Polish World War

1941, Poland. Though war rages around her and occupying German forces march steadily onward, 16-year-old Aleksandra has lived her life sheltered from danger. Until one day, she goes to school—never to return. Pushed roughly into a truck with other schoolgirls like her, a single ominous word tells her all she needs to know about her fate: Lebensborn.

In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing, and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the 14 months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.

In this remarkable work, renowned historian Professor Norman Davies draws from years of meticulous research to recount the compelling story of the Polish II Corps or "Anders Army", and their exceptional journey from the Gulag of Siberia through Iran, the Middle East, and North Africa to the battlefields of Italy to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Allied forces. Complete with firsthand accounts from the men and women who lived through it, this is a unique record of one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II.

Following the end of the First World War, Poland was wedged uncomfortably between the two dominant nations of Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland was obliged to plot and negotiate to try and prevent them from realizing their ambitions to eviscerate the country. As well as bitter ethnic battles between Germany and Poland for the political control of Upper Silesia, there were also the burning ambitions of Weimar Germany, and later Nazi Germany, to reclaim lands incorporated into the new state of Poland at Versailles.

It’s 1937. Poland is about to catch fire. In the boxing ring, Jakub Szapiro commands respect, revered as a hero by the Jewish community. Outside, he instills fear as he muscles through Warsaw as enforcer for a powerful crime lord. Murder and intimidation have their rewards. He revels in luxury, spends lavishly, and indulges in all the pleasures that barbarity offers. For a man battling to be king of the underworld, life is good. Especially when it’s a frightening time to be alive.

There is a chapter of World War II history that remains largely untold: the story of the fourth largest Allied military of the war, and the only nation to have fought in the battles of Leningrad, Arnhem, Tobruk, and Normandy. This is the story of the Polish forces during the Second World War, the story of millions of young men and women who gave everything for freedom and in the final victory lost all. In a cruel twist of history, the monumental struggles of an entire nation have been largely forgotten, and even intentionally obscured. No Greater Ally redresses the balance,

In 1943 Polish underground fighter John Wiernicki is captured and beaten by the Gestapo, then shipped to Auschwitz. In this chilling memoir, Wiernicki, a Gentile, details life in the infamous death camp, and his battle to survive, physically and morally, in the face of utter evil. The author begins by remembering his aristocratic youth, an idyllic time shattered by German invasion.

As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Róza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn. Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Shira struggles to stay still and quiet, as music pulses through her and the farmyard outside beckons. In this make-believe world, Róza can shield Shira from the horrors that surround them. But the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Róza must make an impossible choice: whether to keep Shira by her side or give her the chance to survive apart.

New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is internationally renowned as master of the European espionage thriller. Unfolding in September of 1939 as Hitler’s Wehrmacht ravages Warsaw, the Polish Officer discloses the clandestine existence of Polish Military Intelligence.

During the late 1930s the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin and the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler reached a secret alliance, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By the terms of this agreement, the two dictators divided up Eastern Europe between them, and for a time Stalin even sought Axis membership. Though the alliance forged between the fascist and communist states could not survive their diametrically opposed views, they cooperated long enough to conquer Poland together in 1939.

The German invasion of Poland on 1 September, 1939, designated as Fall Weiss (Case White), was the event that sparked the outbreak of World War II in Europe. The campaign has widely been described as a textbook example of Blitzkrieg, but it was actually a fairly conventional campaign as the Wehrmacht was still learning how to use its new Panzers and dive-bombers. The Polish military is often misrepresented as hopelessly obsolete and outclassed by the Wehrmacht, yet in fact it was well-equipped with modern weapons and armor.

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly 50 years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi crime, 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.

September 1939: The conquering Nazis swarm through Warsaw as social worker Irena Sendler watches in dread from her apartment window. Already, the city's poor go hungry. Irena wonders how she will continue to deliver food and supplies to those who need it most, including the forbidden Jews. The answer comes unexpectedly.

On the night of July 4, 1943, transport aircraft Liberator AL523 took off from Gibraltar's North Front tarmac and within moments crashed into the sea with only one survivor, the pilot. The commander-in-chief of the Polish army and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was dead. Rumors as to the cause of the crash abounded. Was it pilot error? Was it, as officially classified, merely an accident, or was it, as the authors conclude in this riveting and meticulous study, an act of sabotage?

Winter 1939: Danusha and her family are forced to flee their home when the Nazis invade Poland. Danusha’s mother, Anna, changes her name and secures a position as a housekeeper in a German doctor’s mansion in Kraków where Gestapo meetings are hosted in the kitchen. Her secret is their salvation, but what Danusha remembers most is the solitude, with only her baby brother and the girl in the mirror for company.

After a brief revival following World War I, during which it successfully defeated a Soviet attempt to invade in an effort to carry "international revolution" into Germany and Central Europe, Poland once again fell victim to its neighbors in 1939. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and Josef Stalin's USSR collaborated in the conquest and then split Poland between them. The Germans instituted oppressive rule in their portion of Poland, executing some 7,000 people on political grounds and imprisoning thousands of others.

Panoramiczny obraz państwa polskiego odradzającego się po latach niewoli. Cezary Baryka urodził się i wychował w pięknym, kosmopolitycznym Baku, w Imperium Rosyjskim. Choć oboje rodzice byli Polakami, mówił po rosyjsku znacznie lepiej niż po polsku. Gdy miał 14 lat, jego dostatnie i szczęśliwe życie przerwał wybuch I wojny światowej. Ojciec został powołany do wojska. W Baku wybuchła rewolucja, potem wojna Ormian z Tatarami, potem przyszli bolszewicy. Dom Baryków został kompletnie splądrowany, matka Cezarego umarła.

Powieść jednej z najpopularniejszych autorek PRL-u! Henryka zmaga się z cierpieniem, które przyniosła wojna. Kobieta straciła córkę, dręczona jest koszmarami sennymi i wspomnieniami. W ostatnim dniu powstania warszawskiego Henryka otrzymała od umierającej nieznajomej klucze i adres. Ocalona trafia do mieszkania kobiety i powoli zaznajamia się z jej losami. Niedługo potem Henryka poznaje młode małżeństwo, Michała i jego ciężarną żonę, Janinkę. Henryka oferuje im dach nad głową. Realistyczna powieść opisująca grozę wojny i okrucieństwo śmierci.

OPOWIEŚĆ O POLSKIEJ NIEMCE, KTÓRA MUSIAŁA DOKONAĆ OSTATECZNEGO WYBORU. Magdalena Pohl jest dziedziczką fortuny łódzkiego fabrykanta niemieckiego pochodzenia, maturzystką 1938 roku. Ma wokół siebie czwórkę przyjaciół: Polkę, Żydówkę oraz ich braci. Młodość to także miłość – Magda kocha Poldka Rosenmana i jednocześnie wzdycha do brata przyjaciółki, Stefana Brychczyńskiego. Wybuch II wojny światowej przerywa beztroskie lata i dziewczyna musi zmierzyć się z ciężarem swojej podwójnej tożsamości. Wkrótce nawiązuje współpracę z niemieckimi władzami okupacyjnymi, a jednocześnie podejmuje służbę w ZWZ, a potem w Armii Krajowej.

Berlin, 1948: World War II may be over, but a new era of conflict has begun. The Russians have cut off all access to the western part of Berlin in an attempt to seize it from the Allies. The thirst for power, dominance, and revenge is as strong as ever, and anti-Semitism is still rampant. When a store in West Berlin is vandalized with Swastikas, Sara Sturm, a German woman working for the US Department of Public Affairs, is dispatched to investigate, and meets Max and Karl Portnoy, two Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.