Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm
UNTOLD STORIES OF POLISH HEROES FROM WORLD WAR II
UNTOLD STORIES OF POLISH HEROES FROM WORLD WAR II
Foreword : James S. Pula
The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group Inc.
Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2018,
Lanham-Boulder-New York-Toronto-Plymouth,UK
ISBN 978-0-7618-6983-2
https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Aleksandra-Ziolkowska-Boehm/Untold-Stories-of-Polish-Heroes-from-World-War-II/21217985
Endorsements:
Poland was the first country to stand against Hitler’s Nazi armies and the Red Armies of Stalin’s Soviet
Union when, in Sept. 1939, at the beginning of World War 11,they both marched
into Poland with the deliberate intention of dividing the country and destroying it’s people. On
August 22, Hitler claimed the object of the war was to “destroy the enemy..
That’s why I have given orders to kill without mercy all men, women and children
of Polish descent…”
The eminent literary historian and
master story-teller, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm’s important and beautifully
crafted book records the history of this horrific time through seven powerful
narratives relating the experiences of diverse people, many of whom survived
the atrocities of ethnic cleansing, the valiant Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and struggles
beyond. The author brings her fascinating protagonists alive with a brilliant
mix of intimate physical experiences and their profound thoughts of how the trauma
of war affected their own philosophy of life and the meaning of it all. With these
unforgettable true life-stories of special, yet ordinary people, who symbolize
the sum of all persons, Aleksandra has created an
essential link in the chain of human chronicles that document the heroic epic
history of Poland and the Polish people.
The author offers an invaluable bonus in
the Annex where she relates how she personally perceives “creative nonfiction.”
Audrey Ronning Topping--
photojournalist, author "China Mission: A Personal History from the Last
Imperial Dynasty to the People's Republic," winner of the “2013 Prose
Prize for Media & Culture" from American Publishers.
*
The Second World War is a historical
event so immense that it all too easily can become an abstraction. In Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World
War II, Aleksandra Ziółkowska-Boehm humanizes our recollection of the
conflict by demonstrating its effects on the lives of surviving sons and
daughters of Poland, the land most devastated by the war. Representing a vivid
cross section of Polish society, and a telling variety of wartime experiences,
these individual portraits of diplomats, warriors, and ordinary people caught
up in extraordinary times reveal much about the fate of Poland in its time of
greatest trial.
Neal Pease, Professor of History, University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee
*
.
In Untold Stories of Polish heroes from World War II, Aleksandra
Ziolkowska-Boehm continues to inform, delight, and amaze readers who have (or
soon will) know her as one of our most able chroniclers of Polish resistance to
Nazi and Soviet invaders during World War II. These are the memories of
surviving resistance fighters, mainly after the war. What unites them is their
experiences as “brethren in those dark days,” a time of consummate cruelty by
the Nazis, when the penalty of resistance under the Nazis was horrific: if a
Polish resistance fighter killed German soldier, a hundred Poles were randomly
executed. Saving Jews carried the death penalty. Polish citizens who sheltered
Jews were executed, along with their families. Many of the survivors were
scattered around the world after the war, from the United States to India, and
elsewhere, working to retain a sense of Polish culture and history. Her
"Annex I," on literary journalism, will evoke empathy and
understanding from all who write. For the survivors, and generations to come,
this book is invaluable testimony.
Bruce E. Johansen, University of Nebraska at Omaha
*
Some events in history are over remembered, others are under remembered. Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm tell us the stories of survivors and heroes who have not made it to the front pages of newspapers, but who are every little bit as significant as those who have. She does so in an intimate way, as if she were telling secrets to a friend. You will not remain indifferent to the content of this book.
Ewa Thompson, Rice University
*
„The stories of Polish
Christian survivors of World War II and the Holocaust remain little known
outside of Poland and some limited circles in the West. Their victimization at
the hands of Nazi Germany has been seen by most western scholars as unimportant
or potentially distracting from the central narrative of the essentially Jewish
tragedy of the Holocaust. Polish victimization by the Soviets falls completely
outside the standard paradigms of Western scholarship. Attempts by Poles or
Polish Americans to include Polish survivors in narratives of the war or the
Holocaust are often viewed as special pleading or at worst a form of
ant-Semitism or Polish nationalism (two things now treated as synonymous). This
has retarded both understanding of the Polish experience during the war and
efforts to document the experience of survivors.
Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm’s
work has helped the remedy of the deficits in published Polish memoir
literature in the West. A prolific author, she has written on numerous subjects
but with a special focus on Polish survivors of the war. The two works here
under review are an account of the life of Roman Rodziewicz, a Polish soldier
and later prisoner if the Nazis and a collection of shorter memoir chapters.
Rodziewicz’s story is an especially
compelling one. Raised in the Polish settlement in Manchuria, he served in the
Polish Army during the September Campaign. Resisting the imposition of Nazi and
Soviet rule, he joined the command of the legendary “Major Hubal (Major Henryk
Dobrzanski) who continued to battle occupying forces in the months that
followed Poland’s defeat. After Dobrzanski’s death at the hands of the Germans,
Rodziewicz joined the Polish underground but was caught by the Gestapo in 1942
and sent to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald. He survived both camps, settled in
England, and in the postwar years was one of the few surviving veterans of
Major Hubal’s partisans in the West.
The collection “Untold
Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II” covers the lives of several Poles
with diverse experiences during the war, including the late Zbigniew Brzezinski
and his father (who were featured in her earlier book “The Roots are Polish”).
The sheer diversity of backgrounds of the subjects covered is interesting,
though all experienced similar horrors during the war.
These two books are valuable
sources for Polish history but also for the history of post-war Polish émigrés.(...)".
John Radzilowski, University of Alaska
“The Polish Review”, New York, vol. 65, No.1, 2020,
pg. 116-117
*
FOREWORD by James S.Pula
The eminent historian Thomas Carlyle, in
his essay “On History” published in 1830, asserted that “Social Life is the
aggregate of all the individual men’s Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
While we might more properly say it is the sum of all people’s lives, not just men’s, Carlyle’s statement is a
fundamental truth of the historical profession. History is, after all, not the
accumulation of names and dates and recitations of what happened, it is an attempt
to study people, how they behave, and why they make the decisions they do. It
is an attempt to study how people interact in groups, what motivates them, and
how their behaviour is influenced by both their own personal experiences and
the external forces that act upon them. It is, in the final analysis, an
attempt to understand the cause and effect relationships that form the chain of
the human chronicle over time.
Carlyle also
stated, in a subsequent publication, that “The history of the world is but the
biography of great men.” Indeed, most often those who write biography have
chosen to concentrate their efforts on “great men” or “great women” precisely
in the belief that the progression of history depended, as Carlyle suggested,
on the decisions of these “heroes.” Despite the fact that Herbert Spencer began
challenging this idea as early as the 1860s, arguing instead that these “great
men” were simply products of the social environments in which they lived, the
so-called “Great Man Theory” was prominent among professional historians until
after World War II when post-war scholars began to delve more deeply into
social history.
Regardless
of which of these theories one subscribes to, it should be clear that a full
understanding of the historical process must include studies of the social and
economic conditions of societies as well as biographies of the people on which
a clear understanding of history is based—but not just the “great” people.
Biographies of “average” individuals who exist in a society, have their own
experiences and are acted upon by their surrounding environments, are essential
to a clear and complete understanding of the past and its influence on the
present. In this respect, Aleksandra Ziołkowska-Boehm has made a major
contribution to furthering the understanding of World War II, and especially
the part played by Poland and Poles, with her compilation of individual
biographies of people who participated in many of its formative events.
Ziołkowska-Boehm’s
protagonists include a variety of people and experiences that enhance the
usefulness of the volume—Tadeusz Brzeziński, a member of the Polish diplomatic
corps who was on assignment in Canada at the outbreak of the war and went on to
serve as Consul General for the Polish Government-in-Exile in London; Rudolf S.
Falkowski, a freshly minted pilot who escaped from the Soviet Union to fly
fighters over Great Britain; Wiesław Chrzanowski who became a photographer of
the Warsaw Uprising; Krystyna Brzezicka and Marek Jaroszewicz grew up in Warsaw
where she served as a nurse during the Warsaw Uprising and he escaped to France
before being interned in Switzerland; Maria Kowal was actually born while her
parents were fleeing during the war, so her personal memories are of her
post-war era move to the United States; and Danuta Batorska who grew up in the Białowieża
Forest before she was forcefully deported with her family to the Soviet Urals,
later escaping to the Middle East and eventually Mexico.
