Polish 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 the shadow of World War II, a young woman’s life is forever changed. Krista Schulz, a 17-year-old German girl living in Poland, faces a harrowing loss as the Nazi occupation shatters her peaceful life. After witnessing the brutal murder of her beloved grandparents, the Nazis are now hunting her. Krista flees her village, carrying the weight of unanswered questions and a heart heavy with grief. Determined to survive and find purpose in the chaos, Krista makes her way to Warsaw. As she grows from a frightened young girl into a resolute young woman, Krista discovers the strength within ...

During the Second World War Poland was invaded by two nations and torn apart...now as the Third World War spirals out of control Poland once again faces destruction... In Czechoslovakia General Norman Schwarzkopf readies the Army of the Danube for the liberation of Poland. Around Wroclaw British and Canadian armored forces battle the Soviets. In southern Poland The US Army VII Corps battles two Soviet armies. Throughout West Germany, stay-behind units punish collaborators. In the air, RAF Tornado pilots fly deadly low-level missions against Soviet armored formations. On their war-time ...

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.

This book explores the Nazi occupation of Poland 1939-1945--and how ordinary people survived, resisted and endured during those horrible years. Here, with information smuggled out of Poland by the underground resistance, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs documented the Nazi regime’s systematic plan to erase an entire nation: to destroy its culture, enslave its people, and extinguish resistance through terror. Inside this rare report are: Translations of Nazi laws designed to annihilate Polish identity Eyewitness accounts of deportations, executions, and village massacres Chilling ...

For Poland and her people, time is running out: Hitler has set his greedy eyes upon the country and he is determined to have her. In a matter of days, Polish communication with the outside world was eliminated, factories and train stations left in ruins, complete cities annihilated, and thousands lay dead in the once vibrant country. Doctors, professors and clergy are slaughtered while thousands of Polish children are sent to Germany to be raised within the Nazi cause. For young Marta Koblinski the German occupation brings personal tragedy prompting her to take up a friend’s challenge and...

Fifteen-year-old Yitzhak, E-Jo, escapes from his hometown ghetto during WWII, taking several children and teens under his wing in the forests of eastern Poland. He leads the group and helps them survive over a period of three years. While hiding out in the forests, they live like rabbits on the run, gather food and hunt to survive. This book tells a story of bravery under constant threat of death, of a teenaged boy who loved life and other people, and how they all survive inhumane conditions. Where No Roads Lead is the story of a difficult period during which its characters undergo ...

The Most Wounded Warrior in British Military History Shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear. Survived two plane crashes. Tunneled out of a prisoner-of-war camp. Lost an eye and a hand, then pulled off his own mangled fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. His response to it all? "Frankly, I enjoyed the war." A True Story That Defies Belief Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC lived through what should have killed him a dozen times over. This meticulously researched biography unveils the astounding true story of Britain's most decorated and wounded ...

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. 

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.

Dying Echoes: Memoirs of the War 1914-1920 by Stanisław Kawczak was first published in Poland in 1936 (Milknące Echa: Wspomnienia z Wojny 1914-1920). It tells the story and experiences of a young Polish conscript in the Austrian army who fought during WWI wearing the Austrian uniform against the Russian army on the Eastern Front and the Italian army on the Southern Front. Kawczak began his military career as a corporal, and was promoted to officer cadet, lieutenant, and finally captain. From the beginning of the war his heart was in the struggle for Polish independence and the defeat of ...

This program features a bonus chapter of the author's preliminary research interviews with the sisters featured in the book. "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal Rebecca Frankel's Into the Forest is a gripping story of...

Goodbye Poland is a gripping true story of survival, sacrifice, and the quiet strength of a boy forced into manhood by war. Seventeen-year-old Stefan Maczka was born into a proud legacy—his father, a Polish cavalry officer, helped stop the Russian advance into Europe during the 1920 ‘Miracle of the Vistula.’ That victory secured Poland’s independence and earned the Maczkas a plot of land on the new frontier. But Stalin never forgot the humiliation. In 1939, he got his revenge. Overnight, the Soviets rounded up the same families who had once defied them—ripping them from their ...

She ran from Poland as a child. She thought Wales would keep her safe. She was wrong. At ten years old, Lauren Bucievski was torn from everything she knew. No explanation. No goodbye. Just her father's hand pulling her into the dark, and the sound of their old life disappearing behind them. Wales gave her shelter. A quiet bay. A new name for her fear. But safety has a way of being temporary and when Stefan walks back into her world from across the sea, Lauren realises she has been waiting for her past to find her all along. Across a bleeding Europe, a young Polish soldier claws his way ...

From a New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein, a story inspired by a little-known piece of history in the lives of Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. Called a "masterpiece", and as seen on The Today Show with Jenna pick (Madeline Miller). On a November day in 1940...

Fourteen months after her grandmother's funeral, archivist Nora Kamińska-Bell is finally clearing out the Chicago apartment: banker's boxes, a legal pad, and the quiet certainty that dead women keep no more secrets. By dusk she has forty-seven children's names, a forged German identity card bearing her grandmother's face, and a name that isn't Marta's at all. Hidden inside the only Polish book her grandmother ever kept, hollowed out and sewn shut for seventy years, is proof of a life Marta never spoke of: a courier for one of occupied Poland's most dangerous rescue networks, running Jewish...

The vivid memoirs of Heinrich von Brandt, a young law student swept up in Napoleon's reshaping of Europe and dispatched to Spain with the Vistula Legion of the newly formed Duchy of Warsaw. Brandt becomes an officer of the voltigeurs, light infantry who were used to skirmish, patrol, screen battlefield movements, and engage the guerrilla insurgency. He fought battles at Tudela, Santa Maria, and Valencia, as well as sieges at Zaragoza and Tortosa, and participated in numerous smaller engagements, earning the French Légion d’honneur and the Polish Order of Virtuti Militari.

This program includes an exclusive author's note read by the author. In Poland, as World War II rages, a mother hides with her young daughter, a musical prodigy whose slightest sound may cost them their lives. As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Róza and her 5-year-old daughter...

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. 

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.