History

2023 marks the 160th anniversary of the outbreak of the January Uprising. Despite the passage of years, the echoes of this uprising have not ceased in the public debate. An important and difficult question - "to fight (for the freedom of your country) or not to fight?" – thanks to him, it returns in Central Europe even today. The sense and significance of the act of the January insurgents cannot be understood without the historical context of the entire region of Central Europe, today's territory of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus.

The time has come to bring this character closer to the next generation of Poles living or born in emigration, especially since Józef Mackiewicz was a Polish writer who lived most of his life in emigration. This is the right time to say why emigration did not like him and his homeland condemned him to oblivion.

On December 17, in the Vatican, Pope Francis approved a decree on the martyrdom of the family of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, together with their seven children — a heroic family saving Jews during the Second World War.

There is no particular psychological portrait of a Pole helping Jews survive the Holocaust. Everyone helped. Humanity compelled them to do so. An example of such an attitude is the fact that Jan and Antonina Żabiński, who hid Jews in the zoo in Warsaw, were helping on one extreme, and Leopold Socha, a thief from Lviv, who was hiding a Jewish family in the sewers, on the other.

The first American ambassador to Poland after the war was Arthur Bliss Lane (June 16, 1894 – August 12, 1956). He came to ruined Warsaw in July 1945.

The battle — perhaps the largest and bloodiest in the history of medieval Europe — occurred on a field southeast of the Baltic seaport city of Gdansk (Danzig) and between two small villages: Grunwald (Grünfelde) and Stębark (Tannenberg).

Bringing to Poland the ashes of three Presidents-in-Exile of the Republic of Poland: Władysław Raczkiewicz, August Zaleski, and Stanisław Ostrowski, on the anniversary of Poland regaining independence, prompts a reflection and reverie. The question arises: Do Poles on the Vistula River realize what the contribution of Polish emigration to the process of regaining independence by Poland was?

Tamara Łempicka's paintings fetch exorbitant prices at art auctions. She is undoubtedly the most expensive and most recognizable Polish painter in the world. Owning one of her paintings has become fashionable among modern celebrities. They are collected by Madonna, Jack Nikolson and Barbara Streisand.

Who has Buried the Dead (Optimum Publishing International) is a richly detailed global thriller set in Second World War Poland. It brings the reality of the pain and suffering of Poles endured in the German/Russian invasions and occupation of that nation and tells the little-known historical tales of the Polish underground and Poles fighting on the Western front. It also discloses one of the last great secrets of the Second World War which, much like Enigma, has a very vital Polish component.

The German Nazi plan to kidnap and Germanize children, recognized by the pseudo-scientific assumptions of German eugenics as "racially valuable", was practically institutionalized in the territories of Poland, the USSR, the Czech Republic, and other countries occupied by the Third Reich during World War II. Historians estimate, however, that this process took the greatest intensity in occupied Poland.

Today, it would be his hundredth birthday. Maybe 100 years is a decent age, but for us — his friends — it is still not enough. Images are shifting like in a kaleidoscope — important moments in his life and, at the same time, important moments in the life of Polish emigrants in Milwaukee and the United States.