Tadeusz
Brzeziński had already achieved status and an upper-class lifestyle when he
arrived as a member of the Polish diplomatic corps to his new assignment in
Canada in 1938. Born of Polish parents in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he
enjoyed the advantages of study in Vienna, The Hague and Lwów where he received
a doctorate in law and political science in 1919. The essay on Brzeziński
includes valuable information on his attempts, while posted in Leipzig in the
1930s, to protest Nazi treatment of the Jews and to actively help them to
escape by providing necessary documents. It also records his wartime services
and post-war activities, providing original source materials of particular
interest to researchers. The experiences of the father are well-complemented by
the briefer commentary on his son, Zbigniew, who rose to prominence as the U.S.
National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. The younger
Brzeziński’s recollections supplement his fathers, but also add his own
observations of family life in the wartime and immediate post-war eras.
Rudolf
Falkowski dreamed of flying as a young elementary school student when he also
began keeping a journal of his experiences. The first passion would thrust him
into the maelstrom of aerial combat, while the latter would lead to publication
of his first book at age 88. Born into a family of modest means, he had
difficulties in school but managed to enrol in a pilot training program which
he completed in the summer of 1939 on the eve of the German invasion. Following
the Sikorski-Majski Agreement in 1941 he managed to travel to Great Britain
where his knowledge of flying earned him a pilot’s wings flying fighters. The
author’s treatment of him includes lengthy quotations from his journal and their
correspondence that provide valuable historical information of the times he
lived through, as well as his own persona.
Wiesław Chrzanowski
was born in Sosnowiec but grew up in Gdańsk where his father obtained a job in
the shipyard until the family moved to Warsaw in 1930. His childhood appears to
have been typical both in education and his enjoyment of sports. In 1939 he
served in the defense of the fortress at Modlin, then joined the underground.
With the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising, Chrzanowski determined to record the
experiences of his unit. Some of his photographs appear in an album prepared by
the Warsaw Uprising Museum, while others have appeared on Polish postage
stamps. His work, numbering over 200 images and accompanying documentary text,
forms a unique and irreplaceable historical record of virtually every aspect of
his unit’s part in the Uprising, the people who defied the Germans for 63
brutal days, and his experiences in captivity.
Krystyna
and Marek Jaroszewicz were born in Warsaw, knew each other while growing up,
but were separated by the war. Krystyna shared with the author memories of her
childhood including a beautiful manor house in Gulbiny and visits to the
eastern borderlands, as well as the painful experiences under the German
occupation. During the war Krystyna served as a nurse during the Warsaw
Uprising, providing her recollections of this and a postwar refugee camp in
Switzerland. Marek’s father was a chemist and a prominent supporter of Józef
Piłsudski, perhaps a little better situated economically and socially than most
of the other protagonists who appear in the book. He was to enter Warsaw
University of Technology to study architecture in the fall of 1939, but the
invasion intervened. Joining the Polish armed forces, he escaped to the West
but was interned in Switzerland with the fall of France. The two reconnected in
Zurich and married in 1945. In addition to the wartime experiences, the
dual-biography presents first-hand reflections on the experiences of refugees
on arrival in the post-war United States.
Maria Kowal
was from a small village in Volhynia. Her family had to escape from Ukrainian
nationalists during the war and she was actually born in a church in 1943 during
their flight. The family was eventually taken as laborers to Germany. Maria
recalled as a young girl their post-war move to the United States and her experiences
growing to maturity. Danuta Batorska was the daughter of a forestry
administrator in the Białowieża Forest. With the war the family was forcibly
relocated to the Urals when Danuta was only four. Later, she was evacuated to
Teheran following the formation of General Władysław Anders’s army. From the
Middle East, in the post-war years she went to the Santa Rosa resettlement
center in Mexico. Her memories of the NKVD arrest, the forced exile, the
journey to Teheran, and finally the Santa Rosa colony and her eventual settling
down in the United States.
