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.

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.

The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in utmost secrecy in April–May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi...

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. 

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 ...

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.

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. 

A New York Times bestseller A USA Today bestseller The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's life during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English Renia Spiegel was born in 1924 to an upper-middle class Jewish family living in southeastern Poland, near what was at that time...

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.

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.

Smoke rolls through the forests. Tanks burn beside the railway line. Horses charge through artillery fire as Poland fights for survival on the first day of the Second World War. Under Fire – Mokra is a brutal and immersive collection of twelve interconnected stories set during the Battle of Mokra on 1 September 1939, where the Polish Volhynian Cavalry Brigade stunned the advancing German war machine with fierce resistance, hidden anti-tank guns, daring cavalry attacks, and stubborn determination. Through the eyes of tank commanders, cavalry troopers, infantrymen, Stuka pilots, artillery ...

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,