Unique collection of accounts, diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, leaflets, press and literary works created in the Warsaw Ghetto. The material comes from an archive that Jews gathered during the war to document the life of Jewish community inside the Ghetto.
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The story of seven Jews and a catholic priest who spent almost 5 months hidden in the basement in the ruins of Warsaw – city completely destroyed after Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Those “Robinson Crusoes of Warsaw” survived times of the terrific threat: human voices heard from the sewage system, first snow that shut off the ways to reach the food. They had to fight their own nature in extreme conditions and ceaseless danger. Due to their determination and sensitivity they managed to survive. After the liberation of Warsaw on January 17th 1945 they came out from their hideaway.
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The story of a Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust. The book shows that for Jews there was no effective system of coping with the Nazi oppression. Neither connections nor money could save them – the survivors had to be extremely lucky in the first place and have a tremendous will of survival. The testimony is supplemented with the description of an amazing process: Auschwitz could have become a point of mass emigration of the Jews and not a site of extermination. The present fourth edition of the book contains documents fully confirming the truthfulness of that thesis. These memoirs are expanded with the post-war history of the Schönker family, including their struggle with the secret political police persecuting Jewish entrepreneurs (1945–1955).
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Książka Aleksandra Podrabinka nie jest zwykłą opowieścią biograficzną. To wciąż żywe i aktualne świadectwo odwagi i bezkompromisowości. Ta historia ma swój ciąg dalszy, jest obecna, dzieje się na naszych oczach. Ruch dysydencki, tak szczegółowo opisywanyprzez aktywnego uczestnika, nie jest epizodem w dziejach Związku Sowieckiego. Los Podrabinka to ilustracja fundamentalnego sporu: między ideologią kolektywizmu a cywilizacją judeochrześcijańską, w której człowiek stanowi podstawowy i najważniejszy punkt odniesienia.
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Reminiscences of a German maturing in the USSR who was brought up by the Soviet system to propagate the communist revolution in his own country. After the war, Wolfgang Leonhard was actively introducing communism in the defeated Germany. Ideological dilemmas make him break off with Stalinism in 1949. The Children of the Revolution, published for the first time in 1955, is an illustration of the perekovka (re-forging) of souls on the living material, and evidence of political blindness.
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The testimony of an ordinary German who evocatively describes the everyday life of the German provinces during World War II. The author tracks the hypocrisy of fascist propaganda and gives the lie to the thesis that the Germans allegedly were not aware of the atrocities of Nazism. He predicted the defeat of national socialism at a time when Hitler was most triumphant and the behavior of German society after the war when it came to settlements. Nobody, as he wrote in his diary, anticipating the future defeat of his own country, will be willing to admit their faith in Hitler, nobody will admit wartime wicked deeds, either. If, therefore, one is to count on de-Nazification and re-education of entire German society, it must be a long process forced from outside by the Allies. The Germans themselves will never do such an assignment. The propaganda daze which Kellner discovers in his circle (he is an employee of court administration in a small town near Gießen) is so universal that the only effective remedy for such a state of affairs seems to be a lost war and unconditional capitulation.
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The last days of war in East Prussia, the 1945 victory, the Soviet occupation, and the Polish beginnings in Masuria. Hans von Lehndorff, a physician by vocation, a sensitive observer, and a deeply devout Christian on his great odyssey in the havocked lands gives a unique testimony of salvaging humanity at the time of decline and disaster.
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Wiktor Woroszylski followed a path characteristic for many Polish intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century: from entanglement in communism to active opposition to it. He was not only a witness but also a participant of many events of key significance for the post-war history who also influenced them.It is a chronicle of a non-conformist group, written down at a time when keeping such records required great courage, and, at the same time, an expressive portrait of that group, strengthened internally by friendship and mutual loyalty, which has finally become a timeless example of freedom.Crowds, people released from jail, the whole group, one can hardly work out, probably more than one hundred people, press, talks about what has happened, and euphoria again. I was not imaginative enough to realize what happened; I treated the whole work of the Workers’ Defence Committee, etc., in the past years more as a way to save our souls and perhaps create some islands of internal freedom but I did not take into account the prospects of social victory on such a scale.
