Poland War

1944: Heavy footfalls thud on the road on a rainy May night. A band of gunmen scour a hilltop farm, acting on rumors that it harbors a Jewish family. For 18 months, the Rozeneks have been hiding safely, but their luck is about to run out. Only one from the family of six will live to see the sunrise. Sixteen-year-old Hena Rozenek shelters in the woods until morning . . . and then she runs.

Felix lives in a convent orphanage high in the mountains in Poland. He is convinced his parents are still alive and that they will one day come back to get him. When Nazi soldiers come to the orphanage Felix decides to escape and make his way home. The journey to find his parents is a long and difficult one, as all of Poland is occupied by the Nazis and a dangerous place for a Jewish boy.

American horse trainer Adia Kensington is living her dream of working at the famous Janów Podlaski stables in Poland, where the best Arabian horses in the world are bred. But her plans to bring a priceless stallion to the US are derailed when the German army storms into her adopted country in 1939. Little does she know this is just the beginning of six long years of occupation that will threaten her beloved horses at every turn.

1944, Poland. Jacob Stein and Zalman Mendelson meet as boys under terrifying circumstances. They survive by miraculously escaping, but their shared past haunts and shapes their lives forever. Years later, Zalman plows a future on a Minnesota farm. In Brooklyn, Jacob has a new life with his wife, Esther. When Zalman travels to New York City to reconnect, Jacob’s hopes for the future are becoming a reality.

Warsaw, 1939. Poland is on the brink of war, and for Anna Nowak, life will never be the same again. Her brother, Lech, is called up to fight as an officer in the Polish army. He expects to be home in a matter of weeks, but it will be many years and a journey of thousands of miles before he can be reunited with those he loves. Anna's younger brother, Jan, dreams of being a soldier too. But his dreams turn into nightmares when the Germans invade and his best friend is incarcerated within the ghetto.

Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable—and until now, completely unknown—humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they masterminded a systematic program of forging passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust. The operation was one of the largest actions to aid Jews of the entire war. The Forgers tells this extraordinary story for the first time.

The summer of 1940 and the Battle of Britain - the darkest days of World War II. France, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway had all been crushed by the powerful Nazi German war machine. Great Britain stood alone, fighting for its life. Award-winning 303 Squadron is the thrilling story of the celebrated squadron of Polish fighter pilots whose superb skill in the air helped save England during its most desperate hours.

From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.

In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from US soil.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

Two days after Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War II began in earnest. As most people now know, the invasion of Poland was merely the preface to the Nazi blitzkrieg of most of Western Europe, which would include Denmark, Belgium, and France by the summer of 1940.

Today, streets, bridges, monuments, and even neighborhoods bear Tadeusz Kościuszko’s name across the country, and in Polish communities, he is often hailed as a hero equal to General Washington himself. Tadeusz Kościuszko: The Life and Legacy of Poland’s Most Famous General profiles one of the Revolutionary War’s most important figures.

"My good friends," the mustached, bony man with thick eyebrows and large, strong teeth somewhat reminiscent of those of a horse, shouted to the crowds from the second-floor window of his house at 10 Downing Street, "this is the second time in our history, that there has come back to Downing Street from Germany peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time." (McDonough, 1998, 70).

Though history is usually written by the victors, the lack of a particularly strong writing tradition from the Mongols ensured that history was largely written by those who they vanquished. Because of this, their portrayal in the West has been extraordinarily negative for centuries, at least until recent revisions to the historical record. The Mongols have long been depicted as wild horse-archers galloping out of the dawn to rape, pillage, murder and enslave, but the Mongol army was a highly sophisticated, minutely organized and incredibly adaptive and innovative institution.

Halina Shore is a Polish born forensic dentist living in Australia. When she travels to Poland to take part in the investigation of a war crime, she finds herself at the center of a bitter struggle in a community that has been divided by a grim legacy. As the investigation proceeds, her professional assignment becomes a confronting personal odyssey as the truth about her own past begins to emerge.

Luego de finalizada la I Guerra Mundial, quedó muy claro que el país más afectado fue Alemania. De este escenario se aprovecharía el jefe del partido Nazi Adolf Hitler, quien gracias a una prédica incendiaria, nacionalista, xenófoba y racista, buscaría iniciar una nueva guerra. Polonia, el débil país vecino del Este, sería su primer objetivo, iniciando así la II Guerra Mundial en 1939.

European citizens feel the full force of German injustice, but not all are willing to bend the knee. From France to Poland, Resistance groups fight from the shadows to thwart Nazi rule and hinder their goal to exterminate Jews. In Russia, Wilmot Vogel struggles to survive the ravages of a frigid winter, compounded by the German army’s lack of progress. Hit by a surprise Russian attack on the front lines, however, he finds himself facing an even greater challenge than the freezing weather and Soviet bullets.

Hitler has surrendered. The Nazi flags, which once hung throughout the city, striking terror in the hearts of Polish citizens, have been torn down. It seems that Warsaw should be rejoicing in its new-found freedom. But Warsaw is not free. Instead it is occupied by the Soviet Union, held tightly in Stalin’s iron grip.

Starting as early as 1939, disparate Jewish underground movements coalesced around the shared goal of liberating Poland from Nazi occupation. For the next six years, separately and in concert, they waged a heroic war of resistance against Hitler's war machine that culminated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Isaac's Army, Matthew Brzezinski delivers the first-ever comprehensive narrative account of that struggle, following a group of dedicated young Jews - some barely out of their teens - whose individual acts of defiance helped rewrite the ending of World War II.

A chronicle of the experiences of Sigmund Weiss as a teenager trying to survive during the turbulence of Hitler’s mad aggression towards Poland and the Jews. A story about an escape that was near impossible and totally unlikely without luck, courage, and miracles all happening together.