What happens when a region accustomed to violent shifts in borders is subjected to a new, peaceful partitioning? Has the European Union spent the last decade creating a new Iron Curtain at its ...fringes?Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontierexamines these questions from the perspective of the EU's new eastern external boundary. Since the Schengen Agreement in 1985, European states have worked together to create a territory free of internal borders and with heavily policed external boundaries. In 2004 those boundaries shifted east as the EU expanded to include eight postsocialist countries-including Poland but excluding neighboring Ukraine. Through an analysis of their shared frontier,Building Fortress Europeprovides an ethnographic examination of the human, social, and political consequences of developing a specialized, targeted, and legally advanced border regime in the enlarged EU. Based on fieldwork conducted with border guards, officials, and migrants shuttling between Poland and Ukraine as well as extensive archival research,Building Fortress Europeshows how people in the two countries are adjusting to living on opposite sides of a new divide. Anthropologist Karolina S. Follis argues that the policing of economic migrants and asylum seekers is caught between the contradictory imperatives of the European Union's border security, economic needs of member states, and their declared commitment to human rights. The ethnography explores the lives of migrants, and their patterns of mobility, as framed by these contradictions. It suggests that only a political effort to address these tensions will lead to the creation of fairer and more humane border policies.
Jack M. Bloom presents a moving account of how an opposition developed and triumphed in communist Poland, showing the perspectives and experiences of the participants, while often letting them ...recount their own stories and explain their thinking.
Engaging Cultural Ideologies offers a recontextualization of the effects of Poland's cultural practices on the genesis and performance of contemporary Polish compositions from 1918 to 1956.
William and Rosalie Schiff, William; Schiff, Rosalie; Hanley, Craig
2007
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In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. This is an account of two Polish Jews who survive six ...different German slave and prison camps throughout the Holocaust. It describes the struggle of the lovers to stay alive and find each other at war's end.
The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto
Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from ...the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices-young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists-and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as "a civilization responding to its own destruction," these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.
The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after ...this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty- stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it aimed to
destroy Polish national consciousness. As a symbol of Polish
national identity and the religious faith of approximately
two-thirds of Poland's ...population, the Roman Catholic Church was an
obvious target of the Nazi regime's policies of ethnic, racial, and
cultural Germanization.
Jonathan Huener reveals in The Polish Catholic Church under
German Occupation that the persecution of the church was most
severe in the Reichsgau Wartheland, a region of Poland annexed to
Nazi Germany. Here Catholics witnessed the execution of priests,
the incarceration of hundreds of clergymen and nuns in prisons and
concentration camps, the closure of churches, the destruction and
confiscation of church property, and countless restrictions on
public expression of the Catholic faith. Huener also illustrates
how some among the Nazi elite viewed this area as a testing ground
for anti-church policies to be launched in the Reich after the
successful completion of the war. Based on largely untapped sources
from state and church archives, punctuated by vivid archival
photographs, and marked by nuance and balance, The Polish
Catholic Church under German Occupation exposes both the
brutalities and the limitations of Nazi church policy.
The first English-language investigation of German policy toward
the Catholic Church in occupied Poland, this compelling story also
offers insight into the varied ways in which Catholics-from Pope
Pius XII, to members of the Polish episcopate, to the Polish laity
at the parish level-responded to the Nazi regime's repressive
measures.
Poland in the Modern World presents a history of the country from the late nineteenth century to the present, incorporating new perspectives from social and cultural history and positioning it in a ...broad global context * Challenges traditional accounts Poland that tend to focus on national, political history, emphasizing the country's 'exceptionalism'. * Presents a lively, multi-dimensional story, balancing coverage of high politics with discussion of social, cultural and economic changes, and their effects on individuals' daily lives. * Explores both the regional diversity within Poland and the country's place within Europe and the wider world. * Provides a new interpretive framework for understanding key historical events in Poland's modern history, including the experiences of World War II and the postwar communist era.
In a turn-of-the-century, once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue in the center of Warsaw, 10 Jewish families began reconstructing their lives after the Holocaust. While most surviving Polish ...Jews were making their homes in new countries, these families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, intensive research in archives, and the families' personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.
The book presents a chronological narrative of student political activity in Communist Poland and discusses it both from the point of view of those who supported and those who opposed the regime ...while elaborating on generational change within the country's student milieu.
