Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel first encountered Polish historian and dissident Adam Michnik in 1978 at a clandestine meeting on a mountaintop along the Polish-Czechoslovak border. This initial meeting of two extraordinary thinkers who "...

Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet...

The Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be "members of staff" of the Nazi death-f...

Considered by many to be among the greatest writers of the past hundred years, Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz explores the modern predicament of exile and displacement in a disintegrating world in his acclaimed classic Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz's...

The book shows the background and mechanics of the Soviet mass executions in spring 1940 of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war – army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians – taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. The...

Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his "Diary" with one of literature's most memorable openings: Mond...

In this book Yehuda Bauer, an internationally-acclaimed Holocaust historian, recounts the destruction of the shtetls, small Jewish towns in Poland and Russia, at the hands of the Nazis in 1941-1942. Bauer brings together all available documents, test...

This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this...

This masterful political treatise, first published in 1962, examines the history and nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Jozef Mackiewicz, known for his relentless opposition to Communism, argues that accommodation...

Maria Balinska's captivating cultural history of the bagel and its journey through the centuries.