The Polish Experience through World War II

Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm:

The Polish Experience through World War II A Better Day Has Not Come, Lexington Books, Lanham, MA, 2013

ISBN 978-0-7391-7819-5 .

“A remarkable and highly personal account of the human suffering the victims of both Hitlerism and Stalinism had to endure … beyond comprehension of most Americans.” -Zbigniew Brzezinski, John Hopkins University and Center for Strategic and International Studies

“Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm has written on a wide variety of subjects. But she writes with particular feeling when describing, as she does in this new book, the heroism and suffering of Poles during the Second World War. These are stories that must be told -- and she tells them very well, indeed”. -Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, authors of A Question of Honor: The Kościuszko Squadron -- Forgotten Heroes of World War II. .

“In World War II the Poles suffered oppression and murder from both Nazi Germany and the USSR , which attacked their country and divided it between them in September 1939. The Wartanowicz and Michalak families were deported from former eastern Poland to Soviet labor camps near Archangel or farms in Kazakhstan. Freed after the German attack on the USSR, they left in 1942 with the Anders Army for Persia (Iran) and then scattered all over the world. Reserve Captain, Pilot Witold Krasicki was shot by the Soviets in spring 1940, along with thousands of Polish POWs and other prisoners. His family survived the German occupation in Warsaw, including the two-month Polish Home Army uprising against the Germans in 1944. Wanda Ossowska worked for the Polish resistance, survived brutal Nazi torture, three Nazi death camps, and risked her life to save a Jewish girl. In the author's interviews with the survivors and their relatives, they tell their poignant stories with vivid, personal memories of wartime life and death, as well as their lives in postwar Communist Poland or elsewhere. We should be grateful to Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm who has saved these memories for us.”

• Anna M. Cienciala, University of Kansas .

These accounts of Polish family life in Russian and German camps during World War II describe people subsisting on weeds and horse heads, living sometimes in pig sties. Children watch as fathers and mothers wither and die amidst “the calm of terror.” Bodies are thrown out of running trains. Prisoners shiver in the intense cold of long winters, always hungry, amidst bedbugs that somehow survive even the coldest nights. Meet Wanda Ossowska, interrogated 57 times by the Gestapo, tortured “to the limits of her endurance,” refusing to name names. It’s another time, another world, “the true valleys of death,” when even hospitals were “houses for dying”—genocide one by one, or by the thousands (as in the Katyn massacre). These evocative, descriptive accounts become terrifyingly haunting and personally intimate. — Bruce E. Johansen, University of Nebraska at Omaha .

An unforgettable picture of the martyrdom of women and children sent from Poland behind the Urals. A powerful work of art that should be read and re-read. — Karl Maramorosch, Rutgers University . “Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm tells stories that are the substance of history and of dreams. She tells the stories of individuals who are both ordinary and heroic…The book is an easy read in spite of its spellbinding intensity.” -Ewa Thompson, Rice University

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“I particularly liked Joanna's story - she is truly a remarkable person to have experienced genuine human evil, and still keep the capacity to appreciate and recognize the goodness in most people!. Our two paths have crossed in Ahvaz, Iran - she in 1942 and Margaret and I in 1975-1977! I agree with Professor Pease in that most readers (especially Americans) will be familiar with the main historical events of the period, but they cannot appreciate what it would be like to have actually experienced this first hand. The stories from the people you have written about can help us do that. You have written a very important book that will help satisfy a public need here. Let us all hope that a better day has now dawned for Poland!” -Robert Ackerman, New Alexandria, PA June 11, 2013