Robert Capa was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.
Witold Pilecki was a Polish World War II cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader.
Sophie Anna Ward is an English stage and screen actress, and a writer of non-fiction and fiction. As an actress, she played Jocelyn Sheffield in The Nanny, she also played Elizabeth Hardy, the female lead in Barry Levinson's Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), and in other feature film roles including in Cary Joji Fukunaga's period drama Jane Eyre (2011), and Jane Sanger's horror feature, Swiperight (2020). In 1982 she had a role in the Academy Award-winning best short film, A Shocking Accident. On television she played Dr Helen Trent in British police drama series Heartbeat from 2004 to 2006, the character Sophia Byrne in the series Holby City from 2008 to 2010, the role of Lady Ellen Hoxley in the series Land Girls from 2009 to 2011, and that of Lady Verinder in the mini-series The Moonstone (2016). She has had a variety of other roles on stage and in short and feature films.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize, as the Booker Prize was then known, was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
Leon Tadeusz Kozłowski was a Polish archaeologist, freemason, and politician who served as Prime Minister of Poland from 1934 to 1935.
Gerta Pohorylle, known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first female photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
The "cursed soldiers" or "indomitable soldiers" were a heterogeneous array of anti-Soviet-imperialist and anti-communist Polish resistance movements formed in the later stages of World War II and in its aftermath by members of the Polish Underground State. The above terms, introduced in the early 1990s, reflect the stance of many of the diehard soldiers.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD, at Stalin's order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces in 1943.
The Scouting and Guiding movement in Poland consists of about twelve independent organizations with an overall membership of about 160,000 Scouts and Guides. The largest organization by membership is Polish Scouting and Guiding Association with about 140,000 members.
Katyń is a 2007 Polish historical drama film about the 1940 Katyn massacre, directed by Academy Honorary Award winner Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the book Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn by Andrzej Mularczyk. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for the 80th Academy Awards.
Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, abbreviated ZOW, was an underground resistance organization formed by Witold Pilecki at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940.
Aquila Polonica is an independent publishing house based in the U.S. and the U.K., founded in 2005 by Terry A. Tegnazian and Stefan Mucha. The company specializes in books based on eyewitness accounts, in English, of Poland in World War II.
Witold's Report, also known as Pilecki's Report, is a report about the Auschwitz concentration camp written in 1943 by Witold Pilecki, a Polish military officer and member of the Polish resistance. Pilecki volunteered in 1940 to be imprisoned in Auschwitz to organize a resistance movement and send out information about the camp. He escaped from Auschwitz in April 1943. His was the first comprehensive record of a Holocaust death camp to be obtained by the Allies.
The organization of underground resistance movements in Auschwitz concentration camp began in the second half of 1940, shortly after the camp became operational in May that year. In September 1940 Witold Pilecki, a Polish army captain, arrived in the camp. Using the name Tomasz Serafiński, Pilecki had allowed himself to be captured by Germans in a street round up (łapanka) with the goal of having himself sent to Auschwitz to gather information and organize resistance inside. Under Pilecki's direction the Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW, was formed.
Stefan Lech Sokołowski was a Polish mathematician, climber and lieutenant of artillery in the Polish Land Forces. He was aLwów Eaglet, a group of children who defended the city of Lviv in 1918-1919 during the Polish-Ukrainian War. He was also a Doctor of mathematical sciences. He died as a result of the Katyn massacre, a Soviet massacre of Polish military officers in 1940.
Helena Janeczek is an Italian novelist of Polish Jewish origin.
Jack Fairweather, is a British journalist and author.
The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz is a 2019 book which presents research by British writer Jack Fairweather, a former Washington Post war correspondent, into the life of Witold Pilecki, a Polish soldier and Home Army resistance fighter who infiltrated the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. The book was met with positive reception from critics and won the Costa Book Awards – Book of the Year prize that year.
The Pilecki Institute is a Polish government institution in care of preserving the memory, documenting and researching the historical experiences of Polish citizens and increasing awareness regarding totalitarianism in the 20th century. Its patron is Witold Pilecki.
The Virtus et Fraternitas Medal is a Polish state decoration established on 9 November 2017.
