Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, German and Esperanto. According to Czesław Miłosz, for centuries Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction. The reasons were manifold but mostly rested on the historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write, including past cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland, but also, Poland's collective incongruities demanding an adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.
Sir Joseph Rotblat was a Polish and British physicist. During World War II he worked on Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project, but left the Los Alamos Laboratory on grounds of conscience after it became clear that Germany had ceased development of an atomic bomb in 1942.
The Cipher Bureau, in Polish: Biuro Szyfrów ([ˈbʲurɔ ˈʂɨfruf], was the interwar Polish General Staff's Second Department's unit charged with SIGINT and both cryptography and cryptanalysis.
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer and Soviet dissident known as a defendant in the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial in 1965.
Hans Hartwig von Beseler was a German colonel general.
Intermarium was a post-World War I geopolitical plan conceived by Józef Piłsudski to unite former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lands within a single polity. The plan went through several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion as well of other, neighboring states. The proposed multinational polity would have incorporated territories lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name Intermarium.
Polonophobia, also referred to as anti-Polonism,, and anti-Polish sentiment are terms for negative attitudes, prejudices, and actions against Poles as an ethnic group, Poland as their country, and their culture. These include ethnic prejudice against Poles and persons of Polish descent, other forms of discrimination, and mistreatment of Poles and the Polish diaspora.
Walter Werner Arndt was a world-renowned scholar and translator of Russian, German and Polish. At the time of his death, he was the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth College. With degrees in business administration from Warsaw University, in political science and economics from Oxford University, a master's degree in engineering from Robert College (Istanbul), and a PhD in comparative literature from UNC, Chapel Hill, Arndt was well known for his metric translations, which included versions of Goethe's Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a number of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as works by Busch, Morgenstern, and others. His translation of Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.
Marian Brandys was a Polish writer and screenwriter born in Wiesbaden into an assimilated Jewish family of the Polish intelligentsia. Brandys grew up in Łódź. His father owned a bank. Their prosperity allowed Marian, and his younger brother, Kazimierz, to attend the best private school for boys (name?), sponsored by the city's merchants' club, Zgromadzenie Kupców Miasta Łodzi.
Marian Zyndram-Kościałkowski was a Polish politician, freemason and military officer who served as voivode of Białystok Voivodeship in 1930-1934, Mayor of Warsaw in 1934 and 27th Prime Minister of Poland from 1935 to 1936.
Aleksander Brückner was a Polish scholar of Slavic languages and literatures (Slavistics), philologist, lexicographer and historian of literature. He is among the most notable Slavicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the first to prepare complete monographs on the history of Polish language and culture. He published more than 1,500 titles and discovered the oldest extant prose text in Polish.
Marian Adam Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French military intelligence. Over the next nearly seven years, Rejewski and fellow mathematician-cryptologists Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski developed and used techniques and equipment to decrypt the German machine ciphers, even as the Germans introduced modifications to their equipment and encryption procedures. Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II the Poles, at a conference in Warsaw, shared their achievements with the French and British, thus enabling Britain to begin reading German Enigma-encrypted messages, seven years after Rejewski's original reconstruction of the machine. The intelligence that was gained by the British from Enigma decrypts formed part of what was code-named Ultra and contributed—perhaps decisively—to the defeat of Germany.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft in two and a half days, without sleeping much, but also that he was quite a serious student of Holocaust-related literature for years before the idea for the novel even came to him. The book has received mixed reviews; while positive reviews praise the story as a moral, negative reviews attack the book's historical inconsistencies, and the potential damage it could cause to people's Holocaust education.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces.
Józef Czapski was a Polish artist, author, and critic, as well as an officer of the Polish Army. As a painter, he is notable for his membership in the Kapist movement, which was heavily influenced by Cézanne. Following the Polish Defensive War, he was made a prisoner of war by the Soviets and was among the very few officers to survive the Katyn massacre of 1940. Following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, he was an official envoy of the Polish government searching for the missing Polish officers in Russia. After World War II, he remained in exile in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, where he was among the founders of Kultura monthly, one of the most influential Polish cultural journals of the 20th century.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on 28 October 2010. It is about mass murders committed during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Ferdynand Goetel was a Polish novelist, playwright, essayist, screen writer, and political activist; member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature from 1935; president of the Polish PEN Club as well as the Union of Polish Writers in interwar Poland. He established a prominent place in Polish literary circles between the wars and was the recipient of the "Golden Laurel" awarded by the Polish Academy of Literature for his contributions to Polish literature. He was forced to leave Poland after World War II due to his involvement in the German investigation of the Katyn massacre and died in exile in London.
Rafał Pankowski is a Polish sociologist and political scientist. Pankowski is an associate professor at Collegium Civitas, as well as the head of "Never Again" Association's East Europe Monitoring Center. He is also the deputy editor of Never Again's magazine. He is also involved in monitoring football hooliganism as part of UEFA's Fare network.
