform to "socialist realism," a writer who 20 years later would be executed by the State Security Apparatus of the USSR.