Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series)
edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski

Yale University Press, January 2008

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 (a result of the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact), 14,500 Polish army officers, policemen, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army and held in three special NKVD camps – Kozielsk, Ostaszkowo and Starobielsk – were executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.

In February 1943 the Germans announced that they had discovered the graves of those murdered by the NKVD in Katyń. The Soviets denied having done it and accused the Germans of the crime, deliberately fabricating evidence. The post-war Communist regime in Poland silenced the truth about the massacre. But for the people, it became a key symbol of oppression, falsified history, and dependence on the Soviet Empire.

Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver – now subsumed under “Katyn” – present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes that were edited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Prof. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian-Polish relations up to the present.

"An extremely important book on one of the signature crimes of Stalinism and one of the great efforts of obfuscation of Soviet propaganda." – Timothy Snyder, Yale University

Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

by Samuel D. Kassow

Indiana University Press, July 2007

In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code-named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve its history for posterity. As the Final Solution unfolded, this group – though decimated by murders and deportations – persevered in its work until the spring of 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his family perished in March, 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Searchers found two of these buried caches in 1946 and 1950.

Who Will Write Our History? tells the gripping story of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

A stunning revelation of the enduring spirit of the decimated residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. – Rita Kohn, NUVO Weekly, August 8, 2007

The volume provides important insights into the nature of why people [...] create and maintain historical documents. – Reading Archive, September 2007

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He is author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884-1917 and editor (with Edith W. Clowes) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

They Called Me Mayer July. Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust
Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
University of California Press, September 2007

Intimate, humorous, and refreshingly candid, this extraordinary work is a remarkable record – in both words and images – of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived." This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world – we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a "black wedding" in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic. This moving collaboration – a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation – is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town.     Copub: The Judah L. Magnes Museum

This collection of pre-Holocaust memories will be a lasting contribution to our understanding of Eastern European Jewish life and culture before its destruction.
                                   – Publishers Weekly

It is best through personal stories that we can grasp the world of our fathers which the Nazis destroyed. Mayer Kirshenblatt has a unique gift for evocation of the past in his simple and beautiful paintings. Each one tells a story. Together they make up a world.
                                  – Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Mayer Kirshenblatt brings to life the small Polish town of Apt prior to 1934. We see before our eyes the world of Polish Jewry, from the well-dressed kleptomaniac who steals live fish to Kirshenblatt's mother in her kitchen. His paintings are simple, direct, often witty, and always moving. A book to buy, a book to share.
                                  – Sander L. Gilman, author of Multiculturalism and the Jews

As if memory itself had come and lifted up his brush, Mayer Kirshenblatt evokes every aspect of his childhood in a tender, beautiful series of paintings. The accompanying narrative mirrors the qualities of his art: a remarkable spontaneity and transparency permits the precious illusion that Apt, Poland, lives again in scenes of birth and death, recreations of kitchens and fire stations and farms, inhabited by a full and lively cast of butchers, milkmaids, prostitutes, musicians, all so lovingly and creatively brought to life. It is a magician's trick, a joyous and deeply satisfying immersion in the lost world of prewar Poland Jewry.             – Ann Kirschner, author of Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

Mayer Kirshenblatt is an artist living and working in Toronto. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at The Jewish Museum in New York, Koffler Gallery, and Canadian National Exhibition, as well as in an exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (UC Press) and Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Lucjan Dobroszycki) and co-editor of Art from Start to Finish and The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times.

EXHIBITION DATES:

Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, September 9, 2007 – January 13, 2008

The William Bremen Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Spring 2009

Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, May 8 – September 27, 2009

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

by Diane Ackerman

W. W. Norton, September 2007

Diane Ackerman, a noted writer on natural history, recounts the horrors of the German occupation of Poland in World War Two through the unusual prism of the Warsaw Zoo, where its director,Jan Zabinski, and his resourceful wife, Antonina, managed to save hundreds of Jews.

