Posts by Gene Sokolowski
One Star Away by Imogene Salva
(For high school students, teachers, and adults) Imogene Salva re-constructs the emotional climate that surrounded the wartime ordeals of her mother, Jozefa (Josephine) Nowicka, who was one of almost two million Polish citizens deported by Stalin to the depths of Soviet Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia. This is not an episode that is familiar to…
Read MoreJan Peczkis’s 1,800 book reviews will improve your understanding of Polish-Jewish relations
Jan Peczkis has developed a comprehensive database that contains his reviews of 1,800 books on many aspects of Polish-Jewish relations. These can be easily accessed through his website at https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org, Jan’s insightful analyses show why Polish-Jewish relations continue to be problematic, largely because of the many distortions that authors, most of whom are Jewish, have…
Read MoreIsrael and the U.S. insist that Poland must pay for Germany’s World War 2 Crimes
Congress’s JUST Act, “Justice For Uncompensated Survivors Today”, was signed into law by President Trump in 2017. It requires the U.S. State Department to issue an annual report that names the European countries that are – and are not – paying Jews and their heirs for property seized by the Nazi Germans and subsequent communist…
Read MorePoles and Polish Jews: A long and complicated relationship
Outlined below is a brief summary of Polish-Jewish relations during consecutive periods of Polish history. Because it is a summary, it does not address all aspects of the more than one thousand years in which Poles and Polish Jews lived so closely together yet so far apart. For the most part, Polish Jews lived in…
Read MoreJedwabne: The anti-Polish Lie that persists in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
A familiar myth has it that Poles murdered Polish Jews in the small town of Jedwabne during World War 2. This fiction continues to be spread by Polonophobes and is unwittingly accepted as true by the uninformed. One of the disseminators of this fiction is the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, which proclaims…
Read MoreArticle by the Speaker of the House of Commons ignores Hitler’s genocide of Poles
An 11 December 2022 article in The Guardian written by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, is a glaring example of how a major omission of historical fact about Poland serves as an egregious insult to Poles in the United Kingdom and United States. In his article, After eighty years, there…
Read MorePolish Jews invalidate The New Yorker’s accusation that Poles killed 3 million Polish Jews
Masha Gessen’s 25 March 2021 article “The Historians Under Attack for Exploring Poland’s Role in the Holocaust” published in The New Yorker on 25 March 2021 caused considerable outrage from Poles and Polish Jews alike by presenting an all-too-familiar recitation of anti-Polish falsehoods. Dr. Piotr Cywinski, an historian and director of the Auschwitz Museum and…
Read MoreMikhal Dekel’s accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and PiS suppression of the evidence are false
[NOTE: The following was sent to the Boston Review in June 2021 with the request that it be published in response to Mikhal Dekel’s article below. The Boston Review refused to publish it, stating that “it didn’t fit with our purpose”.] Mikhal Dekel, in her 1 June article in the Boston Review titled “Poland’s Current…
Read MoreStanisław Lem: The world’s most widely read science fiction writer
StanisÅ‚aw Lem’s books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. Throughout a career that spanned six decades, Lem produced more translated works than any other Polish writer. His bibliography includes 18 novels, 14…
Read MoreThree Best-Known Polish Women Artists of the Interwar Period (1918-1939)
Poland’s interwar period was between 1918 and 1939. In November 1918, World War 1 ended and Poland was re-established as a nation state. Twenty-one years later, in September 1939, Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland, which began World War 2 and thus ended Poland’s interwar period. During this time, three Polish women emerged as the country’s…
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