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A pre-war communist is taken to a Stalinist prison as a victim of paranoid search for enemy within the party. Her moving story is a picture of an individual facing the criminal system and an accusation of totalitarianism.
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The series of events in March 1981, known as the Bydgoszcz crisis, was a two-week political and social breakthrough in Poland which started in Bydgoszcz with an incident provoked by the communist authorities and ended with a national settlement of fundamental significance for the future of Poland. The book is a record of those developments told only by their witnesses (the main heroes of those events, Solidarity and party leaders, and ordinary citizens). The reference to their memory is of special significance because a simple list of facts cannot explain the essence of the breakthrough. Both the arguments of both sides of that clash and the accompanying emotions are equally important.
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"Karta" (published underground in the year 1982–89 and officialy since 1991 – 39 issues by the end of December 2003) — a quarterly on man and the history of the idividual in Poland and Eastern Europe in 20th century. Through compiled source materials — diaries, memoirs, reports, letters and other documents — human fate and experiences come to life and history is uncovered so that it can not only be learnt but also "felt' and seen thanks to the album form of the journal. Each issue has 160 pages and usually more than 100 archival photographs.
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“Letters like a Touch” (1965–1982) is a fascinating story of an exceptional feeling between one of the most important oppositionist, Jacek Kuroń, and his prematurely deceased wife, Gaja (Grażyna) and, at the same time, a historic testimony of the Polish People’s Republic which has been unknown so far. Jacek Kuroń spent a total of 10 years in prison, arrest, or detention centre. The basic form of contact then consisted of letters written chiefly to Gaja. It is a unique correspondence in many respects: for years it was kept by the security service, and, today, it helps to understand the reality of crucial moments in the history of the Polish People’s Republic. Jacek’s prison pictures alternate with the description of Gaja’s everyday life at large. We can find deep reflections in them or echoes of readings, we can witness the birth of many concepts which were later transformed into great ideas changing the history of Poland.
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Memoirs of a former inmate of Nazi concentration camps who was persecuted for his homosexual orientation. Memoirs of Heinz Heger (pen name of Josef Kohout) are considered unique not only because of breaking a taboo but also because of the description of the suffering of that group of victims which was persecuted also after World War II. Section 175 survived in the GDR and FRG until the end of the 1960s. The “extension” of persecution blocked the struggle of former inmates for compensation and the status of a group of victims. Heger started to be persecuted in 1939 with his imprisonment. In 1940, he was moved to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Less than six months later – to KL Flossenbürg, where he was put to a “special” block, where inmates with the pink triangle were isolated. The man was liberated by the US Army during a death march from the Flossenbürg concentration camp to KL Dachau. The book, an account by Heinz Heger titled Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel, was published in Germany in 1972, in Great Britain in 1993, and in France in 2002.
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A moving testimony of cruelty, anarchy, and overt violence in Soviet political forced-labour camps and prisons in the post-Stalinist period. Anatoly Marchenko, an ordinary worker, was only 20 when he was sent in 1958 to a Soviet prison for taking part in a scuffle in which he did not even participate. He entered the circle of political prisoners, and Mordovia labour camps became his “university”. He got to know true history there, learned the fundamentals of economics, acquired the knowledge of politics, and became a determined opponent of the inhumane system and a true humanist at the same time. He published his experiences from that time in a book which made him one of the best known Russian dissidents. Convicted several times he died in December 1986 after a hunger strike which lasted almost four months. Five days after his funeral Mikhail Gorbaczev called exiled Andrei Sakharov, which initiated the process of freeing political prisoners in the USSR.
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A black grandson of the king of African Vai people and son of a German mother was growing up in Hamburg during the Nazi rise to power. Feeling a German patriot he gradually discovers that he is termed by the ideology as an enemy and nonperson.
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Three months which changed Ukraine written down through the testimonies of individuals: recordings, diaries, memoirs, blogs or Facebook entries. The multitude of experiences makes up a universal story of the phenomenon of Ukrainian breakthrough which started with a peaceful rally in defence of pro-European orientation of the country and ended with the revolution in Kiev and the overthrow of a criminal president. It was the time when the Ukrainians started speaking with a full voice about their right to free choice, about honesty, truth, and dignity, and finally took to the streets in their defence at any cost.
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