With the German invasion in 1939, Warsaw had been devastated and the zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, the Zabinskis found a way to put their empty cages to good use. The Germans had allowed Jan to turn the zoo into a pig farm, and to enter the ghetto for food scraps for the animals. He smuggled food in and smuggled people out. One thing led to another, and while the Jews were transported to death camps, the Zabinskis hid some 300 Jews over time in sheds, animal enclosures, and even the lion house. At any given time about a dozen of these "guests" were hiding inside the Zabinskis' villa. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina, with extraordinary ingenuity, courage, and even humor, kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants — otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes. She had a unique gift, “a nearly shamanistic empathy when it came to animals.” For Antonina, animal and human formed a continuum. It is the perfect story for a writer like Diane Ackerman, with her loving grasp of natural history.

Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman keeps the story in context by leading us into the Warsaw ghetto, the 1943 Jewish uprising, the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and introducing us to the leaders and volunteers of Zegota, the Polish underground organization that rescued Jews. But with her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Ackerman also engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and the other hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her. 8 pages of illustrations.

Diane Ackerman has surpassed even herself in her latest book, which is alternatingly funny, moving, and terrifying.
                          – Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

I can't imagine a better story or storyteller. The Zookeeper's Wife will touch every nerve you have.                  – Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

Stunning… Rarely does one read a book in which the author and the heroine are so magically matched.            – Dava Sobel, author of The Planets and Galileo's Daughter

The alpha female in a unique menagerie… [Antonina] was special, and as the remaining members of her generation die off, a voice like hers should not be allowed to fade into the silence.              – D.T. Max, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sept. 9, 2007

Ackerman's writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: “...the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart.” This suspenseful, beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership.
                        – Publishers Weekly

Diane Ackerman is the author of the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses, among many other books that demonstrate her broad knowledge of animal life. Also an accomplished poet (Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems), she lives in upstate New York.

by Andrew Nagorski

Simon & Schuster, September 2007

Using secret documents and eyewitness testimony, much of which contradicts the sanitized version of events presented by Soviet and even Western writers, Nagorski tells the full story of this epic battle for the first time. Far less known than the battle for Stalingrad, which involved about half the number of troops, the battle for Moscow was the biggest in history. From the time Hitler launched his assault on Moscow on September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides – those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded – were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side.

Hitler was so overconfident – even though his generals warned him – that the German army went into battle in the Russian fall well armed but with no winter clothes. Stalin was so in denial that the majority of Russian soldiers had no weapons. As German troops approached Moscow, half of the city's population fled, while others looted stores, staged strikes and attacked those who were escaping. In the end, the German drive fell short, but Stalin's regime was so embarrassed by how close they came, by the mistakes the Soviet dictator had made that allowed them to do so, and by the behavior of many of its own citizens, that the battle -- which lasted almost seven months -- was given short shrift in their history books.

But Nagorski has given us, in sometimes harrowing detail, an account of the bloody, narrow victory that marked the beginning of the end for Hitler's war machine. He also takes the reader behind the scenes of the early negotiations between Hitler and Stalin, and of those later on between Roosevelt, Churchill, and a very wily Stalin.

This highly readable, intellectually stimulating – and at the same time very moving – record of the fearful experiences of nations and individuals stands out as one of our time's finest war books. Not only the mass dying, but also the profound self-deceits of Hitler, of Stalin – and of high-level Westerners – are brought together in this large-scale horror epic. – Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror

Andrew Nagorski has written a gripping story of a strangely underappreciated event that profoundly shaped our world. Nagorski's morally acute, forceful, grimly enlightening account, enriched by interviews with surviving participants, is an urgent reminder of the totalitarian nightmare from which we in the blessed West only narrowly escaped. – Richard Bernstein, former Berlin bureau chief of The New York Times and author of Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French

Written with a genuine feel for the individual dimensions of warfare and compassion for the suffering of both the victors and the vanquished. – Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

Award-winning journalist Andrew Nagorski is a senior editor at Newsweek International. Previously the Newsweek bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw and Berlin, he is the author of several books and has written for many publications. For more information on the author, upcoming book signings, and reviews, please check www.andrewnagorski.com

Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

by Adam Zamoyski

Harper Collins, July 2007

In the wake of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, the French emperor's imperious grip on Europe began to weaken, raising the question of how the continent was to be reconstructed after his defeat. While the Treaty of Paris that followed Napoleon's exile in 1814 put an end to a quarter century of revolution and war in Europe, it left the future of the continent hanging in the balance.