A strength
of the volume is the variety of its protagonists—their ages and backgrounds are
all different, they had different experiences, and they include the experiences
of civilians and women, both of which deserve more treatment in the historical
literature. Her handling of characters brings them to life, gives them
personality, establishes a connection with the reader. Each of these is
individually important in its own right. Yet, at the same time, the breadth of
their collective experiences paints a broad picture of the many divergent
encounters the war triggered. It is this very breadth that makes it more
valuable in understanding the scope of wartime events and their effect on the
people who lived through them.
James S. Pula, Purdue University
*
*
AUTHOR ADDS NEW BOOK
Aleksandra
Ziolkowska-Boehm, the wife of late Aramco Norman Boehm, has added a new book to
her list of English and Polish titles with publications this year of UNTOLD
STORIES OF POLISH HEROES FROM WORD WAR II by University Press of America. She has won several literary awards.
UNTOLD
STORIES consists of biographies of men and women who struggled against Germany
and the U.S.S.R. during the war, including the father of former U.S. National
Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski called Ziolkowska-Boehm’s 2013
book THE POLISH EXPERIENCE THROUGH WORLD WAR II, “a remarkable and highly
personal account of the …suffering the victims of both Hitlerism and Stalinism
had to endure…beyond the comprehension of most Americans.” (…)
Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah, Spring 2018
*
Pleasant Days,
Pg 12
*
Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from
World War II
by Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm
Hamilton Books, 2018, 146 pgs.
by Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm
Hamilton Books, 2018, 146 pgs.
With a forward by James S. Pula of
Purdue University, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm brings together eight stories
about heroes from the second World War. Photos and direct quotes from the
survivors make their narratives come alive.
The initial story is devoted to a
Tadeusz Brzezinski, a Polish diplomat, and his son Zbigniew who became the
National Security Advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Another
of her untold stories is about a pilot in the Royal Air Force who loved flying
and writing, and at the age of 88 finally was able to get his first novel
published. Another narrative concerns one of a group of rescued children that
was deported to the Urals, to Siberia and left via Tehran.
Wieslaw Chrzanowski, who was able to
keep his camera and film secret and managed to take photos of the Warsaw
Uprising, is the focus of another chapter. The quote below about his experience
in the Home Army of Warsaw is a prime example of the kinds of stories that
Ziolkowska-Boehm gathered.
“On 1st August, our unit mobilized
in Senatorska Street. On the next day, I went to the information point in the
yard of the house No. 13 in Leszno Street (today 93 Solidarity Avenue). At the
opposite side of the street stood (and still stands) a Protestant church with a
soaring tower decorated with sculpted leaves. On 4th August, in the evening, I
stood in the street before the gate. Suddenly I saw the flash of a fuse of an
artillery missile being shot. The shrapnel missed me entirely, but the missile
hurt and killed many dwellers of that big house who were praying at a shrine
built in the yard, i.e. 10 meters behind my back.”
Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm was born
in Łódź, Poland and earned her master’s degree in literature from the
University of Łódź and a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Warsaw.
Ziolkowska-Boehm has written many books including Love for Family, Friends and
Books, Ingrid Bergman and Her American Relatives, and On the Road with Suzy:
From Cat to Companion. She has lived all over the globe including England and
Toronto, Ontario before finally settling in Wilmington, Delaware, where she
lives with her family.
Mary Lanham, Books in
Brief, Polish American Journal, August 2018, pg. 6
http://www.polamjournal.com/News/Book_Reviews/book_reviews.html#August-2018
***
***
(LETTER
from son of Tomasz Lychowski)
Dear Mrs professor Olenka,this is Rodrigo Lychowski, son of Tomasz. I am writing in English since the Polish declination is very difficult for me.
I must say that I am very thankful to you for your incredible friendship and help to my father.
Dear Olenka that was not the first time you demonstrated this friendship =) to my father. As I told him during these days, the greatest virtue is to have a good heart, is to help people, and that virtue belongs to you!!
As you well know, our country
Brazil is suffering economic, political and social problems = (Let’s hope we have a better year in 2018!
I am reading your last book, related to
the polish unknown heroes during the II World War, and I must say that your
book is very well written and full of passion =)
Bog
Zaplac! Serdeczne pozdrawiam, Rodrigo Lychowski
P.S. Although born in Brazil, my polish
routes are fundamental and decisive to me. I think that maybe i feel more
polish than Brazylian (but I obviously love Brazil as well).
Rodrigo
Lychowski, January 13 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
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