History


Once Again, We Are Europe’s Shield
Karol Nawrocki, 8/20/2024

Today, Poland is a key country on NATO’s eastern flank, a defender of the EU’s eastern borders and a haven for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have fled Russian aggression.

Read more... Reading time 6 min.

On August 14, 1982, in the prison in Kwidzyn, the militia and prison guards carried out a brutal pacification of the internment camp for "Solidarity" activists. As a result, over 80 internees were beaten, almost half of them suffered serious injuries.

Read more... Reading time 18 min.

He was supposed to be a military man, but the uniform was not his calling. He discovered and introduced to the world some 60 unknown species of flora and fauna. Georgians owe him a unique national park and remember that he was responsible for the creation of what was then Russia's first nature reserve. In Poland, however, Ludwik Młokosiewicz remains completely unknown.

Read more... Reading time 5 min.
Marian Rejewski – the Code Slayer
Krzysztof Drozdowski, 8/9/2024

August 16 marks the 119th anniversary of the birth of Marian Rejewski, an outstanding Polish cryptologist from Bydgoszcz. Within a few weeks, Rejewski had single-handedly achieved what cryptologists from France and England had been unable to do for many years.

Read more... Reading time 7 min.

The Ładoś Group, which illegally issued Latin American passports to Jews in German-occupied Europe, was the Polish Noah's Ark, saving them from extermination – said Roger Moorhouse, a British historian, author of the book "The Forgers".

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We now move to the 20th century and examine the efforts of Roman Dmowski and Marshall Jozef Pilsudski as they attempt to establish an independent Poland while maintaining pragmatic relations with Russia.

Read more... Reading time 10 min.

The Polish American Congress (PAC, Kongres Polonii Amerykańskiej, KPA) was the largest Polish organization in the world. It was founded in June 1944 in Buffalo, New York. Over 2,500 Polish activists and Polish priests from 26 states participated in the founding meeting.

Read more... Reading time 11 min.

Melchior Wańkowicz - a writer called the father of Polish reportage - is a figure with a biography as rich and full of twists and turns as the 20th century in which he lived. Thanks to his reportages, the Battle of Monte Cassino shaped the identity and imagination of Poles, and the diversity of his activities meant that he was always close to ordinary people.

Read more... Reading time 6 min.

Although the waters of Poland's fourth-largest river have marked borders for centuries, it is believed that the Bug River unites Poland, Ukraine and Belarus into one cultural whole, rather than dividing them. It is one of the few major European rivers that is not regulated, and its green banks are a mile-long nature reserve and wildlife sanctuary.

Read more... Reading time 4 min.

In this scholarly work, "Poland and Russia: The Neighborhood of Freedom and Despotism in the X-XXI Centuries," Professor Andrzej Nowak reviews the history of Poland through the lens of its relations with Russia and presents the ideological beliefs Russia employed throughout its history to achieve its foreign policy objectives through interactions with Poland and the region’s Central and Eastern European states.

Read more... Reading time 9 min.

Built in relation to the numbers in the calendar, it had 365 windows, 52 chambers, 12 great halls and 4 towers. Its ballroom had a glass ceiling with an aquarium and the horses in the stables ate from marble troughs. Although its construction consumed unimaginable amounts of materials and funds, it remained in full bloom and splendor for only 11 years before it was destroyed by the Swedes. Today it is the most beautiful ruin in Poland.

Read more... Reading time 4 min.

Although Russia has officially acknowledged the perpetration of the Katyn massacre, this truth is virtually absent from Russian historiography today. For it does not fit into the myth of the great victory of the war, any more than the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, the mass deportations, the enslavement of the Baltic republics, or the colossal scale of the Red Army's marauding in the final phase of the Second World War.

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