Eager to negotiate a workable and lasting peace, the major powers – Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia – along with a host of lesser nations, began a series of committee sessions in Vienna: an eight-month-long carnival that combined political negotiations with balls, dinners, artistic performances, hunts, tournaments, picnics, and other sundry forms of entertainment for the thousands of aristocrats who had gathered in the Austrian capital. Although the Congress of Vienna resulted in an unprecedented level of stability in Europe, the price of peace would be high. Many of the crucial questions were decided on the battlefield or in squalid roadside cottages amid the vagaries of war. And the proceedings in Vienna itself were not as decorous as is usually represented.

Internationally bestselling author Adam Zamoyski draws on a wide range of original sources, which include not only official documents, private letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, but also the reports of police spies and informers, to reveal the steamy atmosphere of greed and lust in which the new Europe was forged. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, and featuring a cast of some of the most influential and powerful figures in history, including Tsar Alexander, Metternich, Talleyrand, and the Duke of Wellington, Rites of Peace tells the story of these extraordinary events and their profound historical consequences.

Adam Zamoyski was born in New York and educated at Oxford. He lives in London. He is the author of “Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March” (2005), “Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871 (1999, 2001), “The Forgotten Few: The Polish Air Force in World War II” (1995, 2004), “The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of Poles and Their Culture” (1993), “The Last King of Poland” (1992, 1998), “Paderewski” (1982), and “Chopin: A New Biography” (1980).

A QUESTION OF HONOR

The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II
by Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003

A Question of Honor is the gripping, little-known, and brilliantly told story of the scores of Polish fighter pilots who helped save England during the Battle of Britain, of the many thousands more from Warsaw to Monte Cassino who sacrificed their lives to fight the Nazis, and of their country’s stunning betrayal by Roosevelt and Churchill at the end of World War II. The book centers on five pilots of the renowned Kosciuszko Squadron, which had originally been formed by a contingent of American volunteers in the 1919-1920 Soviet-Polish war as an expression of gratitude for its namesake’s role in America’s own war for independence. The authors show how the Polish fliers, already experienced in air combat, and driven by their passionate desire to liberate their homeland from the Nazis, were at first treated with disdain by their British colleagues, but quickly became the most successful squadron in the RAF.  Their story is skillfully embedded in a revelatory history of Poland during World War II, highlighting as never before the fierce struggle of the Poles both in and outside of Poland to regain their independence, and the tragic collapse of their dream in the “peace” that followed.

"Veteran journalists and authors Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud use the pilots’ story as the centerpiece of an impassioned, riveting account of Poland’s betrayal by Britain and the United States…. The book’s title refers to Winston Churchill’s vow that Poland’s allies would honor their commitment to restoring the country’s independence; it was a vow that evaporated at war’s end."
--Newsweek

"Olson and Cloud’s book is both a tribute to the Polish pilots and, more broadly, an eloquent indictment of the realpolitik that led Britain and America to turn their backs on Poland later in the war in a craven attempt to appease Stalin.”
--The Times of London

"A gripping account of personal gallantry and of political treachery. On a par with the recent best-sellers about the fighting men of World War II."
--Zbigniew Brzezinski

Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future
Edited by Robert Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., June 28, 2007 (Cloth, Paperback)

"These probing essays make a profound contribution to enhanced understanding between today's democratic Poland and the Jewish people." – David A. Harris, Executive Director, American Jewish Committee

Since Polish Catholics embraced some anti-Jewish notions and actions prior to WWII, many people tend to associate the Nazi death camps in Poland with Polish anti-Semitism. Reinforced by negative images in Holocaust literature, documentaries, and teaching, certain stereotypes infect attitudes toward contemporary Poland, and have a special impact on Jewish youth groups from Israel and the United States who regularly visit the former camps.

Without denying the existence of either historic or contemporary Polish anti-Semitism, this may be the first book to systematically document anti-Polish images in Holocaust material, to describe ongoing efforts to combat these negative stereotypes, and to emphasize the positive role of the Polish Christians in the present resurgence of Jewish life in Poland. Thus, this book presents new information that will be of value both to Holocaust Studies and to the 100,000 annual foreign visitors to the German death camps in Poland.

