Posts by Gene Sokolowski
Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter
(For college professors and students, parents, teachers, and adults). This well-researched work by British author and historian Clare Mulley presents the amazing story of Elzbieta Zawacka, a Polish World War II resistance fighter whose exploits are truly exceptional and helped restore Polish women to their rightful place in the historical record. Born in 1909, her…
Read MoreSelected Polish Artists of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Polish artists and their paintings generally are not well-known but certainly should be.One reason for this is Poland’s disappearance from Europe’s map after having been divided up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. After 123 years, Poland was recreated in 1918 at the end of World War I. A second reason is the theft…
Read MoreThe Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz
(For high school students, teachers, college students, and adults). As one review of Jack Fairweather’s book notes, this is the true story of Witold Pilecki’s unprecedented heroism. In September 1940, he volunteered for a suicidal reconnaissance mission and allowed himself to be arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz. There were informal reports of…
Read MoreBig Bulletin: Polish Non-Complicity in the Holocaust
The information below is an analysis written by Jan Peczkis, who has analyzed over 1,700 works by Jewish and non-Jewish authors on historical and contemporary Polish-Jewish interrelations. We feature Jan’s database website on our Resources webpage in the section titled “Polish-Jewish Relations”. The article titled “Jan Peczkis’s 1,700 book reviews will improve your understanding of…
Read MorePoland and Russia: The Neighborhood of Freedom and Despotism in the X-XXI Centuries
(For professors, college students, teachers, and adults). In this scholarly work, 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 MoreBetween Myth and Truth. Jewish Partisans During World War II
(For high school students, teachers, and adults). This 18-minute video reveals the facts behind the illusion that Jewish partisans engaged in armed combat against occupying German forces. [To read the speaker’s Polish narration in English, click on the CC (Closed Captions) icon on the bottom right of the video.] A partisan is a member of…
Read MoreOne Polish-American’s Fight to include the Genocide of Poles in Virginia’s High-School Curriculum
How Virginia’s educational, executive, and legislative authorities and the U.S Department of Education enabled the suppression of historical fact and ignored an embarrassing deception. Part 1 – Asking the Department of Education to Correct Flawed Standards of LearningFalsified and Flawed Standards in Virginia’s 2015 Standards of Learning March-June 2022. Gene Sokolowski’s efforts to correct Virginia’s…
Read MoreHow Heroic Polish Codebreakers set the Foundations for the Allies to Crack Enigma
(For high school students, teachers, and adults). This 12-minute video shows that the overall success against Enigma, and its contribution to the Allied victory over Germany, was the collaboration and cooperation between Poland, France, and England. However, the heart of this success was the contribution of the Polish code-breaking team of mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy…
Read MoreThe Righteous! How Poles Rescued Jews from the Holocaust
(For high school students, teachers, and adults). In response to anti-Polish bias in Holocaust scholarship, education, and popular culture, Polish journalist Grzegorz Gorny, together with well-known photographer Janusz Rosikon, published this book to explain what it really meant to save Jews in German-occupied Poland. The Righteous! tells the story of Poles rescuing Jews during the…
Read MoreFrom the Son of a Polish Miner to the Royal Court of Sweden: Fascinating Story of World’s most prolific Stamp Engraver
Czeslaw Slania (1921 – 2005) was a Polish postage stamp and banknote engraver who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, was the most prolific of all stamp engravers with over 1,000 stamps to his credit. In addition to creating stamps for Sweden (300 different issues) and 29 other countries (the remaining 1,000 or…
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