"The authors of the essays written for this volume, Poles and Jews, are some of the most knowledgeable and committed participants in the contemporary Polish-Jewish dialogue. Their writings are a ray of light amidst the acrimonious and generally uninformed polemics that still dominate so much of Polish-Jewish relations today." – Michael C. Steinlauf, Gratz College; author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust

"In a masterful fashion and with breathtaking reach, the authors in this collection both complicate and clarify the historically tense relationship between Jews and Poles. As stereotypes are replaced with facts by Jewish and non-Jewish authors alike, the powerful truth emerges: that without the work of Polish non-Jews the Polish Jewish historical and cultural heritage would be lost." – Holli Levitsky, Loyola Marymount University, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Poland, 2001-2002

"This collection of essays represents a compelling analysis of the complex, tortured, and often tragic relationship between Poles and Jews. Taken as a whole, the book exposes the distortions, inaccuracies and misunderstandings that have divided these two peoples in recent history. While exploring the roots of mutual antagonisms, the essays do not whitewash the real issues that continue to separate Jews and Poles, even today. While offering an honest, objective examination of persistent sources of Polish anti-Semitism as well as Jewish anti-Polanism, the authors nevertheless find many hopeful signs of improved relations..." – Donald Schwartz, California State University, Long Beach

"This carefully crafted book does more than clarify complex interactions. It shows how sound scholarship can improve human understanding." – John K. Roth, Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy, Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College

List of contributors: Eli Zborowski, Robert Cherry, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Thaddeus Radzilowski, Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, Lawrence Baron, Shana Penn, Guy Billauer, Havi Ben-Sasson, Helene Sinnreich, Helene Sinnreich, John Pawlikowski, Antony Polonsky, Michael Schudrich, Stanislaw Krajewski, Joanna B. Michlic, Natalia Aleksiun, and Carolyn Slutsky.

About the Editors: Robert Cherry is professor of economics at Brooklyn College. He has written dozens of articles and four books on discrimination, and has written extensively on the American Jewish community and the Holocaust. He is the author of Who Gets the Good Jobs? Combating Race and Gender Earnings Disparities, Prosperity for All? The Economic Boom and African Americans, Discrimination: Its Economic Impact on Blacks, Women, and Jews, and The Imperiled Economy: Macroeconomics from a Left Perspective. Annamaria Orla-Bukowska teaches in the sociology department at Jagiellonian University, Krakow.

>>>MORE

CAVIAR AND ASHES: A WARSAW GENERATION'S LIFE AND DEATH IN MARXISM, 1918-1968
by Marci Shore
Yale University Press, April 2006

"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.

Marci Shore, assistant professor of history at Indiana University, begins with this generation’s coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

"This book is utterly original, and its scholarship - and I don't use this word lightly - is breathtaking. Shore has produced a penetrating study of a host of the twentieth century's most perplexing issues." - Jan T. Gross, Princeton University

"Shore chronicles the collective journey of a group of brilliant and endlessly dedicated intellectuals through one of the worst hells, both physical and spiritual, of the century just ended. There is scarcely any study I can think of in any language to compare to this one." - Michael Steinlauf, Gratz College

"A marvelous example of intellectual history at its best, this book captures the moral and political dilemmas of a generation of brilliant writers who experienced communism first as a dream, then as a nightmare. A superb addition to the ever disturbing literature on the `God that failed’." - Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism

"Marci Shore's account of the founding generation of Polish intellectual Communists reaches far beyond its subject. In its deeply engaged narrative of the lives and illusions of the twentieth-century Polish avant-garde, Caviar and Ashes recovers a fascinating, talented community of men, women and ideas now rapidly receding beyond memory. Professor Shore's history of Polish Marxists is not just an impressive work of historical scholarship; it is a moving elegy to a turbulent century and a forgotten world." - Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“They leapt enthusiastically onto the ‘locomotive of history’ - but in the end that locomotive ran right over them. […]  One reads this work in one breath. It is not an historical monograph – but a story about people entangled in that history.”  - David Warszawski, Gazeta Wyborcza